Livro An Essay on the Weather; With Remarks on the Shepherd of Banbury's Rules for Judging of It's [!] Changes and Directions for Preserving Lives and ... Intended Chiefly for the Use of Husbandmen

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1773. Not illustrated.

Excerpt: ... SECTION VIII. "Prognostics of the Weather taken from the Changes of the Seasons. AS every year, and the various seasons of each year, have a peculiar character by which they may be distinguished, as to heat, cold, drought, rain, &c.

and as the quality of the seasons has a moll sensible effect on the productions of the earth, it is evident, that it must be of the greatest advantage to the farmer to be able to foresee the nature of the ensuing season, because he can thereby suit the culture of his grounds, and his crops, to the weather expected.

The antients had certainly arrived at a more perfect knowledge in this article, than we are possessed of. They, observing that the weather of each season set in at a stated time, imputed it's quality to the influence of certain stars which happened then to be conspicuous.

In after ages, monks and designing priests, desirous to ascribe every merit to their faints, transferred the supposed irffluence of the stars to the saints whose commemoration happened near the same time.

The moderns, being sensible that the inconceivable distance of the fixed stars, and the smallness of our nearest planets, must render their influence on our atmosphere of no effect, and having but little faith in saints, have, perhaps injudiciously, rejected the observations of the antients, without considering, that the facts might have been discovered first, and the stars and saints only called in to account for them.

The antients acted more rationally than the monks, in not fixing these changes of the weather to particular days, but only to a stated time of the year, as appears from Pliny and other writers on this subject.

By the help of the barometer, we seem to regain that foreknowledge of the weather which still resides in brutes, and which we forf...