FINDING THE WAT AT SEA. 727 



him in making this observation exactly. She obeyed his instructions, 

 and, the moment the shadow reached its highest angle and showed the 

 minutest symptom of declension, she said ' Now,' and Hazel called out 

 in a loud voice " (why did he do that ?) " ' Noon ! ' ' And forty nine 

 minutes past eight at Sydney,' said Helen, holding out her chronome- 

 ter ; for she had been sharp enough to get it ready of her own accord. 

 Hazel looked at her and at the watch with amazement and incredulity. 

 ' What?' said he. ' Impossible ! You can't have kept Sydney time 

 all this while.' ' And pray why not ? ' said Helen. ' Have you forgot- 

 ten that some one praised me for keeping Sydney time ? it helped you 

 somehow or other to know where we were.' " After some discussion, 

 in which she shows how natural it was that she should have wound up 

 her watch every night, even when " neither of them expected to see 

 the morning," she asks to be praised. " ' Praised ! ' cried Hazel, ex- 

 citedly, ' worshipped, you mean. Why, we have got the longitude by 

 means of your chronometer. It is wonderful ! It is providential. It 

 is the finger of Heaven. Pen and ink, and let me work it out.' " He 

 was " soon busy calculating the longitude of Godsend Island." What 

 follows is even more curiously erroneous. " ' There,' said he. ' Now, 

 the latitude I must guess at by certain combinations. In the first 

 place the slight variation in the length of the days. Then I must try 

 and make a rough calculation of the sun's parallax.' " (It would have 

 been equally to the purpose to have calculated how many cows' tails 

 would reach to the moon.) " ' And then my botany will help me a 

 little ; spices furnish a clew ; there are one or two that will not grow 

 outside the tropic,' " and so on. He finally sets the latitude between 

 the 26th and 33d parallels, a range of nearly 500 miles. The longi- 

 tude, however, which is much more closely assigned, is wrong alto- 

 gether, being set at 103^- west, as the rest of the story requires. For 

 Godsend Island is within not many days' sail of Valparaiso. The 

 mistake has probably arisen from setting Sydney in west longitude in- 

 stead of east longitude, 151 14' ; for the difference of time, 3h. 11m., 

 corresponds within a minute to the difference of longitude between 

 151 14' west and 103| west. 



Mere mistakes of calculation, however, matter little in such cases. 

 They do not affect the interest of a story even in such extreme cases 

 as in " Ivanhoe," where a full century is dropped in such sort that 

 one of Richard I.'s knights holds converse with a contemporary of 

 the Conqueror, who, if my memory deceives me not, was Cceur de 

 Lion's great-great-grandfather. It is a pity, however, that a nov- 

 elist or indeed any writer should attempt to sketch scientific methods 

 with which he is not familiar. No discredit can attach to any per- 

 son, not an astronomer, who does not understand the astronomical 

 processes for determining latitude and longitude, any more than to 

 one who, not being a lawyer, is unfamiliar with the rules of convey- 

 ancing. But, when an attempt is made by a writer of fiction to give 



