RAIN MAKING.

Temuka Leader, Volume I, Issue 100, 30 November 1878, Page 3

RAIN MAKING.

A correspondent writes to fhe Christchurch 1 Press’ to suggest the making an experiment which he thinks would he successful in causing a downpour of rain. In the writer’s opinion the want of rain is due, less to absence of moisture in the atmosphere, than to au electrical condition which prevents its falling. He has frequently observed that cannonading has brought on a heavy shower, even when the sky was perfectly clear when the firing took place, and infers that the discharges affected in some way the electrical condition of the atmosphere, causing the fall of rain. During the late long spell of dry weather there have been many calm days, or hours, when the sky was overcast heavily, and promised rain. Several times lately it has struck us that a veiy slight influence would have sufficed to bring down the heavy clouds above our heads. The writer in the ‘Press’ believes that twenty rounds from a battery of ten or twelve sixpounders would suffice to bring rain under such circumstances. He suggests that such a battery should be mounted on railway trucks, so that it could be taken up and down the country to places where it could be usefully tried. It is high time that practical scientists turned their attention to the weather. We could manage to 0.0 xvithout a new form of telephone, or even a new phonograph for V year or two if we could have given instead some moans of preventm^^ or mitigating such droughts as w«g now suffer from, While our sjgff D f the .country is being parclcfoi^g^ u-est coast is being sodden, TifSelevelling of the Southern Alps probably allow ns to get a share of ra i ns which cannot now climb over thig TO Tin that is done, and Mr Macandrew undertake it,

we ought to try some other plan or plans. It is no use sitting down and folding our a: ms. H the problem of influencing the pr >blem of influencing the weather be fairly f-ced, it w H, difficult as it appears, be solved. What man has done, man may do; what man has not done, —why tl at is just what he has to do.