Aug. 28, 1S85.] 



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MAGNIFICATION NEAE HORIZON. 



[1887]— I hope Mr. Proctor will not disdain to dispose of what I 

 venture to offer in support of Prof. Le Conte's view, rather than of 

 his, on this phenomenon (Knowledge p. 90).* 



1. If these bodies have been measured, and found to subtend the 

 same anple -nlien apparently largo as they do some hours after, 

 when looking small, then I suppose, causa finita est ; it is an 

 illusion in very truth. Mr. P., however, does not say they have 

 been so measured. [Have I not ?— than I now say it— they have 

 repeatedly been measured. — R. P.] If they have, the matter will 

 always remain a puzzle to me, [!] for the following reasons (the 

 test of the half-inch disk seems to me rather too rough a one) : — 



2. It is not by any means always, or in the majority of cases, 

 that these bodies seem thus magnified. I have seen them approach 

 the horizon hundreds of times, not undergoing this change of 

 appearance. 



3. It is ,not only the he.avenly bodies which are magnified by 

 certain states of the air. Thus, I sit down on the rocks and gaze 

 at the opposite coast ten miles distant. I see the beach, but I do 

 not see houses, mills, hedge-rows even. I read for an hour, and on 

 rising to go, am astonished to find that, without any apparent 

 change in the air, I now do see all these things, though my sight is 

 fatigued by reading, as though I had gone three miles towardsthem 

 in a boat. It is certainly not refraction which has done this, 

 because I saw the beach at the beginning; tlie objects then too 

 small to be seen were, therefore, in the field of view all the time. 

 One day on the jetty at Boulogne, in bad weather, I remember 

 seeing a church some distance inland in Kent. Now, on very clear 

 days the cliffs are visible, but no buildings. How could refraction, 

 by merely throwing up the object, make it visible, when a similar 

 object, much nearer, is not so ? [I will not pretend to explain an 

 observation which has been made by another, and with the details 

 of which 1 am not fully acquainted. But in such abnormal atmo- 

 spheric conditions as are involved in cases of mirage, magnification 



i may <1- 



whe 



lor than before ; this 

 when she rises faint 

 in ig set, she is free 

 when eclipsed. This 

 But it does not; 



Hero aliould nut v/e insert "when high" after "occupying"? 

 [Quite right, in reply to both points.— R. P.] 



moon rising above our apparent horizon does not tmdergo this 

 change.* 



7. I cannot agree with Mr. P.'s belief about the apparent shape 

 of the sky. When there is driving scud, of course, the clouds over- 

 head do look nearer than those lower down, because they go faster, 

 and we instinctively conclude thence that they must be nearer, as, 

 indeed, they are. (Also, they are vaguer and tieecier, and we get 

 the idea that these details must indicate nearness.) But, as re- 

 gards a clear sky, 1 cannot say the part overhead looks nearer than 

 any other ; rather the reverse. The same with an even dull sky. 

 Both that and a clear one do give me the idea of a line hemisphere. 

 (In 1873 I went, with French friends, into a cyclorama of the siege, 

 at Paris. It was a dome— of course, a true hemisphere — painted 

 cloudy ; the environs of Paris were so well perspectived that, at 

 first, one could hardly credit it was but a show. There were two- 

 boys — of eight and thirteen— with us, and for some time we could 

 not convince them that the dome was not the real sky. I think 

 this goes to show that the common conception is of a hemisphere.) 



8. My own conclusion always has been that dew, fog, or rain in 

 the air does magnify ; but if the micrometer positively disproves 

 this, throwing us back on the certainty of illusion; then, at aU 

 events, I urge that (2) supra shows that v/a have not arrived at the 



" DOUBLING UP TOUE HAVES." 



[1888]- 1 am very glad to find that Mr. Proctor does not 

 really defend the phrase, "I should have liked to have seen." 

 (In my letter, 1881, the compositor omitted the " d " in liked.) 

 I see that Dr. Hodgson, in his " Errors in the Use of English," 

 speaks of " the error of using the perfect form of the infinitive, 

 for the simple or indefinite form, after a perfect verb," and says 

 that, " in making a present statement past, only the principal 

 verb need change its tense." He then goes on to give esamples 

 of this mistake from the writings of well-known authors, including 

 Sidney Smith, Shelley, Sir S. Romilly, John Ruskin, F. W. 

 ■" ■" L. Bulwer, W. S. Landor, &c. This formidable array 



tralist 





conden 



3 the phrase I objec 

 more surprised to E 



t to, and i 

 ;8 or in his 

 :o that he, 

 I am glad 

 E. C. H. 

 follows : — 

 ace got the 



Mr. Proctor say 

 have certainly never detected it 

 lectures. I was, therefore, the 

 as I thought, approved of it in 

 that I was mistaken. 



P.S. What Mark Twain says c 

 " Harris said that if the best w 

 slovenly habit of doubling up his 

 it while he lived. That is to say, if a man gets the habit of saying 

 'I should have liked to have known more about it,' instead of 

 saying, simply and sensibly, ' I should have liked to know more 

 about it,' that man's disease is incurable. Harris said that this 

 sort of lapse is to be found in every copy of every newspaper that 

 has ever been printed in English, and in almost all of our books. 

 He said ho had observed it in Kirkham's Grammar and in 

 Macaulay."— From " A Tramp Abroad," by Mark Twain. 



MISPRONUNCIATION. 

 —When first I had to study the elements of philology.. 

 ;w to teaching them, Grimm's law burst on my under- 

 as an absolutely new idea. " Trench on Words," and 

 )oks, had prepared mo for the wonderful fertility of roots 

 us derivations ; but, although I had learnt at school that 

 more nearly connected with ijravis than cura, and I had 

 ich about the digamma, the idea that one people sys- 

 ly pr mounced as k what their neighbours pronounced 

 1 rice vt'rgi, had never entered my head as possible. 





* Apropos. I read in a French paper t 

 earthquakes in Spain at a certain place had bi n i 

 rise half-an-hour later every day. This, at :irst siglit, rei 

 Joshua, or the famed earthquake pills, is, of coarse, quite oo 

 the mountain-range to the east of that town being elevated. 



