After a severe storm one is tempted to conclude, like Hamlet, that "it is not, and it cannot come to, good".
But this is not always so. Now and then even the worst of weather disasters may have some beneficial outcome.
The infamous October storm in Britain in 1987, for example, resulted in such devastation in the south of England that the resulting inquiry recommended a substantial investment in computer equipment for the Meteorological Office, so that it might be better able to forecast such events in future - and it was.
Going much further, the Royal Charter storm of November 1859, called after the steamship of that name which sank with the loss of many lives, resulted in the introduction of coastal storm warnings, the precursors of today's shipping forecasts.
And 120 years ago today there occurred the Tay Bridge disaster, which raised questions about the relative merits of the instruments available at the time for measuring wind-strength.
The River Tay in Scotland descends eastwards from the Grampian mountains to find the open waters near Dundee.
The first railway bridge to span the waterway was completed in 1877 and carried two railway lines across the river in a gentle curve that was almost two miles long.
On December 28th, 1879, a violent storm occurred: one of the Tay Bridge's 74 spans collapsed in the high winds under a full train, and 75 people lost their lives in what was then the greatest railway disaster ever known.
The collapse of the Tay Bridge after so short a time suggested that the potential wind-loading in storms had been grossly underestimated.
The most widely used instrument at the time for measuring wind was the still familiar Robinson cup anemometer, but scientists of the day disagreed about its accuracy.
Many were convinced that it over-registered the average speed of the wind and under-registered the gusts - because of the mechanical lag associated with the momentum of the whirling cups.
It was feared that the available statistics on high winds were therefore unreliable, with obvious consequences for the construction of wind-sensitive structures like the Tay Bridge.
Following the inevitable tribunal, one of the foremost meteorologists of the day, W.H. Dines, was given the magnificent sum of £6 to investigate the question, and he diligently did so in the back garden of his house in Hersham.
His experiments confirmed the doubts which had been expressed about the errors inherent in the Robinson design, and led to the development of the Dines pressure tube anemometer, which became the standard wind-measuring instrument for more than three-quarters of a century.