Jan. 19, 1883.] 



• KNO^VLEDGE * 



43 



that we often see round the snn or moon. These must, on rare 

 occasions, be polarised, or brought by electrical or some other force 

 into rigorous parallelism, like the atoms of a crystal or mnfrnct, 

 though occupying scores of cubic miles of the upper air. They 

 must all be vertical, to give the astonishing display of circles and 

 spectra that, seen at Rome, March 29, 1G20, led Descartes to work 

 out their optical explanation ; but which display seems hardly to 

 have been as com]>kte as I had the fortune to see on the corre- 

 sponding day (a mere coincidence) of 1848. A horizontal white 

 circle, no wider than the snn's disc, passes through him, 

 and through live other stins, all at the same altitude ; 

 the two nearest at 22^° from him, say about 25° of azimuth, 

 the others at the azimuths 120° and ISO". These three fm-tliest, 

 properly called anihelia, though much the most compact and 

 sunlike, are far too faint to cast any shadow. The two dazzling 

 parhelia are merely 8|>ectra, with all the colours, but the middle 

 yellow in sncli e.\cess as to enable either one to give, if the sun be 

 hidden, the shadows that Hezekiah was shown. Xe.\t brightest to 

 these (in my display) were the upper and lower parts of a broken 

 and elliptical halo, of the common sort, but having no lateral parts. 

 Its top and base were rendered so bright by two tangential frag- 

 ments of similarly-coloured arcs, touching and doubling them. 

 Twice as far as the parhelia, and near the horizon, were two other 

 short pieces, as of common rainbows, convex towards the sun. 

 Then two long arcs, of at Ic.tst 120°, went over from the snn himself 

 to intersect the white circle at the opposite anthelion ; and these 

 were white near the sun, growing more and more edged with colours 

 the farther they went. The white circle was, as II alley says, the 

 most astoonding object. Though the sky was (and must be) a 

 paler blue than usnal, it backed up the northern parts of this sil- 

 very hoop, between the three anthelia. with such relief that I 

 thought birds conld perch upon it. An old carpenter was at his 

 door in I'ortsea, with Ferguson's " Astronomy," or some snch book, 

 open at the " armillary sphere," trying to make out what armilhr 

 were showing themselves. 



In all the thirteen displays recorded in the " Philosophical Transac- 

 tions," as well as this, the two bright parhelia were right and loft 

 of the sun, at the same altitude; but there certainly arc cases, well 

 attested, of their being over and under him, vertically or not. These 

 mast be much rarer, the polar arrangement of ice fibres being far 

 less likely to be in any other direction than vertical ; and I fear the 

 fnllowiDg, which 1 meant to adduce, will not do. In Lady Strang- 

 fonl's " Egyptian .Sepulchres and S\-rian Shrines," Ed. 187-1, p. 181, 

 on leaving Lebanon, she says, *' Our last afternoon at the cedars 

 afforded us the extraordinary sight of what is callei, I believe, a 

 false sun : the mist had jammed itself up into dense masses, like a 

 rough sea of ice-pack, filling up and smoothing over the whole 

 ralley, and extending over the sea beyond ; behind this the sun in 

 due time sank — but, ten minutes after, another sun of flaming 

 blood-colour arose, and after shining with an awfnl kind of 

 dark brilliancy for about a quarter-of-an-hour, it also faded 

 away and died behind the mist clonds — very marvellous it was 

 altogether." The puzzle here is in the word " also," which led mo 

 to associate the two suns as disappearing the same way, and the 

 "flaming blood colour " would apply to a prismatic parhelion, red 

 at the base and flaming above. But the words "arose" and 

 "fade away," instead of set, now make me suspect it was an 

 anthelion in the East. Somebody may say it throws a light on 

 Joshua's famous sun miracle ; but I was fully convinced long ago 

 by Jacob Bryant that this had njthing to do with the natural sky, 

 and the two verses from Jasher have no more business in the 

 Book of Joshua than have the son of Sirach's wise remark, that 

 " one day was as long as two." The Old Testament revisers, 

 we may hope, will banish them and translate Joshua's speech accu- 

 rately, '■ Sun of Gibeon be thou silent, and thou Moon of Arajalon." 

 This snn and this moon were, like Apollo of Delphi, false gods, l>ut 

 real beings, who received worship and gave oracles in two temjiles, 

 which two alone, of all the temples in Palestine, the Hebrews 

 could not destroy, as they had been commanded because of the 

 perpetual treaty into which the Gibeonitcs had inveigled them. 

