April 1, 1887.] 



KNOWLEDGE 



1-39 



read and heard many enthusiastic words of mine in regard 

 to this erst earnest observer's work in the past. Let him 

 give me any new work to " enthuse " over, and he will 

 quickly see whetlier I am colder than of yore. 



* * * 



Rather amusingly, I read within a few hours of sending 

 off my remarks on '■ Pr:z; Competitions " a cablegram in the 

 2f^(w York World mentioning two lists of "Forty" drawn up 

 by readers of the P<dl Mall Gazette, in one of which my own 

 name is included. I do not learn from the paragraph 

 whether anything in the circumstances may make these 

 lists of Forty entirely imaginary Academicians difter from 

 those on which I have commented. But, in any ease, I 

 must fully and unaffectedly disclaim all pretensions to any- 

 thing even tending towards the " celebrity " supposed to be 

 suggested by such lists as these. Except my treatise on 

 " Saturn," which has reached few, mj' still more fascinating 

 " Geometry of the Cycloids," which has reached fewer, and 

 one or two atlases which are. I hope, useful, everything I 

 have yet published has merely indicated the course those 

 studies of mine have taken, which I hope to embody in a 

 treatise on a.stronomy now nearly a quarter of a century in 

 preparation. Either my name illustrates very effectively 

 the argument in my paper on " Prize Competitions," or it 

 has been added to these lists by way of a joke — unless some 

 few have seen, very far ahead, the real purport of my in- 

 quiries in astronomical matters. 



* * * 



A CORKESPONDEXT informs us that Mr. Henrj- L. Ward, 

 a rising young naturalist of Rochester, N.Y., has recently 

 secured several specimens of the West-Indian seal [Jfonachus 

 trojnca) which had long been thought extinct. 



* * * 



From Punch the facetious (!) — ■ 



Lilly writes brightly 



In the i'ortnigJitly, 



Meaning sharp Huxley to settle ; 



Huxley looks silly. 



Finding his Lilly 



Turns out a stinging-nettle. 



Mr. Lilly is a Roman Catholic, so is Mr. Burnand, editor 

 of Punch, author of " Happy Thoughts " and other philo- 

 sophical works; hence Mr. Burnand's fitness to judge and 

 impartiality of judgment. 



itlrbiftDS!* 



Bacox axd ilODERS SciEXCE. — Whatever debt the world of 

 science may owe to Bacon, it was not the invention of the method 

 of research by which all great discoveries in science from long 

 before Bacon's time till now have been effected. Yet, if we are 

 asked in what way Bacon helped the progress of science, and in 

 what degree, our answer must speak very strongly in his favour, 

 though we must reject the false notions commonly entertained. 

 Unquestionably Bacon's two great works, the " Instauratio Magna " 

 and the '• Novum Organum," gave an immense impulse to the de- 

 velopment of science in England — not by their influence on scien- 

 tific workers and thinkers, not five in a hundred of whom have 

 ever studied those works, but by the general attention which they 

 directed to the prevalent faults of the methods in vogue when they 

 were written. A f.alse syllogistic system, applied to imperfect or 

 insufficient evidence, offended justly the clear mind of Bacon: he 

 attacked and overthrew that method, and though he was no student 

 of science himself, in any true sense of the word, though his ideas 

 about matters scientific were mostly erroneous and his knowledge 

 of the science of his day most imperfect, yet by his advocacy of 

 the true general principle that Nature will reveal her secrets only in 

 response to sedulous and reiterated inquiries he moved the mass of 

 thinking men to adopt a truer method of research. They did not 

 adopt the method carefully defined and described by Bacon ; they 

 did not even adopt a new method ; but as a body thej' became 

 disciples of the true school which, when Bacon wrote, had been 

 exiguous in the extreme. 



The Cruise of the March-:sa to Kanuchatht and Xew 

 Guinea. By F. H. H. Guillesiard, M.A., M.D. (John 

 Murray.) — These sumptuous volumes are a worthy addition 

 to the standard works of travel issued from the historic 

 house in Albemarle Street. Dr. GuHlemard writes in a 

 clear and animated style ; the scenery which he describes is 

 brought vividly before us in superbly executed woodcuts 

 from his photographs, and the route is easily followed by the 

 aid of many excellent maps. The cruise of the JIarchesa, 

 an auxiliary screw schooner of 400 tons, extended from 

 .January 1882 to April 1884, during which period regions, 

 already known to us through the graphic narratives of Mr. 

 Alfred Wallace and other explorers, were visited, and con- 

 cerning which Dr. GtuUemard therefore exercises wise 

 brevit}', while other regions, less familiar, give ample 

 employment to his pen. The \oyage, in its scientific 

 results, was successful, 3,000 specimens of birds and a 

 large collection of insects being secured, the birds from 

 Sulu including a hitherto unknown species of bush- 

 shrike, which is the subject of one of the two richly- 

 coloured frontispieces. Another find was in New Guinea, 

 where Dr. Guillemard, whose chief object there was to 

 procure birds of paradise, had the good fortune to capture 

 an echidna, or spiny ant-eater, over two feet long, and 

 therefore larger than its Australian representative. Touch- 

 ing at Formo.sa, the precipices of which are more imposing 

 than even the cliffs of the Yosemite valley, and the former 

 connection of which with North India and Sumatra is 

 proved by the similarity of its fauna, the Marchesa paid a 

 flying visit to Japan on her voyage to Kamschfttka. 

 The chapters on the history, physical character, and fauna 

 of this peninsula, with its thick forests, its belt of eruptive 

 volcanoes, the highest of which is nearly 16,000 feet, its far- 

 extending tundras, its hybrid population so thinly scattered 

 that the doctors in their long rounds leave the sick physic 

 eno\igh for a year, and its salmon-snaring rivers, are full of 

 fresh and entertaiuing matter, the more welcome, as there is 

 little of adventure wherewith to enliven the volumes. The 

 visit to New Guinea was confined to its Dutch or western 

 half, and such fragmentary notes as are given concerning 

 the mop-headed Papuans and their customs and beliefs are 

 useful additions to our scanty knowledge of an island which 

 has yet to be fulh' explored. The houses built on the piles 

 by the waterside, the holes in their flooring for the refuse to 

 be thrown away, and the curious crescent head-rests, which 

 latter occiu- in Egypt and elsewhere, give reality to the 

 ancient life of the lake dwellers described by Herodotus,' 

 and reconstructed in Dr. Keller's researches. But enough 

 has been said to commend Dr. Guillemnrd's volumes to our 

 readers. 



An Arctic Provine3 : Alaska and the Seal Islands. 

 By H. W. Elliott. (Simpson Low & Co.) — Kamschatka 

 is the land of the sable and the salmon ; Alaska of the fur 

 seal. Twenty years ago the United States of America 

 gave Russia seven million dollars for the territory of 

 Alaska, a land of bewildering indentations, endless coast- 

 line fringed with thousands of islands and islets, beaten by 

 wind and waves, scaiTed by volcanic eruptions, enveloped 

 in persistent fog, and cursed by mosquitoes — a region so 

 gloomy that " the good Bishop Veniaminov, when he first 

 came among the natives of the Aleutian Islands, ordered the 

 curriculum of hell to be omitted from the church breviary, 

 saying, as he did so, that those people had enough of it 

 here on earth." Mr. Elliott's volume is encyclopajdic in 

 its details of the features of this desolate, pitiless land, and 

 of hfe among the Indians whose rancheries, each with its 



