On 10 January 1703, a young Englishman named Thomas Appletree penned an entry in his diary of the weather. Appletree (1680-1728), had recently completed his education at Oxford, had been admitted as a prospective barrister to one of the London Inns of Court, and was now managing his family estate in rural Worcestershire. In his entry for this day, he apologized for having allowed the year to start without giving sufficient attention to composing his remarks. He resolved to put this right and henceforth to devote himself to writing an ample narrative of the weather and its changes:

… I remark we had a constant thick & heavy Sea of clouds & close dark nebulous expanse, or Black sad Atmosphere baked in massy clouds, & I could compare ye huge rising body & vast aeriall Load or ye mundane smoak to nothing more than a Diffusion of ye Ocean or steam of some infinite Abyss & what I term in my speciall Language, a Sea=sheet … & now we had a Deluge of vapours wich off some exalted eminence, seemed to flow over ye hills & fill ye valleys & invade ye trembling air … so that in recompense for my neglect I subjoyne this descant; & note ye year commences wet.{1}

Appletree did in fact sustain his journal throughout the year 1703, writing sometimes highly detailed and richly expressive accounts of each day’s meteorological events as he experienced them. A single volume of more than two hundred pages of minuscule handwriting has come down to us, perhaps not the only such volume that Appletree compiled. His self-dedication to the task of writing a weather diary was shared with many other individuals in England in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although the florid metaphorical vocabulary in which his account was composed was a highly individual one. Keeping a journal was the prevailing method of reducing the weather to order, an attempt to comprehend events, which everyone recognized impinged upon human life in many ways, by representing them in narrative form. One might record extreme and unusual meteorological conditions: the storms that threatened harvests, sank ships, and damaged buildings; the anomalous cloud-formations and the phenomena of lightning, auroras, and precipitation. One might also maintain a regular, day-by-day account, recording whatever the weather was like on each particular day. This kind of recording generally drew upon a descriptive vocabulary that was standardized to some extent, matching regularly repeated conditions with a routine form of description or annotation. Recorders might also incorporate readings of meteorological instruments, including thermometers, barometers, hygrometers, and wind and rain gauges, into such a journal. Weather events might be recorded alongside other incidents, to illuminate connections: between seasonal weather patterns and prices of grain, for example, or between changing atmospheric conditions and the prevalence of diseases. Used in these sorts of ways, weather diaries held out the prospect of mapping the links between climate and human life, and perhaps eventually predicting the proverbially unpredictable English weather.

The great diarists of the seventeenth century, including John Evelyn, Ralph Josselin, and Samuel Pepys, all included notes on the weather in their journals, generally when it took the form of extreme conditions or otherwise impinged upon the human events they were describing. Diaries devoted specifically to routine recording of the weather began among the members of the Royal Society in the first years of its existence in the 1660s. Robert Hooke published a "Method for Making a History of the Weather" in Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society in 1667, attempting to lay out a paradigm format for such a journal. At the urging of Robert Boyle, the young physician John Locke began to keep a weather diary in June 1666 and continued (with some gaps) until May 1703. At certain times, Locke’s devotion to his task was impressive indeed; residing in Oxford, he recorded two or more readings of the thermometer, barometer, and wind gauge on almost every day for the first six months. Later he compiled instrumental readings at least once a day from December 1691 to May 1703, while living at Oates in Essex. A similar degree of dedication was shown by William Derham, vicar of Upminster in Essex, whose annual journals, including instrumental readings for every day from 1697 to 1702, were published in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions. Later in the eighteenth century, weather diaries for a month at a time became regular features of periodicals ranging from the Philosophical Transactions to the Ladies’ Diary and the Gentleman’s Magazine. Dozens of journals, sometimes extending for a decade or longer, were published during the century, and hundreds of unpublished examples survive in repositories such as the Bodleian Library, the National Meteorological Archive, and the archive of the Royal Society.

