Then, when many generations had passed, came high-priests and shamans and medicine-men. Self-deceived, stupid followers of tradition, or mere cynics, they beat drums for rain, and cried that the gods were wroth. They sacrificed bullocks, and gashed themselves with knives and lancets before the altars of Baal.

Next, too briefly, came the clean Hellenic mind searching rational truth. “The storm lasted three days,” wrote Herodotus. “At last, by offering victims to the Winds, and charming them with the help of conjurers, while they sacrificed to Thetis and the Nereids, the Magians succeeded in laying the storm.” And then he added dryly, “Or perhaps it ceased of itself.” Plato first used the word meteorology, meaning talk of high, celestial things, beyond the realm of air. Aristotle, canny north-country man, shunning such poetic flim-flam, took over the word for the study of all actions of wind, rain, and vapor in the air itself.

Ptolemy recorded his observations systematically, and Hippocrates studied the effect of weather upon his patients. But the Hellenic spirit withered, and the Roman mind was incurious and superstitious. Even the great Virgil commended the heifers and the rooks as divinely inspired weather-prophets, and the keen-witted Horace (more in jest than in earnest, we hope) saw the warning of Jove in an unexpected clap of thunder. Augur, astrologer, and wind-selling witch held sway through long centuries.

At last Galileo questioned nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum, and recommended the problem to one of his students for investigation. From this beginning sprang modern meteorology. Temperature, wind, even humidity, man could feel through his own senses and roughly estimate. But pressure, most valuable guide of all, was too subtle for him, until he achieved the barometer. Then at last he came to know the waves and whirlpools, the swirling shallows and stagnant deeps, of that ever-changing ocean of air on the bottom of which the civilizations flourish and decay.

And since the storm knows no boundary of race or continent, men of all nations perforce have labored together to learn the ways of weather. Torricelli, the Italian, invented the barometer. Halley, the Englishman, mapped the winds. Franklin, the American, audaciously grasped the idea of a revolving and traveling storm. Coriolis, the Frenchman, discovered how the earth’s own rotation shifts the wind. Buys Ballots’s Law derives from a curiously named Dutchman; Dove, the German, stated the laws of storms; Bjerknes, the Norwegian, probed their nature and explained their life-history.

To these and many others man owes it that he no longer babbles a charm, or tears his flesh in supplication to a storm-demon. Ahead, if man can but conquer himself, lies every hope of greater victory. Still farther off, beyond limits of rational prophecy, lies the time when by arts as yet unimagined man may attain that dream of Magian, witch, and druid—not to predict weather, but to control it.

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