we could have all our wet-weather at one
splash, is of less than four weeks' constant heavy
rain against forty-eight weeks of continual fine
weather. On our west coasts the warm vapours
of the Gulf stream are condensed into excess
of rain. Penzance has thirty-seven instead of
twenty-four inches a year, Liverpool thirty-four,
Manchester thirty-six, Lancaster nearly forty,
and the Cumberland Lake district, the rainiest
part of England, more than that. At Kendal,
fifty-three inches are the average allowance, at
Keswick, sixty-seven, and at Seathwaite, a
hamlet at the head of the Vale of Borrowdale, upon
an observation of three years, the average rainfall
was found to exceed one hundred and forty
inches. Mr. Miller, the observer of Seathwaite,
has found another place a mile and a half
distant from that station, where, the rainfall is even
one-third greater. This place is called "The
Stye," or Sprinkling Fell. Instead of an inch,
they have had in this, the wettest bit of England,
nearly seven inches in four-and-twenty
hours. Thirty-five inches a year used to be the
figure for all England. It is a great deal drier
at Prague, where they have only fourteen, or at
St. Petersburg or Copenhagen, where they have
only about seventeen or eighteen inches of rain
in the year. More than that, as much, indeed, as
usually falls in a whole year over London, has
been known, says Sir Erskine Perry, to fall
in a single night upon the mountains overhanging
Bombay. Rain is more plentiful among the
hills. At Cherra Ponjee, in the Khasyah
mountains, east of Calcutta, the rainfall has been
nearly six hundred inches in a year. We
sympathise with Cherra Ponjee now, for have we
not enjoyed nearly a year of Cherra Poujee
weather? "No," says John Bull, "we have
not. At Cherra Ponjee, when it rains, it rains.
It comes down and there is an end of it. The
weather here is aggravating to me. I am
tempted with a smile of light, and when I put
my nose outside my door am suddenly attacked
and watered as if I were a tulip-bed. If when
the sun shines for a minute, I rush out into my
garden to gather hastily a sloppy carnation,
with which, when I have dried it by my parlour
fire, I may teach myself that it is not November,
down the storm pours upon my head, while the
wet creeps in at the heels of my slippers. You
cannot call that Cherra Ponjee weather."

While the rainfall was remaining constant at
Paris it increased at Viviers, in forty years, from
thirty-one to thirty-seven inches; while at
Marseilles, the removal of woods from the hill-tops
was supposed to explain a remarkable decrease
in the same period—the years being compared
not singly but by tens—of twenty-two inches.
Nearly the amount of a year's rain in London
was taken from the quantity that used to fall at
Marseilles. In the first ten years of the forty,
fifty-nine inches a year fell; and in the last ten,
only thirty-seven inches. Rain again has
become more abundant than it used to be in Milan.

We have said that in this country we are to
regard the fall of an inch in twenty-four hours
as a heavy rain, but it is not only in the lake
district of Cumberland that this measure has been
totally disregarded by the weather when in an
ungovernable state. On Michaelmas Day, 'forty-
eight, Mr. Leonard Jenyns, late Vicar of Swaffham
Bulbeck, and the author of some valuable
Observations in Meteorology, says that there
fell in his parish more than an inch and a half in
three hours. During the last one-and-twenty
years the fall in London has, on four occasions,
equalled or exceeded two inches in twenty-four
hours. Nearly three inches once fell within
that space of time at Newport, Isle of Wight,
but there have been much heavier falls on the
Continent. At Genoa, on the twenty-fifth of
October, 'twenty-two, there was a soaking day.
The fall in four-and-twenty hours was not of
inches, but of two feet and a half!

Rainfall is not now attributed wholly to the
contact of warm and moist with colder breaths
of air. It is supposed that electricity has
something to do with it. The heavy rain accompanying
thunderstorms, and the especial downpour
following a clap, have yet to receive a complete
explanation. It is an old observation that less
rain falls on the top of a house than on the
pavement by its side. Experiments showing this
were made, long since, at Westminster Abbey,
and they were made twenty years ago at York,
with this result: There fell in a year, in round
numbers, twenty-six inches on the ground,
twenty on a housetop forty-four feet high, and
only fifteen inches on the top of a tower two
hundred and thirteen feet in height. The drops
of rain enlarge as they descend; sometimes,
perhaps vapour comes down with the rain, and
has not condensed into drops till it is near the
ground. On the contrary, it sometimes happens
that a current of dry air under rain falling from
a height returns the waterdrops into the form of
vapour, and a shower may be seen falling through
the sky and vanishing before it reaches us.

It has been thought that one year in every five
is very dry, and one in ten is very wet. Eighteen
forty-one and 'fifty-two were the wettest years
before this our wet 'sixty, a rough confirmation
of the theory of tens. May it be eighteen
seventy, then, before we have another year so
wet as this! The Rain King has been claiming
his tenths, he has had them, and we trust he is
now satisfied. Though there are local variations,
October and November rank with the
meteorologists of England generally as wettest
of the months; but they must rain hard this
year to maintain their reputation. In seventeen
years of measuring, the most watery month that
Mr. Jenyns ever registered was that of August,
eighteen forty-three.

We get usually most rain in autumn, a great
deal in summer, less in spring, and least in
winter; although in the winter we have most
wet weather. That is because our summer
rains are usually short and sharp; an hour's
storm bringing down as much as may come in
a week of wintry drizzle. The rainfall of eighteen
sixty, probably, will represent in no striking
degree the persistence of wet weather. But
when it is said that, according to Captain