Note 15 — Chapter I

The nomenclature of meteorology is vague and sometimes equivocal. Not long since, it was suspected that the observers reporting to a scientific institution did not agree in their understanding of the mode of expressing the direction of the wind prescribed by their instructions. It was found, upon inquiry, that very many of them used the names of the compass-points to indicate the quarter from which the wind blew, while others employed them to signify the quarter toward which the atmospheric currents were moving. In some instances, the observers were no longer within the reach of inquiry, and of course their tables of the wind were of no value.

"Winds," says Mrs. Somerville, "are named from the points whence they blow, currents exactly the reverse. An easterly wind comes from the east; whereas an easterly current comes from the west, and flows toward the east."—Physical Geography, p. 229.

There is no philological ground for this distinction, and it probably originated in a confusion of the terminations -wardly and -erly, both of which are modern. The root of the former ending implies the direction to or to-ward which motion is supposed. It corresponds to, and is probably allied with, the Latin versus. The termination -erly is a corruption or softening of -ernly, easterly for easternly, and many authors of the seventeenth century so write it. In Hakluyt (i, p. 2), easterly is applied to place, "easterly bounds," and means eastern. In a passage in Drayton, "easterly winds" must mean winds from the east; but the same author, in speaking of nations, uses northerly for northern. Hakewell says: "The sonne cannot goe more southernely from vs, nor come more northernely towards vs." Holland, in his translation of Pliny, referring to the moon has: "When shee is northerly," and "shee is gone southerly." Richardson, to whom I am indebted for the above citations, quotes a passage from Dampier where westerly is applied to the wind, but the context does not determine the direction. The only example of the termination in -wardly given by this lexicographer is from Donne, where it means toward the west.

Shakspeare, in Hamlet (v. ii), uses northerly wind for wind from the north. Milton does not employ either of these terminations, nor were they known to the Anglo-Saxons, who, however, had adjectives of direction in -an or -en, -ern and -weard, the last always meaning the point toward which motion is supposed, the others that from which it proceeds.

We use an east wind, an eastern wind, and an easterly wind, to signify the same thing. The two former expressions are old, and constant in meaning; the last is recent, superfluous, and equivocal. See Appendix, No. 2.