556 



NATURF 



June 



i<ji I 



was a pruUy piece of symbolism. Ihe icing rude on 

 horsebaclc, to find liis way barred by a coinpany of 

 girls holding a barrier consisting of a cord of crimson 

 silk. 'Ihey plied him with the question : Who are 

 you? Then, after an exhibition ot horsemanship, the 

 king severed the barrier with his sword. The priests 

 then intervened, anointed, crowned, and incensed him. 

 It was, no doubt, at the same period that Ptolemy 

 Philadelphus of Egypt reduced crowning to an 

 absurdity. At his coronation, Athenasus tells us, three 

 thousand two hundred crowns of gold were carried 

 in procession, and one of these was a hundred and 

 twenty feet in circumference. 



Our own ceremony is a wonderful mosaic of sur- 

 vivals. Its main features are the recognition of the 

 king by the people; the oath of good government; the 

 anointing; the delivery of the regalia; the imposition 

 of the crown ; the delivery of " the most valuable thing 

 that this world affords," the Bible; the enthroning; 

 the reception of homage. Among the regalia the anti- 

 quary may miss " the hand of justice " of the emperois 

 of the Holy Roman Empire. The most ancient 

 feature, the unction, of course, derives from Hebrew 

 ritual, as the crowning from Roman. The combina- 

 tion of the two marks the combination of spiritual 

 and temporal power, and is a curious echo of "primi- 

 tive " kingship, when the monarch possessed both mate- 

 rial authority and supernatural mana, and was both 

 president and priest. Unction in its evolution always 

 shows a connection with spiritual ideas ; the vehicle 

 is itself a source of life, and, when consecrated, in- 

 spires the recipient. But its ultimate origin is the use 

 of oil as part of the festal garb. At one end of the 

 scale we have the Australian medicine-man "singing" 

 a charm of power into a magic ointment ; at the other 

 Plato conceives the fancy that the Soul of the Universe 

 was impressed upon material nature by the Creator 

 as an unction in the form of a cross. 



To the student of man it is interesting to observe 

 that all these elements of the ceremony except the 

 " recognition," have only lost their original magical 

 import, and become symbolic, within the last eight or 

 nine hundred years. He may ask himself wliether 

 the imagination of the people really accepts unction 

 as expressive of modern thought and modern life ; 

 whether there is not too much " survival " in the whole 

 ceremony to enable it to retain any living meaning. 

 Dead forms, he may note, are ahvays dangerous. \i 

 we still possessed the art and craft of ceremony, new- 

 forms might be evolved. It is remarkable that the 

 whole essence of the ancient ritual not only does not 

 contain any recognition of the one great motive force 

 of modern civilisation, science, on which all progress, 

 all wealth, and even all existence increasingly depend, 

 but is actually a negation of it. 



A really living symbolism is to be found in the 

 "recognition " of the King by the people. This might 

 form the nucleus of a representative ceremonial 

 adequate to our times. Those present to "recognise" 

 would be representative of every factor that helps to 

 make the Empire, and in proportional numbers and 

 prominence. Other countries have realised this oppor- 

 tunity'. At Qyery great State function in Germany a 

 prominent place is assigned to the representatives of 

 pure and applied science; the German mind realises 

 that the wealth and well-being of the empire ulti- 

 rnatelv depend on science, and science alone. It is a 

 pity that those responsible for the organisation of our 

 ceremony sympathise so strongly with its archaic 

 elements that they have not secured an adequate re- 

 presentation of the depositaries of modern knowledge, 

 tho true palladium of people and of empire. 



A. E. Crawley. 

 NO. 2173. VOL. 86] 



AERIAL NAVIGATION AND MECHANU 



''pHE exigencies of modern aeronautics co 



A with the uncertainties attaching to at: 

 flit'^ht are slowly but gradually directmg attention . 

 the necessity of researches and original papers of 

 highly specialised character, dealing with air pressui • - 

 and the motions of bodies acted on by them. Ti • 

 question thus becomes imminent: Where should su'.. 

 investigations be published? 



