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There was practically no wind, and the Elsinore, just maintaining steerage way by means of intermittent fans of air from the north, floundered exasperatingly in a huge glassy swell that rolled up as an echo from some blown-out storm to the south. Ahead of us, arising with the swiftness of magic, was a dense slate-blackness. I suppose it was cloud-formation, but it bore no semblance to clouds.
To this end he studied the changing phenomena of the sky for many years, until he was able so to read its play of features that it disclosed to him the archetypal forms of cloud-formation underlying all change. Cumulus: Convex or conical heaps, increasing upwards from a horizontal base. Stratus: A widely extended, continuous, horizontal sheet, increasing from below. Nimbus: The rain cloud.
Among the three formations of cirrus, cumulus and stratus, the cumulus has a special place as representing in the most actual sense what is meant by the term 'cloud'. The reason is that both cirrus and stratus have characteristics which in one or the other direction tend away from the pure realm of atmospheric cloud-formation.
In discussing Howard's discovery of the stages of cloud-formation we found something lacking, for it was clear that the three stages of cloud proper stratus, cumulus and cirrus have a symmetry which is disturbed by the addition of a fourth stage, represented by the nimbus. This showed that there was need for a fifth stage, at the top of the series, to establish a balanced polarity.
Obviously, for a science based on mere onlooking there is no objection to breaking up an established system into ever more subdivisions in order to keep it in line with an increasingly detailed outer observation. This, indeed, modern meteorology has done with Howard's system, with the result that, to-day, the total scale is made up of ten different stages of cloud-formation.
What is it but Ruskin's 'Stand by Form against Force' that Howard is here saying in his own way? Before entering into a further description of Howard's system, we must make clear why we disregard the fact that modern meteorology has developed the scale of cloud-formation far beyond Howard, and why we shall keep to his own fourfold scale.
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