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Sarasota News Leader January 25, 2013 Page 78 Even the absence of clouds makes a statement, es- Luke Howard, the Englishman who "named" the pecially on evenings when a full moon rises clear clouds, grew up in the late 1700s in a house with and unhampered over city streets and countryside. a huge plate glass window. As a boy he sat for All four elements make up clouds: Earth is rep- hours gazing out across London's rooftops at the resented by bits of hair and leaves, mineral dust, skies. Years of observation noting the differences in spores and bacteria; air is the transporter; fire is the clouds grew into study when he was an adult, and result of lightning strikes; and then there is water. eventually he linked the differences to changes in the weather. At a meeting of the Askesian Society in Despite their amorphous nature, clouds have been 1802, he presented his paper, "On the Modifications organized into species with three main classifications: cirrus, the highest, with a parallel threadlike of Clouds," which grouped clouds into species with formation; cumulus — cauliflower-like domes that Latin names based on the Linnaean system being grow up from a horizontal base; and stratus, a con- formulated at that time. It took the scientific community by storm. His nomenclature — cirrus, cutinuous cloud that grows from top to bottom.