WEATHER BUREAU, the govern ment office maintained by all civilized nations for the systematic observing and predicting of the weather from day to day. Many of these were established before weather predictions were consid ered practicable or even possible, and in such offices the original object of the in stitution was the collection of climatic statistics considered as an important item in the description of the country and the study of its agriculture, dis eases, and other vital phenomena. Of such older statistical bureaus may be in stanced the Meteorological Division of the Suregon-General's Office, U. S. A., of the Statistical Bureau in Berlin, of the Central Physical Observatory at St. Petersburg, and of the office of the Registrar-General, London. Some of these climatic bureaus have had their scope enlarged by the imposition of the addi tional duty of weather and storm pre dictions, but in most cases an entirely new office has been established for this special work; such, for instance, are the Meteorological Office in London, founded in 1861 under the Board of Trade, and now under the administration of the Royal Society, the Meteorological Divi sion of the Astronomical Observatory at Paris, enlarged in 1859, and now trans ferred to the Meteorological Bureau of France; the Seewarte at Hamburg, founded in 1867, now in part transferred to the Royal Meteorological Institute for Saxony at Berlin; the Central Office for Meteorology at Rome; the Meteorolog ical Office of the Customs Bureau at Hong Kong; the office of the Meteoro logical Reporter for India at Calcutta; the Imperial Signal Office at Tokio, Japan; and the Weather Bureau, for merly of the Signal Office in the Depart ment of War at Washington, but now a part of the Department of Agriculture.
The appointment of official predicters in all countries whose territories are suffi ciently well covered by telegraph sta tions is at once a demonstration of the revolution that has taken place in our ideas with regard to the utility of mete orology, concerning which science it is only a comparatively few years since prominent astronomers and physicists expressed grave doubts as to the value of the great accumulation of observa tions, and as to the possibility of devel oping anything more than a crude and useless guess as to the weather of the forthcoming day.