Meteorologists, whom we have to thank for the preservation of many of these unpublished records, have tended to regard them only as sources of data—and of questionable reliability as such. They have labored to extract average temperature and rainfall figures from them to answer questions about climatic change, while bemoaning the observers’ insufficiently standardized apparatus and methods. Historians too have sometimes relegated eighteenth-century weather diarists to the prehistory of scientific meteorology. Only at the end of the eighteenth—or early in the nineteenth—century did weather recording become properly scientific, in this view. Only then were weather observers systematically organized by scientific institutions, their instruments rigorously standardized, and their procedures made uniform. Only with the invention of the electric telegraph did it become possible to bring together dispersed observations rapidly enough to draw a weather map, like the ones familiar today. Prior to that, scattered weather observers pursued their idiosyncratic labors in splendid isolation, and their findings were never assimilated within a collective scientific enterprise.

I would like to explore an alternative to the outlook that condescends to the eighteenth century as the last age of the prehistory of science. Rather than seeing the weather observers of that period as unsuccessful aspirants to the scientific expertise of the following century, I want to explore how they understood what they were doing. Only by trying to answer this question can we hope to relate eighteenth-century studies of the weather to other features of the cultural and social experience of the age. In this connection, I suggest that the compilation of weather diaries can be understood as part of the large-scale enterprise of "civilizing nature." An aspect of the general movement of enlightenment, particularly as it took hold in Britain, was the attempt to assimilate features of the natural world within the practical and conceptual framework of civil society. Two dimensions of this are relevant here. First, the weather was encompassed by human action channeled through the institutional and social innovations of the time. These included the new clubs and societies—more or less formalized groupings of autonomous individuals who directed their activities toward public goals. The institutions of publication, including learned journals, magazines, and newspapers, were also critically important in sustaining explorations of the natural world within the enlightened public sphere. And, as a number of historians of the period have recently emphasized, less formal but no less pervasive cultural formations also bore upon the process of the construction of knowledge, such as the conventions of politeness, gentility, and conversation.{2} The era of the Enlightenment saw the weather first remarked upon as a topic of conversation, a regrettable cliché already to Joseph Addison and Samuel Johnson, but a readily available theme to initiate social intercourse in public interactions.{3}

The second dimension of the enterprise of civilizing nature as it shaped the study of the weather was the metaphorical traffic between the language used to describe humanity and that applied to the natural world. The notion of "human nature," a key term in much Enlightenment discourse about society and humanity, invoked attributes of humans that supposedly had their origins in nature.{4} Certain of these natural features of humanity were also identified as human features of nature. Many of the categories of enlightened self-reflection were projected upon the natural world as that world was brought gradually within the scope of human control. For example, the notion of lawful behavior was extended from the social domain to the cosmos. As human society was seen to be governed by laws, traced in the Enlightenment to their natural roots, so the material universe was found to be under the sway of laws of nature. The meteorological realm proved to be much less amenable than the cosmological one in this respect, however: The weather was never as good an example of the lawfulness of nature as, for instance, the Newtonian solar system. If the weather did not exemplify the rule of law particularly well, it was nonetheless connected to other aspects of human nature. Human beings were said to have a natural sentiment or "sensibility" that linked them with their physical environment and explained the effects of weather on health and the emotions. Some natural philosophers invoked models of material causation to account for these connections, but older notions of "sympathy" continued to be used in describing people’s susceptibility to climatic influences. This was understandable at a time when the notion of sympathy was deployed to argue for more refined standards of taste and manners, and when its extension to plants, animals, and landscape informed an enhanced appreciation for the beauties of the natural world.{5} In this context, it seemed reasonable to expect the weather also to be brought within the domain of enlightened sensibility.

