THE BEGINNINGS OF SCIENTIFIC WEATHER OBSERVATION IN IRELAND (168441708)

By LISA SHIELDS Librarian, Irish Meteorological Service

HE earliest serious meteorological activity in Ireland took place towards the end T of the seventeenth century, under the auspices of the Dublin Philosophical W e - ty. Meteorological registers were begun by Wiaiam Molyneux, continued by St George Ashe, and later resumed by William Molyqeux’s son Samuel.

Samuel Molyneux’s observations have now bqen traced, but of the earlier regis- ters one page only is known to have survived. I alb giving this account of the Dublin Society’s meteorological work firstly in the belief that it will be of more than local interest and secondly in the hope that its publication might lead to the recovery of the missing registers.

BACKGROUND: EUROPE AND ENGLAND

The seventeenth century in Western Europe saw among educated people the rise of a great interest in scientific experimentation rpld in the new instruments being invented and developed. Societies sprang up in several countries to study all branches of science, including meteorology. The most notable of these early societies was the Academia del Cimente of Florence, founded in 1@7. During the following ten years that society had instruments made and sent to seven Italian cities and four cities outside Italy. Observations of temperature, pressure, humidity, wind direction and state of sky were recorded on standard forms and sent back to the Academy for comparison.

This work of standardisation and international co-operation was continued, in a less formal way, by the Royal Society of London, founded in 1660. Members from many countries contributed papers describing their experiments to the Society’s jour- nal, the Philosophical Transactions. Robert Hooke in his book Method for making a history ofthe weather (1663) gave instructions to observers and advocated the use of standard instruments. Hooke introduced a fixed scale for the thermometer, using the freezing point of water as zero, and in 1665 he produced a standard thermometer for the Royal Society. During the following years a series of improved barometers and other instruments were described and demonstrated to the Society by Hooke, Boyle and others (Frisinger 1977).

THE SITUATION IN IRELAND

Ireland was late in sharing this excitement, and seems to have been unprovided with instruments (Hoppen 1970). In 1681 we find William Molyneux lamenting, in a letter to the astronomer Flamsteed, that ‘living here in a kingdom barren of all things, but especially of the ingenious artificers, I am wholly destitute of instruments I can rely on’. By 1684, however, he seems to have built up a fine collection of instruments, mostly astronomical, and when his brother Thomas, then a medical student at Leyden, wrote deploring the lack of meteorological instruments in Holland, William was able to reply with some complacency (on 14 June 1684) ‘ignorant as we are in this place, God be thanked we know what a baruscope is, and can prattle about the explanation thereof.

WILLIAM MOLYNEUX (1656-16Y8)

William Molyneux, the subject of a recent biography (Simms 1982), was born in Dublin and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. Later he studied law in London. He is

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best known now for his patriotic tract on colonial nationalism, The case of Ireland stated, but as well as being an administrator and political figure he was an enthusiastic amateur astronomer and the author of a book on optics. He studied ballistics, col- lected and invented scientific instruments and corresponded with scholars and scien- tists abroad. He was a particular friend and admirer of the English philosopher John Locke and had his son Samuel educated according t o Locke’s theories.

THE DUBLIN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

William Molyneux undertook to collect material for the Irish part of an ambitious world atlas being produced for the Royal Society by the London bookseller Moses Pitt. In 1682 he had a questionnaire printed and distributed around the country. This work provided him with contacts with other scientifically inclined Irishmen. Some of these living in Dublin met weekly with Molyneux in Trinity College to discuss the progress of the atlas. In October 1683 they decided to form a society along the lines of the Royal Society, similar to the Philosophical Society formed that year in Oxford.

The first meetings were informal gatherings in a coffee house. Later the Provost of Trinity invited them to meet in his college lodgings, and the Dublin Society was formally set up in January 1684, with a constitution and 14 members. In April it moved to more spacious quarters at Crow’s Nest off Dame Street, not far from Trinity College. Members were to apply themselves chiefly to practical experiments and ex- change minutes and letters with the societies at London and Oxford. Molyneux was the first secretary and treasurer. He was later elected to membership of the Royal Society, an honour shared by many of the members of the Dublin Society.

Hoppen (1970) and Simms (1982) have given detailed accounts of the history and activities of the Society. Gunther (1939) prints in full the surviving minutes and letters sent to Oxford.

METEOROLOGICAL WORK OF THE SOCIETY

All branches of science were studied but four members had an active interest in meteorology and a fair proportion of the mentions in the minutes are meteorological. Members had heard with interest about Martin Lister’s account to the Royal Society of his method of noting barometer readings on a graph, and they asked for a copy of it.

