Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CLOUD NAMES. )HE clouds were without names until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when at a meeting of the Askesian Society, session of 1802-3, a young chemist of Tottenham read an essay in which he proposed a cloud classification, using the terms beginning with the lowest: nimbus, or rain; stratus, or layer; cumulus, or rounded pile; and cirrus, or feather. By combining the types, all ordinary cloud forms could be included. There had been but one other attempt at cloud classification. Howard's system was so superior to this and his scheme so flexible and easyof comprehension, that it met with general -favor and ready acceptance. Luke Howard's essay was reprinted in 1832, translated into various languages and adopted almost without change by the meteorological services of the world. While his name is known everywhere, little has been handed down concerning the man himself. I find that he is quaintly described on the title page of his three volumed Climate of London, as a "Citizen of London, Honorary Citizen of Madgeburg and Honorary Associate of the Art Societies of Hamburg and Leipsic." No less a person than Goethe was among those who were charmed by Luke Howard's work. A friendship sprang up, a long correspondence was carried on and the poet sings of Howard as one worthy of all honor. But the Howardian nomenclatureis unscientific in that it classifies according to appearances, and with the clouds these are misleading. What is needed is a system showing the origin of the cloud. Modern meteorology cares little for cloud beauty, compared with significance in the matter of air motion, nucle- ation and thermal energy involved. Meteorology wants to use the cloud as an exponent of the rate of condensation, a means of measuring absorption and transportation of ener...