In the discussion that follows, I shall touch upon both of these strands of the project of "civilizing nature": the encompassing of the material world through innovative forms of social action, and the metaphorical seepage between the language of humanity and that of nature. In relation to the weather diaries of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I shall examine how the literary form of the diurnal journal was modified from its original function as a tool of spiritual self-reflection to embrace the external phenomena of the weather. I shall consider how the author came to suppress his own subjectivity in the interests of achieving transparency as an objective recorder of external meteorological conditions.{6} I shall argue that this apparent transcendence of the demands of the self was accomplished through a considerable measure of self-discipline on behalf of the weather diarist. Turning to the external resources upon which the diarists drew, I shall suggest that their documents made use of the narrative conventions by which public events were routinely described, inserting weather incidents within the chronological framework of the public calendar. By these means, the weather was assimilated to the category of news, a familiar enough conjunction for us today but a novel one in the early eighteenth century, when news began to assume its modern prominence in public discourse.{7} Within the framework of public time, weather events also became part of "history," both natural and civil. By recording their results within a chronological schema, the weather diarists represented their projects in terms of the narratives by which their age achieved its historical self-understanding. Diaries of the weather were made to appear as part of the collective enterprise of progressive enlightenment, by which civilization and natural knowledge were seen to be advancing hand-in-hand.

It is striking, and surely not merely coincidental, that weather journals emerged from the same Restoration scientific circles that included the great diarists Evelyn, Hooke, and Pepys. Though it exhibited important novel features, the Restoration diary was rooted in traditions of Puritan spiritual discipline and providential accounting. From the late sixteenth century, spiritual journals had been kept by devoted Christians (mostly Protestants) to record their triumphs over temptation and their lapses into sin, and to keep a kind of ledger of divine gifts and punishments. Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault and others, Tom Webster has argued that this kind of document comprised a "technology of the self," "a means by which the godly self was maintained, indeed constructed, through the action of writing." He proposes that, "the diary is a mechanism for turning the ephemerality of action and speech into an artefact, supposedly removed from the subjectivity of the other elements of the maintenance of the individual."{8} Through the writing of a diary, the experiences of an individual were given external substance and the past fixed in a form that could be consulted at will. Maintaining a diary was also a kind of spiritual discipline, a way of subjugating personal wishes and desires to the demands of regular and exacting ritual. Foucault has taught us to see the creation of subjectivity as the outcome of processes of subjection. The early-modern diary presents an example of individuals forming their personal identities through submitting to the discipline of recounting all the significant events of their lives.{9} In the diary, the continuous self-monitoring of Protestant subjectivity was to find expression in the density and temporal continuity of the narrative. The Puritan minister John Fuller urged his readers in 1656 to, "put into your Journal all deliverances from dangers, vouchsafed to you or yours. And indeed, what is our whole life, but a continual deliverance?"{10}

Early weather diaries carried forward this understanding of a journal as an internally imposed discipline, a duty to the self. To keep up a systematic weather journal was generally acknowledged to be a tedious task, particularly if instruments had to be read once or more per day, at more-or-less specified hours. Ralph Thoresby, a Yorkshire virtuoso and compiler of an extensive personal diary, considered undertaking the chore in the 1690s, "but bethought myself of the tediousness of it." When Clifton Wintringham brought out his record of two decades’ observations of weather and diseases in York, in 1727, he admitted to "the continual tediousness in making these observations over several years." As the twentieth-century meteorologist Gordon Manley has put it, "prolonged maintenance of daily observations demands an odd and uncommon type of enthusiasm."{11}

In Worcestershire in 1703, Thomas Appletree was frequently swept away by this odd and uncommon type of enthusiasm, but he also regarded the compilation of his weather journal as a kind of duty. He called his text "my Ephemeris or Historicall Remarques on vicissitudes of weather, with a narrative of its course & Tracing it in its various winding meanders round the year"; but he also described it as "the grand history & picture of my own life."{12} He represented his subjectivity as thoroughly permeated by the atmospheric environment: responding with ecstatic rapture to fine weather or sublime cloud formations, disoriented by claps of thunder or strokes of lightning, humored by a congenial misty rain. Affected by the weather as deeply as he was, Appletree registered a sense of obligation to represent in his writing the pleasures it gave him. On a fine day in August, he noted that the fair prospect "obliges [me] to pay ye gratefull Tribute of a few Remarks upon it, for ye Pleasure I took & received in ye contemplation."{13} But pleasure was not always the spur. On occasion, the diarist admitted the pains his labors cost him, for example when it came to finding appropriate language to describe the rich variability of clouds. "I tire myself with Pumping for apt terms & similes to illustrate my Thoughts, & yet must own a deficiency," he complained.{14} What kept him going was his consciousness of an obligation to describe as amply as possible the meteorological phenomena that impinged upon him so deeply. As the year neared its end, however, the self-discipline slackened. On 26 December 1703, Appletree composed the following note of contrition:

