72 



the Aneroid Barometer, and read an extract from Sturm's 

 Collegium Experimentale, published at Nuremburg, in 1676, 

 wherein the author enlarges upon a plan recently proposed by 

 a Jesuit named Francisco Land, for enabbng men to navi- 

 gate the air. This, which may be considered as the first essay 

 towards the construction of balloons, was to be effected in the 

 following manner. After premising that air was a body pos- 

 sessing weight, and attempting to define its actual weight, the 

 writer proposes to construct a large globe with copper, of so 

 thin a substance that when the air should be taken out of it, 

 (in other words, when a vacuum should be produced,) the 

 globe would float in the atmosphere, and support a boat with 

 sails, &c, attached to it. In order to produce tins vacuum, 

 the globe was to be screwed on the top of a vertical tube 

 thirty-five feet long, and the whole was to be filled with water. 

 A little before this period, the pneumatic discoveries of Tor- 

 ricelli had shown, that in such a tube the water would subside 

 until a column of thirty-two feet was left with a vacuum at the 

 top. A stop-cock being then turned, the copper ball might be 

 removed and floated off into the aerial regions. One material 

 difficulty however escaped the attention of the ingenious 

 scavant, namely, that a ball made up of metal so attenuated 

 would certainly collapse by the pressure of the ambient air, 

 long before a complete vacuum could be formed. Sturm gives 

 an engraving of the whole apparatus scudding with expanded 

 sails, and directed by three passengers through the atmos- 

 phere. Francisco Land's work was printed at Brescia, and 

 entitled Prodromo dell' Arte Masire. 



Mr. W. J. Lamport then read a Paper on " the Education 

 of the Mercantile Classes," of which the following is an 

 abstract: — 



The often agitated question of the relation of classical 

 studies to the education of those destined for commercial pur- 

 suits forms part of the larger question, whether there needs be 