At the meeting of 10 March 1684 there was discussion about the keeping of a diary of the weather

‘which was look d upon by Sir William Petty as very difficult to perform so as to make it useful and instructive without a great apparatus of barometers, thermo- meters, hygroscopes, instruments for telling the point of the wind, the force of the wind, the quantity of rain that falls, the times of the sun’s shining and being overcast. As to the common thermometer of spirits and hygroscopes of oat beards, wooden planks, etc. hitherto invented, ’twas objected. that they lose their quality by keeping, and that they are not constant standards: and if we make new ones every year, we can make no estimate of the weather by them, in relation t o what was observed last year by others’.

William Molyneux was less pessimistic. He undertook to have a plate specially engraved, based on Lister’s method, and to keep a weather register and send copies of it monthly to Oxford. He sent a copy of his engraved plate to his brother Thomas in Holland on 10 May 1684, with the following explanation:

‘At whatever station or division my mercury stands in the tube, I mark in the paper on the correspondent tenth of an inch, over against the day of the month, with a small stroke: and under the column of winds mark down the point and strength it blows at: and going to bed, I put down the general constitution of the day in short wordes; then if anything extraordinary happens in the night, I note it the next morning. So that. at one view, we have the motions for an whole month of the mercury. and of the weather that attended it: the figures 28,29,30,

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31, denote the inches into which the baroscope plate is divided.’ (Wilde 1841) In earlier letters the brothers had been comparing and reporting on the weather in Ireland and Holland. On 21 January 1684 Thomas asked if Ireland had experienced the same severe winter that Holland was suffering, William replied

‘We have had here a most extraordinary hqrd winter, for the Liffey has been frozen over so as to admit thousands of people to pass over for these six weeks together, and so continues at present, and all this notwithstanding a constant seriene (sic] sunshine all day, and southerly winds frequently blowing. In fine, such a season has not been known I believe in man’s memory.’ (Wilde 1841)

On 5 May Thomas had sent him a long account of Holland’s disagreeable climate, together with his own elaborate explanation of its causes. Now William suggested that Thomas should keep a weather register too. Thomas sent back a diary of Leyden weather for July, but was discouraged by not finding the necessary instruments avail- able:

‘I have not gone, nor do not design to go, any farther in making observations on the weather, for not being joined with the heights of the thermometer and baruscope, (for I count the first of these also very necessary), they are useless and insignificant observations.’ (Wilde 1841)

At the meeting of 2 June 1684 William Molyneux ‘produced a paper containing the observations of the weather for the month of May, with the winds, and the heights of the mercury in the baroscope noted according to Dr Listers ingenious and compe- dious method’. He sent a copy of the May 1684 diary to Oxford, where it is still preserved in the Bodleian Library (see Fig. 1 and Table 1).

When William Molyneux left to join his brother on the Continent in May 1685 responsibility for the Society’s weather register was taken over by St George Ashe, professor of mathematics and later Provost of Trinity College. Ashe presented the April 1685 diary ‘taken at Trinity College’ to the Society on 4 May. He continued the diaries at least until the middle of 1686, and presented some of them at meetings of the Society. We do not know the exact site of the earlier observations, or if instrumental readings were ever introduced for temperature, humidity or wind force. At the meet- ing of 10 November 1684 a letter was read from a County Dublin member, Richard Bulkeley, ‘containing the description of a machine lately contrived by him for reges- tring the force of the wind’. but n o further details are given. On 20 October 1685 Bulkeley again gave the Society an account of ‘his anemoscope’.

Molyneux put his mind to producing a hygrometer which he considered an im- provement on Hooke’s fragile oat-straw model. On 1 1 May 1685 he

‘presented the description and draught of a very ingenious hygroscope or weath- erclock (as he calls it), invented lately by him, which by a piece of whipcord and a weight with an index shews the least alteration or variety in the moisture of the air’.

This invention was not, in fact, original, but in the belief that it was he published a description of it in the Philosphical Transactions and in the Acta Eruditorum of Leipzig (Simms 1982).

