CIRROCUMULUS.-SONDER-CLOUD

Is an aqueous vapour, consisting of extensive beds of small well-defined orbicular clouds, in horizontal opposition, but at the same time lying quite asunder; hence the appellation of sonder, or separate from one another. Few combinations are more pleasing to the eye: they have been compared to a flock of sheep at rest, and are thus elegantly alluded to by the author of Ellen Fitzarthur :

"Unclouded was the deep serene

Of heav'n's dark azure-save were seen
Around the moon, soft fleeces roll'd,
Bright with the liv'ry of their queen,
The snowy flocks of Cynthia's fold.
One might believe on such a night,

Good angels choose that silv'ry car,
To watch, with looks of heav'nly light,

Their mortal charge, on earth's pale star."

The sondercloud is noticed as indicative, in summer, of an increase of temperature; but I have uniformly observed, that it then precedes rain or wind; while, in winter, it announces the breaking up of a frost, succeeded by wet or foggy weather.

CIRROSTRATUS.-WANE-CLOUD.

We generally notice this kind of cloud as the harbinger of rain or snow. It is distinguished by

its flatness, and great extension, in proportion to its height—a characteristic it invariably preserves under every modification: whether disposed in wavy bars, or streaks, in close horizontal opposition, generally blended in the middle, but distinct towards the edges, and indicative of wet; whether consisting of small rows of little curved clouds, that uniformly precede stormy weather, and which appear like a long streak, thick in the middle, and wasting away at its edges; or whether stretched across the heavens in an extensive and shallow form, an appearance which it generally assumes in the evening and at night. Those peculiar refractions of the solar and lunar rays, called halos and mocksuns, usually appear in this cloud. We also notice with the poet of the Georgics,

"That when the moon appears, if then she shrouds

Her silver crescent in these warning clouds,

She bodes a tempest in the raging main,

And brews for fields impetuous floods of rain."

In the morning, too, if a wane-cloud is above, or across the sun, there is always rain before the evening:

"For if he rise unwilling to his race,

Clouds on his brow, and lines across his face ;
Or if through mists he shoots his sullen beams,
Frugal of light, in loose and struggling streams :
Suspect a drizzling day, with southern rain,
Hurtful to fruits, and flocks, and promis'd grain."