PREFACE

THE translation of the Meteorologica treatise on atmospheric phenomena which follows is the work of a scholar whose death was one of the severest losses which the University of Oxford suffered through the Great War. Erwin Wentworth Webster came up to Wadham as a Scholar in 1898. Besides taking First Classes of unusual brilliance in Classical Moderations and in Literae Humaniores the study of classics, philosophy, and history, he won the Taylorian Scholarship for German and the John Locke Scholarship for Mental Philosophy. Shortly after taking his degree he was elected to a Fellowship of his own College, and undertook tutorial work in philosophy, to which he devoted himself with immense energy and great success. He was, in addition to his general philosophical interests, a keen student of Aristotle, and one of the most faithful members of the Aristotelian Society which met week after week under the presidency first of Professor Bywater and then of Professor J. A. Smith, and at which many of us younger men learned from these masters of the art how to tackle the interpretation of the Greek philosophers. He took up the Meteorologica fairly early as a special study. His notes, apart from the translation, are unfortunately not in a suitable form for publication, but show how wide and how deep was his study of all that bore on the subject, and how valuable a contribution he would have made, if he had been spared, to our knowledge of it. But things were otherwise ordained. On the outbreak of war he offered himself for service in the Royal Flying Corps. An accident during his training compelled him to give up this prospect; and he thereupon applied for and received a commission in the 13th King's Royal Rifle Corps, in which he later became a Captain. He went to