JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post (Overall Post 5114)
“Euery Cloud engenders not a Storme.”--Shakespeare, Henry VI, Pt. 3 (1623) v. iii. 10
“Vapour, previously unseen, makes its appearance as cloud, or mist, or fog.”--T. H. Huxley Physiogr. (ed. 2) 40
"H.C" notes in the end that there is "vast importance in noting the colors of clouds. We depend very much in this country ([Canada] on the colour of clouds for weather prediction..." And he says, H.C. says, that they are not the person for the job of standardizing the description of cloud color. I imagine that that would be left to the keepers of weather stations (or data collectors), or lighthouse keepers, etc. after some sort of congress or collective determined what colors were what, and then issuing color cards or guidelines matching up clouds color to some standard color list.
It is not terribly surprising to see this beginning discussion of cloud color, as cloud shapes hadn't come to be standardized, somehow, until the early 19th century. The great cloud pioneer Luke Howard (1772-1864) first published on his cloud classifications in his papers "On the Modifications of Clouds and on the Principles of their Production Suspension and Destruction being the Substance of an Essay read before the Askesian1 Society in the Session 1802-3" in 1803, launching him from general normal obscurity into the ranks of the internationally known. He had done what Aristotle and many others down the years hadn't--classified (his "Modifications" of the title of his 11k-word effort) the moving mountains in the sky, making him a Linnaeus/Godfather of clouds, his nomenclature quickly adopted worldwide.
Color, though, was yet another story
Here's a bit from none other than Goethe (another great classifier, and color person--I wonder if clouds and color ever came up for him?):
"But Howard gives us with his clearer mind
The gain of lessons new to all mankind;
That which no hand can reach, no hand can clasp,
He first has gain’d, first held with mental grasp.
Defin’d the doubtful, fix’d its limit-line,
And named it fitly.—Be the honour thine!
As clouds ascend, are folded, scatter, fall,
Let the world think of thee who taught it all."--Goethe, "Howards Ehrengedächtnis", 1821
Source: "Cloud Colors", by H.C., in Nature, volume 16, no. 394, 17 May 1877, pp 43-4.
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