William Molyneux used the diaries to compare Dublin weather with the weather in London and Oxford: in May 1685 he noted that the heights of the mercury, while not always equal in Dublin and London, generally rose and fell together, ‘especially in all remarkable changes’. In June 1686, after studying Oxford weather diaries closely, he ‘observed that any sudden and extraordinary change of weather, affects the inhabi- tants of Dublin at the same time and after the same manner; and if a man may guess from so narrow observation, that Dublin enjoys as much good weather as Oxford’. Ashe also tried to interpret the data collected. In October 1686 he ‘read a discourse about the weather, and descended to the weather we have here at Dublin, and here he endeavoured to assign those causes, which seem to render the situation of it un-

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wholesom’. Despite the strong bias towards meteorology in the early years of the Dublin

Society, little activity in this field seems to have been evident around the turn of the century. Indeed the Society appears to have ceased meeting for long periods. Howev- er , interest in the Society was revived again in November 1707 by William Molyneux’s astronomer son Samuel, then an undergraduate at Trinity College. Samuel had inher- ited his late father’s library and large instrument collection. There was a distinguished membership of about 20, including the philosopher George Berkeley, Samuel’s uncle Thomas, two archbishops, the Provost and the Lord Lieutenant, but the new Society lasted less than one year. By now the wave of scientific enthusiasm had passed its peak: the Royal Society was going through a mediocre phase, the Oxford Society had been defunct since 1690, its laboratories abandoned and its instruments broken. The Dublin Society’s collapse in 1708 was mainly due to the fact that Samuel Molyneux, its secretary and moving spirit, temporarily lost interest in scientific matters. In 1712 he settled in England, where he regained his interest in science and was elected fellow of the Royal Society.

SAMUEL MOLYNEUX AS A WEATHER OBSERVER

In August 1707 Samuel Molyneux had been asked by William Derham, an En- glish scientist who was publishing weather registers in the Philosophical Transactions, if he would agree to keep a similar register in Dublin:

‘If you could in Ireland observe as I d o here the quantities of rain which fall with you, you would doe a very acceptable service to the Royal Society. And if you could add the variations of the barometer etc. as I have done and transmitt them to me your favour would be the greater. In one of the last Trans. Nr. 309 and some others before, you will find my method of catching and measuring the rain, and therefore I need not trouble you with a discription.’ (Southampton MSS)

Samuel Molyneux replied, writing from Trinity College on 27 September 1707,

‘to serve you and your excellent Royal Society in my observations of the weather which I fear the want of so nice instruments as you have with you will render less exact and useful then (sic] I could wish; however with such as I have 1 shall endeavour to keep a diary as you desire of the heights of the mercury in the barometer with the expansion of the spirits in the thermometer mine being a close thermometer of Mr Patricks of London. The quantitys of rain that falls here I shall endeavour to estimate as justly as I can together with the directions and strength of the wind but having not yet furnished myself with necessary instruments I must beg pardon for deferring the beginning of my observations till I am in somewhat better order to make them.’ (Southampton MSS)

Samuel Molyneux began his weather register on 20 November 1707. On 5 April 1708 he wrote to Rev Walter Atkins, one of his natural history informants living in County Cork, urging him to keep a similar register:

‘You will extremely oblige me in letting me know whether you have ever poss- ibly made any observations of the time of the migration of birds, and whether you could find the leisure of a quarter of an hour in a day to keep a journal of the weather as I doe here in Dublin: which if you think you can with convenience 1 shall procure you the necessary instruments.’ (Southampton MSS)

expressing his willingness

Unfortunately we d o not know if Atkins ever acted on this suggestion. Molyneux, for his part, replied to Derham on 3 August 1708, reporting on the

progress of his register, and adding a few words in defence of Ireland’s notorious climate:

‘Though I have just now complain’d of our late cloudy weather in Dublin I am apt to think our observations of the rain = [sic] weather which since the 20th November I have constantly measurd will not give very diffrent quantitys in the

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Fig 1. (reduced phorocopy of original phologruph). (Oxford Bodleiutr Lihrury. Ms Ashnwle 1813, folio 347).

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TABLE 1 A transcription of the M a y 16x4 page of Wil l iam Molyneux's weather register shown in Fig. 1

A Diary of the Weather for y' Month of May lhK4

Days Hciaht Wind State of the Wcathcr Days Height Wind State of thc Weather

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

of tKC Mcrcury 2Y.5 29.3 29.4

29.6 29.7

29.7 29.6 29.6

29.7 29.7 29.65

29.6 29.7 29.8 30 30 30

M 30 30.1 30.1 29.9

29.9 29.9 29.9

29 .Y 293 29.7

29.7

294

29.7 29.7 29.7

29.6 29.5

29.7 29.7 29.8

SSE. Calm W. brecz W. Calm

W. hard - brccz - Calm

SSE Calm - brccz S & . E

hard SW breez S. hard SE Calm

SW. hrccz - Calm

- Calm bctwecn . . . and SE. Calm all day

SE. Calm SW. Calm

ESE Calm SE Calm

Fair.