 Hence the only possible way of ending the Gibeonite religion was 

 by silencing their gods, which Joshna was that day commissioned 

 to do by those words, as mirncnlous' as when, ages later, .\pollo of 

 Dclphiand the rest were as suddenly silenced at the advent of the great 

 real Joshua. He is not recorded as saying a word about standing 

 still ; and if the day had been any longer than nsual, would any 

 chronicler dream of writing this after the statement that the enemy 

 fled, but were destroyed in the night by a hailstorm ? Again, 

 would New Testament writers, especially he who wrote to the 

 Hebrews, chap. li., utterly ignore such a stupendous fruit of faith ? 



Physical science can have no more l>earing on Joshua's miracle, 

 which was a purely metaphysical one, than on Christ's saying to 

 people, "Thouha-st had five husbands," 'or "There shall meet you 

 a man bearing a pitcher of water." But, returning to Hezekiah, 



considering how much steeper is the sun's daily path in the latitude 

 of Jerusalem than in England, it seems more likely that the pair 

 of parhelia wore of the rarer kind, over and under the sun, which I 

 certainly have seen described (or possibly even oblique), than the 

 commoner ones that I saw, and Descartes, Uallcy, Folkes, and the 

 other Royal Society observers. From the account in Isaiah, 

 speaking of bringing back the sun, but the fuller one in Kings of 

 only bringing back the shadow, I gather the Book of Kings to be 

 the" earlier document, and more likely, in this place, to preserve 

 that prophet's own words. 



The same book has, in Chapter III., an account of another optical 

 phenomenon that I once thought very incredible. Captain Burton 

 derided it, when conii)aring this chapter with the Moabito Stone, 

 which he thought more genuine. The story is in verses 22 and 23. 

 Now it happened that one morning, near the winter solstice, I 

 started by an early train from London for the south-west, and was 

 looking from its S.E. side when it entered on the water meadows 

 of either the Mole or Wey. Suddenly I was startled, as well as the 

 oi>posite passenger, by looking down on what seemed a round pool 

 of blood, two yanis in diameter. The next minute we came to so 

 many pools or channels, tinged not quite so deeply, that we re- 

 marked some new chemical factory or dye-works must be making 

 all this sanguinary appearance. We had hardly said this, when a 

 mile or more of the main stream came into view, with the sun rising 

 red beyond it. In another hour there was violent wind and rain, 

 and the day about the stormiest I ever saw ; but I could never again 

 deny thaij had made exactly the same mistake as the Moabites. 

 ^^ E. L. G.VRBETT. 



[$89]— While reading Mr. Garbett's tantalising letter on " Tlie 

 Dial of Ahaz," a possible solution of the problem suggested itself 

 to me. Let us suppose a great display of solar haloes with well- 

 developed parhelia, &c., to be visible ; then if a dark cloud were to 

 float across the "mock suns" and the true solar disc, in due 

 succession, it seems to mo that the required conditions would be 

 fulfilled. 



I remember, when a child, during a solitary ramble, looking up 

 and suddenly seeing the phenomenon I have alluded to (minus the 

 cloud) in all" its awful grandeur, and I shall never forget the shock 

 of terror I experienced. F.G.S. 



[Well hit.— R. P.] 



A LOGICAL PUZZLE. 



[690] — Your logical puzzle reminds me of another I heard at a 

 friend's hotxse some years ago, that several friends assembled there 

 on that evening could not see :— (1.) There are more cows in the 

 world than there are hairs in any one cow's tail ; therefore (2) There 

 are at least two cows in the world with exactly the same number of 

 hairs in their tails. An Oeigin-al Subscribeb. 



[A capital puzzle ; certainly more in it than in the logical 

 puzzle— at least in De Morgan's ingenious illustrative case. The 

 fallacy in this should not mislead for an instant, but it takes a clear 

 head "to see within ten or twenty seconds that there must bo at least 

 two cows with the same number of hairs in their taUs, if there are 

 more cows than there .ire hairs in any one cow's tail, vnless (which 

 onr correspondent omits to notice) one "/ the cows has no hairs at all 

 on her tail. For instance, there might, in accordance with the con- 

 ditions, be three cows in the world, one with no hairs, one with a 

 single hair, and one with two hairs, on tail. — R. P.] 



SPRINGS AND STREAMS. 



[691] — (1) -Why do springs and streams rise during the preva- 

 lence of an east wind ? (This is said by the millers in Dorsetshire 

 to be an invariable rule.) 



(2) Why may we expect rain when the springs go back 

 suddenly ? 



(3) Why after the heavy rains we have had lately are the springs 

 still goingback ? Is this dependent on local causes ? Zeta. 



FELLOWSHIP OF LEARNED SOCIETIES. 



[6921—1 am very glad to see the note (No. 674), by an F.R.A.S., 

 upon Fellowships of Learned Societies. It is very desirable that 

 as many people as possible should join and support these societies 

 either for pleasure or as students ; but why .should they not be 

 styled " members " ? Let " fellowship " be only conferred, as yoi:r 

 correspondent suggests, upon those who are more or less past 



