6 4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the prevailing habits of American family life, it is becoming with 

 us every day more and more impossible to obtain from pupils the 

 proper amount of work, associated with the proper regime as to 

 exercise and recreation— and diet even— so long as they remain 

 under the parental roof. Such a school could not fail to soon 

 stand as an exponent of the development of a higher, better, and 

 truer secondary education. It would be a model for the encour- 

 agement of other schools of a similar character that would soon 

 come into existence, and it would make its impress upon the pro- 

 grammes of public secondary schools. Any man of wealth who is 

 animated by the ambition of sending his name down to a grateful 

 posterity linked with a noble educational benefaction, could not 

 to-day find a more deserving field for the investment of a spare 

 million than in the founding of such a school. To the colleges, to 

 the universities, to the schools of industrial science, would the 

 money thus invested be of as great benefit as if donated directly 

 to them. For, as the gentle rain sinking far down into the earth 

 among the rootlets refreshes and revives the mature tree, so would 

 a preparatory school of this character give to the higher institu- 

 tions of learning strength at a vital point where it is peculiarly 

 needed. 



-♦•♦«•- 



SCENES ON THE PLANET MERCURY.* 



Br G. V. SCHIAPAEELLI, 



OF THE OBSEBVATOBY OF MILAN, ITALY. 



"VTO one of the planets that were known in ancient times is so 

 -i-N difficult to observe as Mercury, and none presents so many 

 obstacles to the study of its orbit and physical constitution. As 

 to its orbit, Mercury is the only planet the course of which seems 

 even now to have partly cut loose from the laws of universal 

 gravitation, and the theory of which, although well built up by 

 the genius of Leverrier, is still in considerable disagreement with 

 the observations. The little we know of its physical construc- 

 tion is derived from the observations made a hundred years ago by 

 Schroeter at Lilienthal. A telescopic examination of this planet 

 is really a difficult affair. Describing a small orbit around the 

 sun, Mercury is never seen so far from it as to make it possible 

 to observe it, in temperate latitudes, in the full darkness of night. 

 It is rarely possible to observe it in the twilight before sunrise 

 or after sunset ; it being then so near the horizon and so affected 

 by the agitations and unequal refractions of the lower strata of 

 the atmosphere that it usually presents itself to the telescope with 



* Address before the Royal Academy Dei Lincei, December 8, 1889. 