I never took less heed, or was more incumbred & totally slurd over my Diary & Ephemeris than today. I could [not] take any notes, or breif abstract for use of my memory & now ye many passages & matters I mett with drove it out of my head; I had allmost lost or mist a day, & left a gap or chasm in my commentories thereby; … I lapsed into pristine innocent Gulf of oblivion narrative & this most sweetly prevailes on me & will sooner wean me from this Tiresom & Tyrannic custom of keeping & so laboriously penning this Book of Life, than all ye anxious distasts possible. … [T]his I have entered to fairly confess a Defect & failure in nicer observation: dies sine Lineâ.{15}

The passage gives us some clues about the diarist’s method of composition. Evidently, Appletree’s custom was to take brief notes in the course of each day and refer to them later (perhaps several days later) to compose his remarks. This is borne out by the appearance of the manuscript. Variations in the color of the ink suggest that the entries for several days were frequently composed at a sitting. On other occasions, however, the entry for a single day spills over into lengthy digressions of up to twenty pages, apparently not all written at once. Each day’s remarks are preceded by a summary annotation of the prevailing weather, encoded by a personal system of symbols. For some days, this is all there is; for most the annotation is followed by the prose commentary and sometimes by lengthy digressions. Prior to adopting this form, the author reveals, he had composed a previous document, now lost: "my more miscellany confused & immethodicall Diary, before I lighted upon a distinct Tract to enter my annotations in."{16} The adoption of a (more or less) standard form may have resolved some of the author’s anxiety as to what should be written and how it should be organized, but there remained the tedium of actually writing the record, a "tiresome and tyrannic custom" from which Appletree longed to be released.

Other weather diarists took the process of standardization of form much further, paring down their records to formulaic phrases or symbols and numerical readings of meteorological instruments. Appletree’s richly metaphorical vocabulary for situating himself in his weather narrative was quite untypical. The more normal style among his contemporaries and successors sought to represent the observer as a transparent window upon the world of nature. Most weather diaries made only very occasional references to the personal circumstances of the diarist himself, usually to explain instances when the writer’s indisposition caused a lapse in his observations. Thus, Wintringham noted, in the summer and fall of 1725, "I myself about this time was seized by a serious and lengthy disease, which kept me from these observations for four months."{17} In the last three decades of the century, Thomas Hughes, a physician in Stroud in Gloucestershire, mentioned his own confinement due to rheumatism and lumbago at times when it prevented him making observations of the weather and diseases in his locality. At such rare moments, the body of the observer asserted itself as an obstacle to the routine recording of observations. In the normal course of events, however, the weather diarists represented themselves as almost disembodied observers of the natural world. They did not present themselves as subject to the weather’s influence, but as objective witnesses of it. Indeed, their stoical perseverance without regard to their own bodily state is indicated by the fact that several authors kept up their diaries until just a few days before their deaths. Weather diaries might thus be regarded as one of the textual forms in which authors displayed themselves as reliable witnesses of natural phenomena by suppressing their emotions and the demands of their bodies, preconditions of the emerging modern construct of "objectivity."{18}

