Wragge’s lecture style was grandiose, a rhetorical squall, a twister that gathered ideas from every discipline his mind roamed over. An observer of a 1902 lecture by Wragge described the meteorologist as embodying the very weather systems under his observation: “His voice comes in gusts, and dies away in murmurs; it occasionally travels with the speed of a small tornado”. The lecture prospectus for the Wragge Institute and Gardens, which opened at Birkenhead, Auckland, in 1916, offers a glimpse of the encyclopedic ambitions harbored by this Englishman, who sought to harmonize the farthest reaches of space with the inner depths of the soul: “astronomy, geography, travel, meteorology, natural history, radium, etc. besides lectures on Oriental and Indian philosophy, studies in the psychic and occult realms, practical gardening, and evolution of the beautiful and other subjects”.
