1918] on The Spinning-Top in Harness 295 



navigation, how to keep off Africa, l^efore he sets sails on his raft 

 from Gibraltar : — 



" Never to let the Bear take a bath — 

 He alone should be unsharing of the baths of Ocean," 



not setting below the horizon any star of him. To-day these instruc- 

 tions would land Ulysses well ashore, some 600 miles on Africa. 

 Ulysses could take his latitude with a piece of string, one end held 

 up to the pole, and sliding the other fingers to cover some well- 

 known star, sweeping the hand round to see if the star would graze 

 the horizon, in which case the polar distance of the star is equal to 

 the latitude. Two such observations on different stars would fix his 

 position, on Sumner's method, provided he had a chart ; and Lord 

 Kelvin amused himself on his yacht in testing the primitive methods 

 of Ulysses and the old Greek navigator against the modern instru- 

 ments of observation, sextant and chronometer, with Nautical 

 Almanack. 



The Maxwell top may represent our earth and its precession — 

 called precession because the seasons come up to meet the sun earlier, 

 about twenty minutes in the year, which makes the 26,000 years for all 

 way round. In the ancient tradition there was formerly no obliquity 

 of the ecliptic, and the year was one perpetual spring. But after the 

 Fall of Man, in the Greek legendary astronomical theory which 

 Milton has thrown into verse in "Paradise Lost" : — 



" Some say he bid his angels turn askance 

 The poles of earth, twice ten degrees and more. 

 From the sun's axle. They with labour pushed 

 Oblique the centric globe." 



Xo particular labour would be required, we see, if only the polar 

 axis projected, as the angel could move the poles by holding his 

 finger against the axle and letting it run up. A reverse action at 

 the millennium will restore eternal spring. 



[G.G.] 