The link between this kind of disciplined recording of observations and techniques of spiritual self-monitoring can still be glimpsed in the eighteenth century, for example in the work of the Irish Quaker physician, John Rutty (1698-1775). Rutty published a number of works on the environmental causes of health and disease, including his Chronological History of the Weather and Seasons and of Prevailing Diseases in Dublin (1770), which covered the period from 1725 to 1766. After his death, his personal Spiritual Diary (1776) was edited for publication by a fellow Quaker. The method of the two works is intriguingly similar. For more than forty years, Rutty was making daily annotations of his observations of the weather and the diseases he observed in the course of his medical practice. He was also maintaining an intimate record of his spiritual achievements and lapses, castigating himself daily for moral failings visible to no-one but himself. He prefaced the spiritual diary by explaining that he wanted to introduce scientific methods of observation into the domain of religious self-improvement. Themes of bodily discipline and temperance emerge from both spiritual and medico-meteorological records. Over-indulgence in food or drink or luxurious living were seen by the author as threats to religious and physical health alike. In January 1756, Rutty appealed to God to help him learn the spiritual lessons from his "daily views of mortality, diseases, earthquakes, and my own infirmities." He was aware that natural inquiry itself offered temptations, not least the lure of worldly glory. (In July 1759, he took comfort from, "A mortifying, but wholesome repulse on application to the Royal Society.") But he also clearly saw the self-discipline of natural science, and in particular of methodical journal-keeping, as complementary and conducive to the spiritual improvement that was his overriding concern. One of the few notes of explicit self-congratulation was struck when Rutty looked back on his work on compiling the weather diary, in September 1759: "A sweet evening in a review of the History of the Weather; and not only that, but also of my spiritual state, even the history of my progress and regress, and restoration through the Divine Bounty. Surely, here has been no small industry in nature: Lord, supply the defects in grace!"{19}

Weather diaries, such as Rutty’s, mobilized stringent methods of self-discipline that paralleled techniques of spiritual exercise, but the weather—unlike personal devotion—was a public phenomenon not a private one. The compilers of weather journals therefore also regulated their practice by means derived from the institutions of public discourse, especially the narrative forms in which chronology was embedded. The emergence to prominence of the diary in the late seventeenth century has been seen as part of a widespread insinuation of the framework of public time into a variety of discursive forms, including newspapers, periodicals, and novels. It has recently been argued, by Stuart Sherman, that this development as a whole was indebted to improvements in the design of mechanical clocks and the increased prevalence of watches in private ownership. The wide availability of means for making finer divisions of time increased people’s awareness of a shared temporal framework on many different levels—hourly, diurnal, and calendrical.{20}

Viewed in these terms, the important feature of diaries as texts is that they place events within a chronological outline established by reference to the public calendar, which is constructed prior to and independently of the incidents recorded. The calendrical framework can be extended indefinitely and can encompass any event that happens to occur. The purpose of establishing such a framework prior to composing the diary is to make the composition, more or less, a matter of routine—a practice that demands a degree of discipline and perseverance, but where the formal outlines of the writing are laid down in advance. Pepys’s text of the 1660s showed how narrative self-expression could be governed by the imperative of filling a pre-established temporal framework with abundant empirical description. Pepys used a variety of discursive and graphical devices to set down the outlines of date and time, constituted by public authority, within which the supposedly comprehensive narrative of events unfolded. The subsequent emergence of the daily prints—newspapers and such periodicals as the Spectator—provided further discursive models of narratives organized according to the same temporal schema.

Weather diarists of the late seventeenth century reflected in their own discursive practices the new modes of chronological organization of narrative. Observers who used meteorological instruments, beginning with Locke, frequently employed temporal divisions finer than the diurnal. Clocks were referred to in order to set regular hours for consulting the barometer, thermometer, and other apparatus. The hours of observation would be recorded, especially if more than one reading was taken per day. All weather diaries made use of the outline of the calendar, usually established graphically by drawing lines on the blank page to mark spaces for each day in the month to come. Observations thus filled in the spaces already prepared. Such a procedure attests to the governing notion of a neutral framework of time, configured prior to and independently of events, and indefinitely extensible. The notion is signified by use of the words "chronological history" in Rutty’s title and in Thomas Short’s General Chronological History of the Air (1749). Short extended the framework of neutral calendrical time all the way back to the biblical flood, which he dated to anno mundi 1657, and, beginning at that point, embarked on a lengthy catalogue of plagues, floods, pestilences, earthquakes, famines, and other extreme meteorological and epidemic events. Events perceived by Christians and Jews as providential interventions were included in a single series with the marvels recorded by pagan historians. Volume one of the two-volume work took 494 pages to reach AD 1717; volume two picked up at 1711 and included in a seamless continuum the records of Wintringham, John Huxham, and other observers. Short stitched the records of his contemporary weather observers into a single continuous temporal fabric, extending back to the time of the biblical patriarchs. His work indicates how the calendar could be extrapolated to construct a complete chronological framework for historical understanding, an example of what Donald J. Wilcox identified as the application of Newtonian "absolute time" to historical writing.{21}

