Doctor John Lining, of Charleston, South Carolina, kept a daily record of the temperature in this country as early as 1738, although the accurate thermometers of Fahrenheit had then been in use but a few years and the errors due to imperfect mechanical construction may have been considerable as compared with the refined instruments now used for measuring temperature. About one hundred years after the invention of the barometer, viz., in 1747, Benjamin Franklin, the patriot and statesman, the diplomat, the scientist, divined that certain storms may move in a direction opposite to the blowing of the wind and that they progress in an easterly direction. It was prophetic that this idea should come to him long before any one had ever seen charts showing observations simultaneously taken at many stations. But although his ideas in this respect were more momentous than his act of drawing the lightning from the clouds and identifying it with the electricity of the laboratory, yet his contemporaries thought little of his philosophy of storms, and it was soon forgotten. It will be interesting to learn how he reached his conclusion as to the cyclonic or eddy-like nature of storms. He had arranged with a co-worker at Boston to take observations of an eclipse at the same time that Franklin was taking readings at Philadelphia. Early on the evening of the eclipse an unusually severe northeast wind and rainstorm set in at Philadelphia and Franklin was unable to secure any observations. He reasoned that as the wind blew fiercely from the northeast the storm, of course, was coming from that direction, and Boston must have experienced its ravages before Philadelphia was reached. Reports indicated that the storm was widespread. What was the surprise of Franklin, when, after the slow passage of the mail by coach, he heard from his friend in Boston that the night of the eclipse had been clear and favorable for observations, but that a terrific northeast wind and rainstorm began early the following morning. Franklin then sent out inquiries to surrounding stage stations and found that at all places southwest of Philadelphia the storm began earlier and that the greater the distance the earlier the beginning as compared with its advent in Philadelphia; but northeast of Philadelphia the time of the beginning of the storm was later than at the latter city, the storm not reaching Boston until twelve hours after it began at Philadelphia. In considering these facts a line of inductive reasoning brought him to the conclusion that the wind always blows towards the center of the storm; that the northeast storm which Boston and Philadelphia had experienced was caused by the suction exercised by an advancing storm eddy from the west which drew the air rapidly from Boston toward Philadelphia, while the source of the attraction—the center of the storm eddy—was yet a thousand miles to the southwest of the latter place; that the velocity of the northeast wind increased as