s w . High - brccz - Calm

Calm - brccz -

w. vc

- Calm

SW brccz all day

hi$

E. Calm SW brcez

- breeze al day

Morning ovcrcast and sunshine by fitts. about I . pm. ashowcr. all after ovcrcast and sunshine by fitts. Clear sky about 1 I . p.m. Morning overcast. about 10 a shower and misling by fitts till noon. aftcnvards Clcar sushine all day. Morning overcast. drops by fitts. about 4 p.m. Rain which continued all day and evcning aftcr. Morning mostly sunshine. hut now and then ovcrwst. Aftcrnoon OVCMSI and showry Morning as yesterday morning. Mcrnoon fair sunshine Fair sunshinc all day, only now and thcn a flying Cloud. Warm weathcr Rain in y' night A shower about Y. a.m. overcast all day. Evcning clcarcd up. Fair hut mostly overcast. now and then a little sunshine. about 10 p.m. it began to rain Overcast. now and thcn a little breaking out of the sun. a shower about I . p.m. Ovcrcast and thrcatning al day now and thcn a little faint sunshine. misling rain about 1. p.m, a shower about 7. pm. AI the Morningovcrcast. about noon it elcar" up. fair sunshine al aftcnvards. Mornin Clcar sunshine. about I 8 overcast and so continued al day. Slight rain in y' night Morning overcast. about 8. a.m. it began to rain and continued 6 hours. aftcnvards clouds and sunshine by fitts. al day. Al day Clcar sunshine, only now and then a flying cloud

of the Mcrcury

15 2Y.8 29.0 29.9

16 2Y.Y 2Y.Y 29.Y

17 29.8 29.8 294

18 2Y.Y 29 .Y 29.9

19 29.9 2Y.Y 2Y.Y

20 29.9 30 30

- brccz Dead Calm E Calm - Calm - brccz NE hrccz - hrecz - Calm

- brecr - Calm

- Calm - Calm

- brccz

21 30 - brccz 30 30

22 30.1 - Calm 30.1 30.1

23 30.1 - brecz 30.05 - Calm 30

24 30 - Calm 30 29.9

25 29.8 - Calm 29.7 29.6

26 29.5 DeadCalm 29.55

27 29.7 - brecz 29.9 - Calm

28 29.9 - Calm 29.85 S.W. brecz 29.8

29 29.65 - brcez 29.5 - hard 29.7 - Calm

30 294 W&N brccz 29.8 - high 29.8 S.W. breez

31 29.8 SW breez 29.1 - 29.6

Fair sunshine al day only about 10 a.m. overcast fair a littlc wind Fair sunshine all day

Fair hut overcast and sunshine by fitts al day

Fair sunshine all day

The samc

The samc

The samc

The Same

The samc

The samc. hut something morc Hazy

Thinly ovcrcast. now and then the sun brcaks out

Overcast but fair al day. only about 11 a.m. somc fcw drops Overcast and sunshine by fitts all day Overcast all day. about 10. a.m. misling for an hour. at 3. p.m. a showcr Ovcrcast all the morning about 2 p.m. a shower and storm. about 5 p.m. i t began to clear up. and continued clear al afterwards

Fair sunshine al day. only about 10. a.m. overcast and a shower from a flying Cloud. Overcast and sunshine hy fitts all day.

1 call i t Calm. when there is only a gcntle motion of the air just able to turn a tic At this mark - the wind continues in yE same point as last expressed.

:klish weathercock

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whole for whereas we generally have a continued mizling sky, you as I am told have it by fitts more violent which perhaps may bring things near to an equality this I hope we shall determine to the defence of our country which is commonly called the piss pott of Europe when we compare the observations of this years weather which I have endeavourd hitherto to make with all possible exactness in all the particulars you desir’d and shall not fail to send you when finish’d. (Southampton MSS)

He finally sent Derham his 1708 register, with apologies for its lateness and incompleteness, on 2 April 1709. Derham replied on 12 April, with detailed queries about Samuel’s methods of recording and measuring rainfall, and about the size and bore of his thermometer. Unfortunately Samuel Molyneux’s register arrived just too late to be included in Derham’s published contribution to Philosophical Transactions Vol. 26, giving tables for Upminster, Zurich and Ksa, and seems never to have been published subsequently.

Samuel evidently continued his weather observations after he settled in England in 1712. The private library of the Marquess of Bute, in Scotland, has preserved a volume of his registers with records from 1708-1733 and a further six volumes attri- buted to him which cover the period 1716-1722. These have proved of some value to modem research: the late Gordon Manley found them of use in his study of Central Efigland temperatures (Manley, 1974).

WHAT BECAME OF THE FIRST DUBLIN WEATHER OBSERVATIONS?

