it necessary to reply, believing that the grounds of it would disappear in presence of the full account. The only opinion to which I thought it right to defer was to some extent a private one, communicated to me by Prof. Stokes. He considered that I had, in some cases, ascribed too exclusive an influence to the mixed currents of aqueous vapor and air, to the neglect of differences of temperature. That differences of temperature, when they come into play, are an efficient cause of acoustic opacity, I never doubted. In fact, aërial reflection arising from this cause is, in the present inquiry, for the first time made the subject of experimental demonstration. What the relative potency of differences of temperature and differences due to aqueous vapor, in the cases under consideration, may be, I do not venture to state; but, as both are active, I have, in Chapter VII., referred to them jointly as concerned in the production of those "acoustic clouds" to which the stoppage of sound in the atmosphere is for the most part due.
Subsequently, however, to the publication of the full investigation, another criticism appeared, to which, in consideration of its source, I would willingly pay all respect and attention. In this criticism, which reached me first through the columns of an American newspaper, differences in the amounts of aqueous vapor, and differences of temperature, are alike denied efficiency as causes of acoustic opacity. At a meeting of the Philosophical Society of Washington, the emphatic opinion had, it was stated, been expressed that I was wrong in ascribing the opacity of the atmosphere to its flocculence, the really efficient cause being refraction. This view appeared to me so obviously mistaken that I assumed, for a time, the incorrectness of the newspaper account.
Recently, however, I have been favored with the "Report of the United States Lighthouse Board for 1874," in which the account just referred to is corroborated. A brief reference to this report will here suffice. Major Elliott, the accomplished officer and gentleman referred to at page 261, had published a record of his visit of inspection to this country, in which he spoke, with a perfectly enlightened appreciation of the facts, of the differences between our system of lighthouse illumination and that of the United States. He also embodied in his report some account of the investigation on fog-signals, the initiation of which he had witnessed, and indeed aided, at the South Foreland.
On this able report of their own officer the Lighthouse Board at Washington make the following remark: "Although this account is interesting in itself and to the public generally, yet, being addressed to the Lighthouse Board of the United States, it would tend to convey the idea that the facts which it states were new to the Board, and that the latter had obtained no results of a similar kind; while a reference to the Appendix to this Report[1] will show that the researches of our
- ↑ It will be borne in mind that the Washington Appendix was published nearly a year after my Report to the Trinity House.
