234 



KNOWLEDGE 



[December 1, 1892. 



not mount as much proportionally as they did at that 

 time ? 



180 



100 



140 



5« 2' 



52 23 



40 23 



■10 21 30 



1870 '2 'i '6 '8 '80 2 'i '6 '8 '90 2 

 CoxTiciioxs AXD Appeehensioss roR Dbunkenkess. 



The great rise of public sentiment in favour of tem- 

 perance is a remarkable feature of our time ; and if with 

 so many of our best citizens strenuously at work con- 

 tending with this national vice, the evil still continues 

 so bad, we have thankfully to remember how much 

 worse it would have been if these efforts had been with- 

 held. 



These diagrams (in the present writer's opinion) afford 

 an easy means of testing statements of various kinds 

 which are made on the great drink question. 



Notices of Boofts. 



Theoitc dii Sdh'il. Par A. Brester, -Jz. Amsterdam, 

 ly<)2. — There can be no doubt that the ishysical consti- 

 tution of the sun still remains to a large extent enigmatical. 

 Experience is, indeed, baffled by the intensity and scale 

 of action of the forces concerned, and the extension of 

 inferences beyond the sphere where they are certainly 

 legitimate to far outlying regions is always a perilous pi'O- 

 cess. The subject hence bristles with difficulties which, 

 in many cases, seem to become more formidable tlie more 

 closely they are examined. Efforts to remove them, indi- 

 vidually and collectively, are continually renewed, not 

 altogether fruitlessly, though with only partial success. 

 The work before us aims at providing a complete solution 

 of the entire problem. It is evidently the outcome of long 

 thinking based on painstaking research, and as such 

 deserves respectful consideration. Yet we doubt whether 

 Dr. Brester has really found the mot ilc Vcni(jme. His 

 theory is essentially a chemical one. Stars and suns, as 

 he says, " beiug after all nothing but enormous bubbles of 

 incandescent gas, and incandescent gases being precisely 

 the substances with which modern chemistry is best 

 acquainted, it seemed to me that in studying such bodies 

 chemical science should, in the first place, be consulted. 

 If these vast bubbles are composed of matter in the last 



stage of disaggiegation — of matter, that is to say, evapo- 

 rated, dissociated, and dilated by transcendent heat — it 

 belongs to chemistry to predict the course of change in 

 this attenuated matter as it radiates away its heat." 



Starting from this postulate, Dr. Brester contrives to 

 " save " (as the old Greeks used to phrase it) all the solar 

 phenomena. His sun, he truly remarks, is like the suns 

 of most other theorists, only it behaves in a totally different 

 manner. Assuming the absence of external causes of 

 agitation, he concludes the workings of the great machine 

 to be carried on in almost absolute physical tranquillity. 

 Neither cyclones nor eruptions (in the material sense) occur 

 in his sun ; uprushes and downrushes are alike absent ; 

 the stratification, in the order of their densities, of the 

 vapours forming the solar photosphere, subsists perennially 

 undisturbed. To account for the apparently violent com- 

 motions observed in the solar atmosphere and its sur- 

 roundings, the dissociating power of heat and the effects of 

 chemical affinity are alone invoked. The progress of 

 refrigeration, it is argued, incessantly brings about partial 

 combinations of the most elementary principles of matter, 

 and this being accompanied by the development of heat, 

 dissociation again ensues, and so the play of forces is kept 

 up. Their XJlay, moreover, is rendered more or less spas- 

 modic by the prevalence of what our author terms " super- 

 dissociation." This state is reached by atoms cooled down 

 below the point at which their strong inherent affinities 

 would bring about their combination were it not for the 

 copious presence of atoms of different natures, and when 

 they are eventually enabled to come together it is in such 

 numbers, and with so great violence, as to cause a " heat 

 eruption." Such heat eruptions, by dissolving the photo- 

 spheric clouds, occasion spots, while the coronal rays, as 

 well as " white prominences," mark regions where a 

 lowering of temperature has permitted the formation of a 

 glowing mist capable of reflecting sunlight. Thus, no 

 transport worth mentioning of ponderable matter is involved 

 even in the most seemingly tumultuous of the solar crises. 

 Calm really prevails in strata through which hurricanes 

 appear to sweep. Prominences, accordingly, are main- 

 tained to be mere evanescent illuminations. They are the 

 products of rapidly propagated chemical action. But if 

 this were the case they would give a continuous spectrum. 

 Hydrogen ignited by combustion shows no trace of its 

 characteristic rays. Moreover, the rate of propagation of 

 chemical action through a gaseous mass is vastly too slow 

 to account for the line displacements in prominence-spectra, 

 usually admitted to be due to motion in the line of sight. 



Dr. Brester's elaborate discussion, none the less, raises 

 several valid objections to current theories, and insists 

 upon incongruities too apt to be lightly passed over. It 

 serves, at the least, a useful ventilating purpose. Copious 

 annotations, too, in the shape of foot-notes afford in them- 

 selves a very fair conspectus of the literature of the subject, 

 and add greatly to the value of the book. It is, indeed, 

 only the first instalment of a larger work, the second and 

 third parts of which will apply the principles now unfolded 

 to elucidate the natures of stars, nebula?, and comets. 

 They were employed to explain stellar variability in an 

 essay published in 188'J, but that intricate theme cannot 

 here be entered upon. Agnes M. Clekke. 



Veijetahh' M'asps nmt Plant \\'urin)<. By Dr. M. C. Cooke 

 (Christian Knowledge Society). — Under this somewhat 

 romantic heading Dr. Cooke, the well-known authority on 

 eryptogamic plant life, gives what is described in the sub- 

 sidiary title as "a popular history of entomogenous fungi, 

 or fungi parasitic upon insects." The book is essentially 

 a compilation which has been made in the interests of two 

 classes of readers, mycologists and entomologists, to both 



