Investigations in Currency and Finance Volume 4 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1884 Excerpt: ...which have comparatively little foreign trade. Even when they are affected, it may be indirectly through sympathy with the great commercial nations. There is nothing in this theory inconsistent with the fact that crises and panics arise from other than meteorological causes. There was a great political crisis in 1798, a great commercial collapse in 1810-11 (which will not fall into the decennial series); there was a Stock Exchange panic in 1859; and the great American collapse of 1873-75. There have also been several minor disturbances in the money market, such as those of February, 1861, May and September, 1864, August, 1870, November, 1873; but they are probably due to exceptional and disconnected reasons. Moreover, they have seldom, if ever, the intensity, profundity, and wide extension of the true decennial crises. If it were permitted to draw any immediate conclusion from these speculations, I should point to the necessity of at once undertaking direct observations upon the varying power and character of the sun's rays. There are hundreds of meteorological observatories registering, at every hour of the day and night, the most minute facts about the atmosphere; but that very influence, upon which all atmospheric changes ultimately depend, the solar radiation, is not, I believe, measured in any one of them, at least in the proper mauner. Ponillet showed long ago (1838) how the absolute heating power of the sun's rays might be accurately determined by his Pyrheliometer. This instrument, and the results which ho drew from its use, are fully described.in his "Elements do Physique Experimental et de Meteorologie," livre 8i, chap. i. section 285. But I have never heard that his experiments have been repeated, except so far as this may have been don...