The sale catalogue of Samuel Molyneux’s Iibrary and instrument collection (Anon. 1730). printed in London after his death, includes the following items: ‘A barometer and thermometer, in a large case, made by Hauksby’ and ‘Six volumes of observations, made by Mr Molyneux by them, in manuscript’; also ‘A large folio of misc. observations of the weather’ and ‘A parcel of paper containing observations of the weather’.

Harvard University now has the auctioneer’s annotated copy of the catalogue. We learn from this that a Scots peer, Lord Ilay, 3rd Duke of Argyll, bought the six volumes for two guineas and the single volume for nine shillings. The parcel was sold to an unnamed buyer for half-a-crown. Lord Ilay’s sister was married to the second Earl of Bute, and it seems highly probable that the seven volumes purchased by Lord Ilay are the ones now in the library at Bute. If that is the case Lord Ilay’s purchase did not include any of the earlier registers made by William Molyneux and St George Ashe: we still do not know if these have survived.

Copies may have been held once at the Royal Society, but are not there now. It is known that the Society’s custodians destroyed original registers in their care a few years after publication of their summaries. Registers made by Derham and Locke were destroyed: the Dublin diaries would hardly have fared better. Harries (1924) has complained that ‘it looks as if we have thus been deprived of series of records for at least the years 1684 to 1705, a period of 22 years, by the best observers of those days’.

Another approach to the missing records, suggested by Mr F. E. Dixon in a recent address to the Irish Meteorological Society, could be through the private papers of St George Ashe. Ashe was Jonathan Swift’s college tutor and lifelong friend and it was widely believed that Swift was married secretly by Ashe in 1716. There is still a possibility that Swift scholars might come across Ashe’s weather register in their search for papers throwing light on Swift’s marriage. On the other hand Ashe may well have handed it over to Samuel Molyneux. Samuel wrote to him on 27 November 1707 asking him ‘to look out for what books or papers your Lordships kind patronage of the old Society may possibly have left in your possession’. Ashe, then Bishop of Clogher, replied on 30 November to say that he was returning the first journal book and promising to search for any other papers belonging to the Society.

I end with an appeal to readers of Weather. These registers containing Ireland’s

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first scientific weather records may be lying obscurely in some library, or stored with somebody’s family papers. If any readers have knowledge of them, or can provide clues which might lead to their discovery, please can they get in touch with me? The carefully kept records of these early observers could still make a valuable contribution to the climatological history of Dublin. It would be wonderful if, after three hundred years, they could be rescued from oblivion.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to the following for their help or advice: the Bodleian Library, Oxford, for permission to reproduce and quote from the May 1684 Dublin weather register; Southampton City Archives for permission to quote from an unpublished letter-book of Samuel Molyneux; the Houghton Library, Harvard University for use made of the manuscript annotations in Samuel Molyneux’s library sale catalogue; the Most Hon. the Marquess of Bute and his archivist Miss Catherine Armet; Dr Peter Anderson and Mr James Galbraith of the National Register of Archives (Scotland); Dr P. H. Kelly of the Dept. of Modern History, Trinity College, Dublin and Miss Mary Pollard of Trinity College Library; Mr Peter Jones of the British Library Dept. of Manuscripts; the Director, Irish Meteorological Service, for permission to publish this article.

REFERENCES

Anonymous (1730) A catalogue of the library of the Honble. Samuel Molyneux, de- ceas’d . . . with several curious manuscripts, and all his mathematical, optical, and mechanical instruments. London

Frisinger, H. H. (1977) The history of meteorology: to 1800. Science History Publica- tions, New York

Gunther, R. T. (1939) Early science in Oxford, 12. Oxford Historical Society, Oxford Harries, H. (1924) Fate of old weather records. Met. Mag., 59, pp. 183-184 Hoppen, K. T. (1970) The common scientist in the seventeenth century. A study of the

Dublin Philosophical Society 1683-1 708. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London Manley, G. (1974) Central England temperatures: monthly means 1659 to 1973.

Quart. J. R. Met. SOC., 100, pp. 389-405 Simms, J. G. (1982) William Molyneux of Dublin 26561698, Ed by P. H. Kelly. Irish

Academic Press, Dublin Southampton MSS MS. D/M 1/2 (letter-book of Samuel Molyneux, 1707-1709).

Southampton Corporation Archives, Southampton (copy in National Library of Ireland, microfilm p. 1586)

[Wilde, Sir W.] (1841) Gallery of illustrious Irishmen, no. XIII: Sir Thomas Molyneux, bart., M.D., F.R.S. Dublin University Magazine, 18, pp. 305-327, 470-490,604-619,744-764 (published anonymously)

THE METEOROLOGICAL CALENDAR 1984

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