84 



♦ KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



[Adg. 10, 1883. 



made a noise like an ass, and was killed. L^ng might he, 

 adds the ancient moral, 



Clad in a lion's skin 

 Have fed on the barley green ; 

 But lie br.ayed 1 



And that moment he came to ruin. 

 The variants of this old fable are found in medic-eval, in 

 French, German, Indian, and Turkish folk-lore, as are also 

 those of the tortoise who lost his life through " much 

 speaking." Desiring to emigrate, two ducks agreed to 

 carry him, he seizing hold of a stick which they held 

 between their beaks. As they passed over a village, the 

 people shouted and jeered, whereupon the irate tortoise 

 retorted, " What business is it of yours 1 " and, of course, 

 thereby let go the stick and, falling down, split in two. 

 Therefore 



Speak wise words not out of season ; 

 You see how, by talking overmuch, 

 The tortoise fell." 



In iEsop, the tortoise asks an eagle to teach him to fly ; 

 in Chinese folk-lore he is carried by geese. 



.Jacob Grimm's researches concerning the famous 

 media'val fable of " Reynard the Fox," revealed the 

 ancient and scattered materials out of which that wonder- 

 ful satire was woven, and there is no feature of the story 

 which reappears more often in Eastern and Western folk- 

 lore than that cunning of the animal which has been for the 

 lampooner and the satirist the type of self-seeking monk 



say liis prayers, and flies off while the outwitted beast folds 

 his hands and shuts his eyes. 



But I must forbear quoting further. Enough if it is 

 made clearer to the reader that the Beast-fable is the lineal 

 descendant of barbaric conceptions of a life shared in 

 common by man and brute, and another link thus added to 

 the lengthening chain of the continuity of human history. 



PRETTY PROOFS OF THE EARTH'S 

 ROTUNDITY. 



CHIEFLY FOR THE SEASIDE. 

 By Richard A. Proctor. 



(Continued from page 70.) 



IN my last I described the Bedford level experiment in 

 which use was made of a telescope t at A, (Fig. 3 bis) 

 and of a disc 6 at B three miles oS", to determine the 

 deviation of the line of sight from t to c (another disc at 

 C) six miles oH', from the disc b, — t, b, and c being all at 

 exactly the same height above the water surface ABC. 

 The result was, to show b several times its own diameter 

 above c, a simple and decisive proof that the points t, b, c, 

 were not in a straight line, — as of course they would have 

 been if the water surface were plane and therefore ABC 

 a straight line. 



Fig. 3, lis. 



and ecclesiastic. When Chanticleer proudly takes an 

 airing witli his family, he meets master Reynard, who tells 

 him he has become a "religious," and shows him his beads, 

 and his missal, and his hair shirt, adding in a voice " that 

 was childlike and bland," that he had vowed never to eat 

 flesh. Then he went ofi" singing his Credo, and slunk 

 behind a hawthorn. Chanticleer, thus thrown off his 

 guard, continues his airing, and the astute hypocrite, dart- 

 ing from his ambush, seizes the plump hen Coppel. So in 

 Indian folk-tale, a wolf living near the Ganges is cut oS" 

 from food by the surrounding water. He decides to keep 

 holy day, and the god Sakka, knowing his lupine weak- 

 ness, resolves to have some fun with him, and turns him- 

 self into a wild goat. " Aha ! " says the wolf, " I'll keep 

 the fast another day," and springing up he tried to seize 

 the goat, who skipped about so that he couldn't be taken. 

 So Lupus gives it up, and says as his solatium : " After all, 

 I've not broken my vow." 



The Chinese have a story of a tiger who desired to eat a 

 fox, but the latter claimed exemption as being superior to 

 the other animals, adding that if the tiger doubted his 

 word, he could easily judge for himself So the two set 

 forth, and, of course, every animal fled at sight of the 

 tiger, who, too stupid to see how lie had been gulled, 

 conceived high respect for the fox, and spared his life. 



Sometimes the tables are turned. Chanticleer gets his 

 head out of Reynard's mouth by making him answer the 

 farmer, and in the valuable collection of Hottentot tales 

 which the late Dr. Bleek, with some warrant, called 

 " Reynard in South Africa," the cock makes the jackal 



To direct the telescope < to c it had to be slightly de- 

 pressed, at least if c were brought exactly to the centre of 

 the field of view. But it seems that although the telescope 

 was apparently level — indeed one account says that it was 

 carefully levelled — the distant disc c appeared to be in the 

 centre of the Held, absolutely coincident with the intersec- 

 tion of two cross-hairs marking the centre of the field. On 

 the strength of this observation the loser claimed that the 

 stakes should be handed to him. The claim was natural 

 enough, and no doubt honestly made. Doubtless, also, the 

 loser was convinced then and he may even be convinced 

 still that wrong was done to him in the rejection of his 

 claim. Be this as it may, it was probably unfortunate for 

 him that he was thus led astray, as there is every reason to 

 believe that his stake would have been returned to him by 

 the winner but for the wild and angry ways into which 

 this mistaken notion caused the loser to indulge. 



Now let us inquire where his mistake lay. We shall 

 thus be led to a proof of the earth's rotundity which 

 though not so simple and striking as the one described at 

 page 69, is really as convincing. It can readily be tested 

 at the seaside by any one of ingenious and handy turn. 



In the plan illustrated in Fig. 3, the disc b may be re- 

 garded as part of the apparatus employed to measure the 

 depression of c. Of course b is itself depressed below the 

 true horizon plane through t, but c is depressed four times 

 as much, and therefore seen below the disc b in the tele- 

 scopic field. In the other test, the disc at b is not used to 

 help the observer. Let us see what remains to show the 

 earth's rotundity. 



