On January 1, 1898, an extensive cold wave swept from the Rocky Mountains eastward to the seaboard. Estimates secured from shippers in a hundred principal cities indicate that property valued at three million four hundred thousand dollars was saved as a direct result of the predictions sent out well in advance of the coming of the severe cold. The utility of these forecasts to the agriculture, the commerce, and the industry of the country is so great that there is hardly a daily paper that does not publish weather forecasts in a prominent place, and there is scarcely a reader who fails to note the predictions. Twenty-five years ago mariners on our Great Lakes and seaboard depended on their own weather lore to warn them of coming storms. Then, although the number of craft plying our waters was much less than now, every severe storm that swept the Lakes or Atlantic coast left destruction and death in its wake, and for days afterward the dead were cast up by the receding waves, and the shores were lined with wreckage. Happily this is not now the case, for the Weather Bureau is ever watching the changes of atmospheric conditions, and giving to the mariner warning of coming storms. Each observer telegraphs instantly to the Central Office whenever the delicately adjusted instruments at his station show unusual agitation. By this means the inception of many storms is detected when the regular morning and evening reports fail to give notice of their origin. Some idea of the vast interests floating on the Atlantic coast may be had when it is stated that 5628 trans-Atlantic steamers, with an aggregate of 10,076,148 tons, and 5842 sailing craft, aggregating 2,105,688 tons, entered and left ports on the Atlantic seaboard during a single year ten years ago, and the record is vastly greater now. The value of their cargoes is more than a billion and a half of dollars. Our coastwise traffic is enormous. Fifteen years ago more than seventeen thousand sailing vessels and four thousand steamers entered and left the ports between Maine and Florida. The number has largely increased since. From these facts one can roughly measure the value of the marine property which the Weather Bureau aims to protect by giving warning of approaching storms. It is the expectation of the meteorologist that some day he will be able to accurately forecast the weather for weeks and months in advance. What a wonderful conservation of human energy would result if it were possible to tell the farmer when the great corn and wheat belts would have abundant rain during the next growing season, or when droughts would parch and wither the vegetation; or to truthfully inform the planter of the South that the coming season would be favorable or unfavorable for the production of cotton! Effort could be withheld in one part of the country, and greater energy exerted in another.