714 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



vacation tour ; the reply was that he could not be spared from the work 

 of teaching the younger children. 



The " Autobiography " gives a full account of his acquaintances 

 among the young men resident at Cambridge, who afterward came to 

 London, including, besides Charles Austin, who was the means of intro- 

 ducing him, Macaulay, Hyde and Charles Villiers, Strutt (Lord Belper), 

 Romilly, etc. There is no mention of his having gone to Cambridge 

 in 1822, on a visit to Charles Austin. The contrast of his boyish fig- 

 ure, and thin voice, with his immense conversational power, left a deep 

 impression on the undergraduates of the time, notwithstanding their 

 being familiar with Macaulay and Austin. 



I alluded, in my last article on James Mill, to the persistent attempts 

 of Professor Townshend, of Cambridge, to get John entered there. Here 

 are two sentences from a letter dated March 29, 1823, two months before 

 he entered the India House : " I again entreat you to permit me to 

 write to the tutor at Trinity to enter your son's name at that noble 

 college. Whatever you may wish his eventual destiny ±o be, his pros- 

 perity in life can not be retarded, but must on the contrary be increased 

 by making an acquaintance at an English University with his Patrician 

 contemporaries." Whether it would have been possible to induce his 

 father to send him to Cambridge, I very much doubt. I suspect that, 

 of the two, the son would have been the more intractable on the matter 

 of subscription to the Articles. Ten years later, it was an open question 

 in the house whether his brother Henry should be sent to Cambridge. 



♦»» 



THE INTRA-MEKCUKIAL PLANETS.* 



By CAMILLE FLAMMAEION. 



A GOOD deal of noise was made a few months ago about a dis- 

 covery that an American astronomer believed he had made during 

 the recent solar eclipse of July 29, 1878. At the moment of totality, 

 while the bright disk of the sun was completely hidden by the black disk 

 of the moon, and after the eye had become habituated to this sudden 

 darkness, the American astronomer made a search to find whether there 

 might not be, in the vicinity of the sun, a planet answering to the the- 

 oretical planet Vulcan, whose existence was announced by Leverrier 

 after he had mathematically analyzed the motion of Mercury. As every 

 one knows, during total eclipses of the sun, our atmosphere being no 

 longer illumined, night comes on as though at the bidding of an en- 

 chanter, and the brighter stars make their appearance in the heavens. 

 It is this sudden metamorphosis of nature that most forcibly impresses 



* Translated from " La Nature " by J. Fitzgerald, A. M. 