The governing model of time as regular measure, a neutral structure into which all events could be inserted, was shared by weather diaries with newspapers and other periodicals. Thus, events reported in newspapers were seen as homogeneous with those recorded by the diarists and in some circumstances interchangeable with them. Appletree referred the reader of his diary to newspaper accounts, from various parts of the country, of the effects of the violent storm of November 1703. Daniel Defoe collected the accounts of this event by numerous observers for publication in his journalistic history, The Storm, published the following year. In his preface to the tract, Defoe considered the moral and epistemological issues raised by such narratives. His overall purpose, he claimed, was to convince readers of the awesome power of divine providence, to convey "to the Ages to come the Memory of the dreadfulest and most universal Judgment that ever Almighty Power thought fit to bring upon this Part of the World." To communicate this moral lesson, he had to secure the readers’ trust for narratives of highly unusual events. If readers were to doubt the testimony of the witnesses Defoe had assembled, he would find himself "convicted of a double Imposture, to forge a Story, and then preach repentance to the Reader from a Crime greater than I would have him repent of." In his prefatory musings to this tract, Defoe both confirmed the prominence of extraordinary events within the category of news and borrowed the mechanisms of witnessing and credit to secure their believability. Where human testimony was insufficient, as for an earthquake rumored to have accompanied the storm, Defoe withheld validation even though he repeated the report: "tho’ it may be related for the sake of its Strangeness or Novelty, it shall nevertheless come in the Company of all its Uncertainties, and the Reader left to judge of its Truth."{22}

As items of news, weather phenomena continued, throughout the eighteenth century, to partake of the character of strange and novel events. As Vladimir Jankovic has recently shown, violent storms, unusual degrees of heat or cold, and strange appearances in the sky, were all reported regularly in the Philosophical Transactions as well as in such periodicals as the Gentleman’s Magazine. Their strangeness made them likely candidates for tokens of providential action, even when it was also asserted that they were the results of natural causes. Their prominence in eighteenth-century news reports followed upon their earlier manifestation in private diaries, where weather events appeared as signs of divine favor or admonishment.{23} With the rise of routine weather journals, however, occasional records of extraordinary meteorological events were joined by catalogues of normal conditions compiled day-by-day. The authors of these diaries also employed news reports, exploiting a permeability between the discursive realms of journal-keeping and journalism. Rutty made quite systematic use of reports in the medical and general press to map the progress of a catarrh epidemic from country to country across Europe. John Fothergill, in one of his monthly columns in the Gentleman’s Magazine, reported a fall in his barometer reading, which did not correspond with a change in weather at the site of observation but could be linked to more distant meteorological events reported in the newspapers.{24} Other uses of news reports were apparently more arbitrary, generating sometimes quite surreal juxtapositions. Thomas Hughes, for example, regularly recorded military events of the Napoleonic wars alongside his own weather and natural history observations in Gloucestershire. For instance: "[30 June 1799] Bologne surrend’d to the Austrians. Some Hay made well."{25} In the same spirit, Gilbert White, the vicar of Selbourne in Dorset, recorded the execution of Louis XVI alongside the appearance of bees gathering on the snowdrops.

