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HARDWICKKS SCIENCE-GOSSIP. 



expected to rise in price. Locusts multiplied in 1812 

 and 13, 1822, 1834, 1843 and 44, 1865, 1868 and 69, 

 1S77-79, that is at the period of fewest sun-spots, 

 a rule that appears to hold good for the entire 

 Northern Hemisphere. I once endeavoured to ascer- 

 tain the destructive species, but could meet with no 

 corresponding enthusiasm in the matter. According 

 to Toaldo, the price of wheat in Lombardy was 

 highest in 1685, 1690, 1693, 1696 and 1700, 1709 and 

 1715, 1722, 1729, 1735, 1739, 1743 and 47, 1756, 

 1 759 and 63, 1766, 1773, 1778; dates which will serve 

 to show how a general law locally varies. 



Horace hears the winter breakers pounding the sea 

 cliffs, and scolds Leuconoe for trying the Babylonian 

 numbers, and chaunteclere has been known to twit 

 Madame Pertelote as being at the root of the matter. 

 But when the air grows soft on the springing corn we 

 need no longer sigh over the hidden fate of Romulus, 

 Tullus, or Ancus, for these dire numbers stand in the 

 margin of everybody's Bible, could anyone suggest 

 how to consult them to any profit. Certainly if we 

 commence B.C. 588 and add eight and three alter- 

 nately we may calculate out a very perfect table of 

 destiny for the kings of Judah and Israel, so that like 

 some warning prophet we might have loomed on each 

 in turn and propounded the alternative of a seven 

 years' war, a famine, a distemper or an abdication ; 

 or we may if desirable begin B.C. 1014 and compute 

 by adding the sevens, but in this case the dates will 

 be less nearly approximated. Proceeding by either 

 method, we infallibly arrive at one or the other of the 

 cardinal dates' of the Prophet Daniel employed in 

 astrological predictions, and continuing down to our 

 own times, it will become self evident that the'Jubilee 

 dates of the Bible, taken as they stand, represent the 

 mean series of most and fewest sun-spots. Possessing 

 such a table, we shall awake to the same dark shadows 

 playing everywhere over the open page of history, 

 notably embodied in the rush of the barbarians over 

 the rustling corn-lands of the west at the decline of the 

 Roman Empire, a battle-cry of famine, nowhere so 

 photophoned as in the burden of the valley of 

 Jehosaphat, when the earthquake roars and the sun 

 dons its noontide sackcloth ; ' Hamonim, harmonim, 

 bemek hacharutz,' whose refrain as the moon arises 

 red we catch in ' canes ululare per umbram.' 



' We are seven,' said Wordsworth's smart school- 

 girl : they are seven, was then the dark song of fate ; 

 the child sneezed its seven times. But there must have 

 been room for a range of opinion, for on one of the 

 Assyrian signets the king stands before his burning 

 tree crowned with the seven-rayed sun, which has the 

 adjunct of eight pomegranate-like side cressets, and 

 so very confident is he in his arrangement, that he 

 holds what looks like a bell-rope communicating 

 with the Deity, in apparent disregard of a priest 

 opposite, who tugs just such another ; the reverse is 

 seen in the resourceless monarch who weeps over the 

 face of the prophet exclaiming, ' O thou chariot of 



Israel and horseman thereof.' Two arrows fly tO' 

 glitter in the sun, five or six blows are struck on the 

 land of milk and honey, though the medieval al- 

 chemist would have transmuted all to gold from 

 spirits four and bodies seven, and Josephus thinks 

 that the arrows were necessarily three. Is this thy 

 place, sad city, this thy throne, where the wild desert 

 rears its craggy stone, while suns unblest their angry 

 lustre fling? we feel ever ready to exclaim, inured to 

 the smooth, uneven, star and planetarj' stops of a 

 brilliant millennium, that warms in the sun, refreshes 

 in the breeze, glows in the stars, and blossoms in the 

 trees ; though even in our green native lanes, far 

 remote from throne or senate, we do all unawares 

 encounter the white-winged angel as our destiny, in 

 the shape of a barking cough, bronchitis, rack of 

 nerve or muscle, prelusive of the end. On the 29th.' 

 of April, 1882, it was truly painful to behold the seared, 

 and blooming cheeks of nature, the greenwood 

 scorched and withered on its southern aspect, as 

 though scathed with flames, or languishing in the 

 breath of autumn that benumbs the bumbles on the 

 thistle tufts. The aristocratic elms stood like ragged- 

 foresters rayed half green, half umber ; the horse 

 chestnuts and hawthorns showed piteously their white- 

 china flowers from among sienna leaves ; the oaks ia 

 flower and leaf looked as though hung on the sunnier 

 side with charred paper, leprous with an orange 

 fungus ; the limes and sycamores had their leaves 

 shrivelled. In the neighbourhood of the tropics these 

 stormy winds whirl the dust-storms over hot sands, in 

 their furnace breath the top of Carmel withers, there: 

 is a galloping in the trees, the locusts teem, and the- 

 five-and-twenty prophets come forth to gaze at the 

 sun arising on Olivet, and exclaim, 'This is the 

 cauldron and we are the flesh.' The Indian statistics- 

 show that behind a drought does not necessarily stalk 

 a famine, but Mallet's tables render it perfectly clear 

 that eruptions and earthquakes occur in spells at the 

 epochs of most and fewest sun spots. In vain was- 

 Catherine mangled and borne through mid-air to saint 

 a Sinai that does not glow, for the gentler sex remain 

 of opinion that a blazing mountain admonishes the 

 earth ; Proserpina has left us a nosegay, and Agatha 

 her veil, such were ever the resort of the prophet and 

 the seer in evil times. According to an author 

 quoted, Julianus states that in the reign of king 

 Theodoric, when his wife's grandfather was returning 

 by sea from Sicily to Italy, the ship stopped at one ot 

 the Lipari islands, where a hermit told him that 

 Theodoric was dead. The hermit knew the fact from 

 having seen the king, on the previous day, dragged 

 between John the Pope and Symmachus the patrician^ 

 ungirt, unshod, and in chains, and thrown into the 

 crater of the volcano. The kinsman of Julianus made 

 a note of the day, and found, on his arrival in Italy, 

 that Theodoric had died at the time of the appearance 

 described by the hermit. It may be remarked that 

 John and Symmachus had been put to death by 



