JF Ptak Science Books Post 2381
[Image from Arnold Guyot, Physical Geography, Scrinber's, New York, 1873]
There are all sorts of clouds, everywhere: Red Cloud, mushroom clouds, clouds of confusion, Cloud Nine, dust, radioactive, rain, thunder, lightning, drifting, passing, growing, high, low, solitary, puffy, racing, threatening, and on and on, enough to fill many sets of alphabets even before you get to their real names.And that's just in English. In sheet music in the U.S. in the late 19th century songs celebrated clouds of all manifestations--people "waited for the clouds to roll by", and also listened to "The Clouds Will Never Roll Away", and how time, temperance, and love will move the clouds, and how many other things would be covered by them. Of course nowadays people think of clouds not only as physical atmospheric mountains but also as places to store data.
Clouds though pretty much escaped the notice of even the greatest of all great classifiers, Aristotle, and just about everyone else, for two dozen centuries, no real scientific approach to them until Luke Howard first published on his cloud classifications in his paper "On the Modifications of Clouds and on the Principles of their Production Suspension and Destruction being the Substance of an Essay..." in 1803 (full text here), and his "modifications" (which at the time meant "classifications") were instantly and universally adopted. (It is interesting to note that in the first German appearance of the Howard papers in the Annalen der Physik in 1815 that there were no illustrations.)
Arnold Guyot (1807-1884) published his imaginative and rather unusual and complete global map on the appearance of clouds. It is pretty, and creative, and to my experience very unusual. He was a very accomplished and experienced, significant scientist (Guyot Hall, Princeton is named for him), though this map above is speculative and questioning in an area meagre data.
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