'The Transactions of the Bombay Geographical Society. From December 1854 to March 1856. (New Issue.) Edited by the Secretary. Volume XII.' [‎25] (44/258)

ON THE CYCLONE AT BOMBAY.
XXV
Bengal Government From c. 1758-1858, the East India Company's administration in Bengal. From 1773-1833, the most senior of the three subdivisions of India, also known as the Supreme Government of India. From 1858-1947, a subdivision of the British Raj. , and that in the Parliamentary return of Mr. Hume be
re-printed.
Paper. —On the late hurricane, with a list of the hurricanes in India
generally for the past century, with a particular account of those which have
prevailed in the Arabian sea namely, from the 1st to the 7th of November
1783; 1st to 7th of Nov. 1799 ; 8th of May 1819 ; 13th November 1827 ; 15th
June 1837 ; 31st October 1842 ; 19th April 1847; and 2nd November 1854.
A large collection of maps were exhibited. They were colored in illustra
tion of the meteorology of India. Rain maps for the S. W. and S. E. mon
soons. A series of maps illustrating storms of simultaneous occurrence, a
map of the hail-storms of India,—a series of the mapsof the hurricanes of
1842, 1847, and 1854, with diagrams of the barometer of eight of our
principal hurricanes. Dr. Buist addressed the meeting for about half an
hour, premising his lecture with a few observations on the climate of India,
and then commenced an exposition of the laws of rotatory hurricanes,
and shewed how valuable to navigators were the data furnished by the ob
servations which had been made of cyclones. The lecture was concluded
with a brief history of the principal storms which had passed over India
during the last two centuries.
Lecture IV.—.0« the Cyclone at Bombay, 2nd November 1854, with
the two nights previous thunderstorms. By Dr. George Buist.
My professional avocations as Editor of the Bombay Times compel me to
read or at all events to glance at, at least eight newspapers a day on an aver
age, through the year, or, including those from England, Malta, the Cape,
Australia, China and Singapore, which come in by dozens at a time,
perhaps not fewer than a thousand a month. It has always been my habit to
keep copious note-books, especially since I came to India; and from 1846
I have devoted a large volume of 300 or 400 pages annually, to notes on meteo
rological subjects alone—pasting into it in chronological order all the obser
vatory and other tabular returns, and all the notices pertaining to the weather
I could meet in with in the newspapers. Considering that there are
only some 8,000 Europeans in India in all, and that of these at least 3,000
are accumulated in numbers at the Presidencies and other large towns, or
cantonments, we have a little more than one for every 4,000 square miles of
the million and a quarter Hindustan alone contains ; and as of these but a
small number ever think of writing for the press an account of anything
they may have witnessed, however remarkable—a large proportion of our
lesser, and many of our more striking meteorological phenomena must,
pass unnotced or unrecorded altogether. The nemerous returns, not the less,
which do find their way before the world ought, on the mere principle of chances,
to afford a tolerably fair average type of the whole; and on this assump
tion 1 have proceeded. As most of the papers copy from their neighbours
anything very remarkable, when notices of the weather do once get into print,
they are not very likely to escape detection in some one of the fifteen or twen
ty periodical publications in which they are likely to be met.
On carrying out this patching process for some years, I observed that
while there were portions of my note-books where the leaves got all at once
covered with printed scraps and MS. notes of my own under some parti
cular date, there were others left comparatively blank , and that, moreover,