Before 1803 the clouds had no names — only the shapes poets saw in them. Luke Howard (1772–1864), an industrial chemist by trade and an amateur meteorologist by calling, changed that. Drawing on weather journals he had kept since the age of ten, his Essay on the Modification of Clouds made the case that the sky has stable, distinguishable forms.
The Latin names he coined are still the ones we use:
- Cirrus — from the Latin for a wisp of hair
- Cumulus — “convex or conical heaps”
- Stratus — a “horizontal sheet”
- Nimbus — the rain cloud
The argument was not obvious at the time. Most observers assumed no reliable types could be read off a constantly shifting sky. Howard’s rejoinder: if clouds were merely condensation drifting through atmospheric masses, “then indeed might the study of them be deemed an useless pursuit of shadows.” But the principal modifications, he insisted, are as distinguishable from each other “as a Tree from a Hill, or the latter from a Lake.”
That clarity came with a condition, and he never stopped repeating it. The 1865 third edition warns “the young student of Meteorology” against leaning on the engraved plates — Howard’s collaborator, the painter Edward Kennion, could render hulking nimbus and wispy cirrus, but not the sky’s actual behaviour. “A correct comprehension of the subject,” Howard writes, “is only to be obtained by a habitual observation of Nature.”
His own practice was Romantic in exactly this sense. Alongside the taxonomy he produced watercolour cloud studies (ca. 1803–11, now in the Science Museum collection) — beige, blue and pale-grey splashes that catch shifting light, sketched on the road between London and the Lake District. Naming the clouds did not close the sky off; it was one more way of paying attention.
The collection ends with Goethe, who did more than anyone to canonise Howard. The essay was translated into German in 1815, where it crystallised Goethe’s own sky studies; the two men corresponded, and Goethe wrote a poem in Howard’s honour that the 1865 edition reproduced untranslated. Its contrast is the point. Imagination still gets its lions and elephants and camel-necks in the vapour — but:
But Howard gives us with his clearer mind The gain of lessons new to all mankind; That which no hand can reach, no hand can clasp, He first has gain’d, first held with mental grasp. Defin’d the doubtful, fix’d its limit-line, And named it fitly. —Be the honour thine!
Goethe called his method zarte Empirie — delicate empiricism, an attentiveness that neither dissects nor merely gawps. It is a decent model for looking at anything: classify, name, and then keep going outside.