Until now no attempt has been made to mn!:-- ■ 

 of journals and transactions of societies pui 

 physical papers, and articles full of formulae, di. 

 and tables have generally found their way inti 

 dicals of a semi-popular or practical character, c-. . - 

 to general aeronautical or engineering questions, li,' 

 result has not always been satisfactory, and it h - 

 often been a question as to whether the printing ■ 

 the formulai or the reproduction of the diagrams h 

 suffered the most. The insufficiency of the existi:^ 

 media for the publication, of theoretical articles ■ 

 aeronautics is, however, more clearly shown by askir- 

 the question : What is to be done with a manuscri; 

 of 100 foolscap pages filled from beginning to ei. ; 

 with long formulae or diagrams? Further, whatev. : 

 may be the drawbacks of the system of refereeing J 

 papers no doubt can exist as to the advantages of a 

 collection of memoirs, all of which have been subjected 

 to the judgment and criticism of external examiners. 



The Government Blue-books contain exactly the 

 kind of investigations to which these remarks apply, 

 and the hope may therefore be expressed that these 

 will in the future become a recognised medium for the 

 publication of lengthy investigations which have been 

 approved by the Government Committee. 



The " Report " for 1909-10 consists of (1) records 

 of experiments performed at the National Physical 

 Laboratory; (2) original papers by members of the 

 committee and others ; (3) abstracts of papers of a 

 scientific character dealing with aeronautical problems. 



Probably the features which possess the greatest 

 interest for the large majority of readers are the 

 abstracts and reports on the state of science with 

 regard to specified subjects. The thirty-five pages of 

 general abstracts do for aeronautical science what is 

 done for physics and electrical engineering by " Science 

 Abstracts." In order to make the collection more 

 complete the compilers have included papers published 

 some time ago; for example, abstract No. 8, deals with 

 Turnbull's experiments, which were published in The 

 Physical Review for 1907. 



Mr. F. J. Selby's special reports on the present state 

 of knowledge regfarding electrification of balloons and 

 on papers bv Ferber, Crocco. and Soreau, dealing with 

 equations of motion and stability considerations, form 

 a valuable contribution of a similar character. It is 

 interesting to notice that several stability conditions in 

 the papers referred to are defective, owing to the 



1 Report of the Advisory Committee for Aeronautics for the year iqo>- 

 1910. Pp. 191. (London: H.M. Stationerj- Office; Wyman and Sons, 

 Ltd. ; Edinburgh : Ohver Boyd ; Dublin : E. Ponsonby, Ltd., 1910.) Cd. 

 5282. Price Ss. $d. 



Interim Report on the work for the Year 1910-11. Pp- 30. Cd. 5453. 

 (London : H.M. Stationery Office ; Wyman and Sons, Ltd. ; Edinburgh; 

 Oliver Boyd ; Dublin : E. Ponsonby, Ltd.) Price \s. -id. 



Report on the Theory of a .=tream Line past a Plane Barrier, and of] 

 the Discontinuity arising at the Edee, with the application of the theory to 

 an Aeroplane. ' By Sir C-orge Greenhill, F.R.S. Pp. 06+106 figs. 

 (Advisory Committee for Aeronautics Reports and Memoranda, No. 19.) 

 (London: H.M. Statlonerv Office; Wyman and .Sons. Ltd.; Edinburgh:' 

 Oliver Boyd ; Dublin : E. Ponsonby, Ltd., 1910.) Price 5^. _ J 



"The Aeroplane, an elementary text-book on the pjinclples of djmamic] 

 flight." By T. O'B. Hubbard, J. H. Ledeboer, and C. C. Turner. Pp.| 

 xi + 128. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1911.) Price is. td. net. 



"The Mech.-inics of the Earth's AtmospherCja collection of Translations." 

 By Cleveland Abbe. Third Collection. Pp. iv+617. (Washington, D.C.! 

 Smithsonian Institution, 1910.) (Smith'ocian ^liscellaneous Collectioos,^ 

 Vol. li., No. 4 Hodgkins Fund.) 



