The Rev. Henry Roe, of Poyntington Rectory, Sherborne, has disclosed
a new weather theory, in a letter to last Satur- day's Times. His notion is that our summers are good or bad in cycles of three years at a time, and that every year which,
being divisible by three, is also an odd number, is the centre of a good cycle, but that every even-multiple of three is the centre of a bad cycle. .As a matter of fact, however, we do not think that a cycle of three years of the same sort of summer, common. Nor do we believe that 1871,1872, and 1873, which ought to have been a bad cycle, did, as a matter of fact, give us three bad harvests. In 1872 certainly the heat of June and July was excessive, and yet it should have been, by this rule, the centre year of the evil cycle. If there were indeed any truth in this guess, the eleven years' weather cycle, due to the periodic time of the sun-spots, could by no possibility have anything in it, for no conjuring could 'make an eleven years' cycle and a three years' cycle coincide in their results. As a matter of fact, however, neither of these guesses gives us results in accordance with ex- perience. Nothing could be less like the summer of 1868 than the present summer, and yet the disciples of the eleven years' cycle assured us that we should have this year a summer of the 1868 pattern.
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