There is an old proverb which implies that England need never fear drought; and we have had clear evidence this year (1868) that an exceptionally dry summer is not necessarily followed by a bad harvest. But I believe that when a balance is carefully struck between the good and the evil effects resulting from excessive drought in England, it will be found that the latter largely prevail. In fact, it is only necessary to observe the effects which have followed the recent wet weather to recognise the fact that rain has a forcing power, the very diminished supply of which at the due season cannot fail to have seriously injurious effects. In various parts of England we see evidences of the action of such a power during the present autumn in the blossoming of trees, in the flowering of primroses and other spring plants, in rich growths of fungi, and in various other ways. It cannot be doubted that there is here a comparative waste of powers which, expended in due season, would have produced valuable results.

The modern theories of the correlation of force suffice to show how enormous a loss a country suffers226 when there is a failure in the supply of rain, or when that supply comes out of its due season. When we consider rain in connection with the causes to which it is due, we begin to recognise the enormous amount of power of which the ordinary rainfall of a country is the representative; and we can well understand how it is that ‘the clouds drop fatness on the earth.’

The sun’s heat is, of course, the main agent—we may almost say the only agent—in supplying the rainfall of a country. The process of evaporation carried on over large portions of the ocean’s surface is continually storing up enormous masses of water in the form of invisible aqueous vapour, ready to be transformed into cloud, then wafted for hundreds of miles across seas and continents, to be finally precipitated over this or that country, according to the conditions which determine the downfall of rain. These processes do not appear, at first sight, indicative of any very great expenditure of force, yet in reality the force-equivalent of the rain-supply of England alone for a single year is something positively startling. It has been calculated that the amount of heat required to evaporate a quantity of water which would cover an area of 100 square miles to a depth of one inch would be equal to the heat which would be produced by the combustion of half a million tons of coals. The amount of force of which this consumption of heat would be the equivalent corresponds to that which would be required to raise a weight of upwards of one thousand millions of tons to a height of one mile. Now, when we remember227 that the area of Great Britain and Ireland is about 120,000 square miles, and that the annual rainfall averages about 25 inches, we see that the force-equivalent of the rainfall is enormous. All the coal which could be raised from our English coal mines in hundreds of years would not give out heat enough to produce England’s rain-supply for a single year. When to this consideration we add the circumstance that the force of rain produces bad as well as good effects—the former when the rain falls at undue seasons or in an irregular manner, the latter only when the rainfall is distributed in the usual manner among the seasons—we see that an important loss accrues to a country in such exceptional years as the present.

There are few subjects more interesting than those depending on the correlation of physical forces; and we may add that there are few the study of which bears more largely on questions of agricultural and commercial economy. It is only of late years that the silent forces of nature—forces continually in action, but which are too apt to pass unnoticed and unrecognised—have taken their due place in scientific inquiry. Strangely enough, the subject has been found to have at once a most practical bearing on business relations, and an aspect more strikingly poetical than any other subject, perhaps, which men of science have ever taken in hand to investigate. We see the ordinary processes of Nature, as they are termed, taking their place in the workshop of modern wealth,............