It was not hard to see the humor in such juxtapositions. The style was satirized already in the Spectator in 1712, with Addison’s spoof diary of "The Citizen," who reads of the assassination of the Grand Vizier by day and dreams of him by night.{26} But the use of news reports in the weather diaries can also be read as indicative of the sharing of discursive methods by diary and newspaper. Through their composition of chronological histories, the weather diarists partook in the construction of the kind of chronological narratives which were, in various forms, characteristic of the public sphere. The framework of neutral calendrical time, shared by diaries and newspapers, was viewed as indefinitely extensible into the future. Hence, the diarists’ expectation that the project of compiling data would go on for a long time and involve many observers as participants. The practice of chronological narrative was consistent with very long-term views of the incremental accumulation of knowledge, and with a vision of natural inquiry as a collective public enterprise. As early as December 1700, when Locke sent his Oates weather journal to Sir Hans Sloane for possible publication in the Philosophical Transactions, he wrote: "This I know that I did not keep this register for my own sake alone."{27} Other observers called for the compilation and comparison of as many "histories" of weather as possible. The physician and weather observer William Hillary wrote, in 1740: "[T]here must be many Collections, and of much longer Continuation, obtained with the greatest Exactness, before we can draw such Aphorisms as are certain and conclusive from them." Short suggested that the journals of "ingenious Gentlemen" should be gathered "in some public Museums where the Curious might have Access to them."{28} Construing weather diaries as "histories" enabled their authors to view them as prospective contributions to a Baconian inductive enterprise, as materials for the grand synthesis from which general axioms of the weather would eventually emerge.

The derivation of general scientific laws, which Bacon himself had looked forward to with millennial aspirations, tended to be indefinitely postponed on this view. Since weather journals were chronological records, necessarily limited in location and temporal range, it could always be argued that more were needed before a valid induction could be undertaken. Hopes for prediction were projected toward the indefinite future, in a move that would make the collective enterprise potentially interminable, like the work of the individual journal authors. The limitless time of the personal weather record was matched by that ascribed to the collective project. As Appletree wrote in his diary of 1703, "to be oracular in weather asks no small pains & labour, & can alone be founded on a vast & extensive science."{29} Oracles were nonetheless demanded, notwithstanding the prevarication of the cautious diarists. The gap between people’s need for some form of weather prophecy and the indefinitely postponed fulfillment of the diarists’ project was filled by a wide range of schemes for reading signs of the weather to come. Older semiotic methods of "weather-wising"—which invoked such indicators as cloud formations, appearances of the sun and moon, and the behavior of domestic animals—continued to command attention throughout the eighteenth century. Even new instruments like the barometer were generally interpreted in relation to the search for prognostic signs, a demand that the diligent labors of the weather diarists never satisfactorily met.{30}

The diarists’ program nonetheless resonated with other features of their culture. Its chronological dimension fitted well with the historical self-understanding of the age. The progress of knowledge and the refinement of manners—aspects of what we may now identify as a self-conscious process of enlightenment—were seen as continuous and open-ended in their temporality. By contributing to the steady accumulation of empirical knowledge, the diarists represented themselves as advancing the historical processes that progressively divided their society from the unenlightened past or the primitive "other." Thus, Samuel Say, vicar of Lowestoft in Essex at the beginning of the eighteenth century, mentioned he had begun to compile weather observations, "at first upon a very slight Occasion in my early youth to be able to contradict some common & groundless Observations and Superstitions."{31} Later in the century, Gilbert White introduced his journal of weather and natural history as a weapon in the fight against "superstitious prejudices," such as those held by the "lower people" of his district. Short also made the compilation of weather diaries a signifier of enlightenment, complaining that in non-European regions "the barbarous Natives" had no inclination to write them and that, even in nations where learning existed, "the Generality of People have been too idle to collect such Histories."{32}

In this way, the diarists indicated how their undertaking could find a place within the narratives of enlightenment that pervaded their culture. It was in this spirit that the pioneer meteorologist and Quaker social reformer Luke Howard introduced his work The Climate of London in 1818-20. The bringing to completion of such a project was a reassurance, Howard suggested, that recent political and religious discord had not overwhelmed "all that seemed to soften and refine our manners" with "a harsh unsocial feeling": "That men will yet be found, not so wholly sunk in the vortex of business and strife, as not to pay some regard to that wonderful system of cause and effect in nature, which is ever in play around them."{33} The providential system of the natural environment could only, in Howard’s view, be properly studied by those who made a sustained commitment to public life. God’s universe was revealed only by collective action within the sphere of civic society.