December, 1913. 



KNOWLEDGE. 



459 



neighbourhood of Riidesheim and Eltville may deem himself 

 fortunate if the kindly host, who has his own vineyard, will 

 supply him with the vintage of 1911. To mix it with 

 Apollinaris, or any natural water, would be a crime. 



The Spanish fruiterers, of whom there are many in this 

 part of Germany, had no need to import any fruit except real 

 exotics such as aubergines and pimientos. Quinces and 

 medlars were relatively extremely abundant. Peaches and 

 apricots were not only thoroughly ripe but also abundant, 

 and consequently so cheap that in some places they were 

 allowed to drop and rot upon the ground. It was worth a 

 walk of many miles out of the tourist's route to see in the 

 neighbourhood of Heilbronn the patient oxen drawing 

 wagon-loads of pumpkins which were like great balls of gold. 



In Heidelberg and other towns of Baden it is extremely 

 common to see oleanders and pomegranates in public and 

 private gardens. They are often arranged in rows in front of 

 fashionable hotels, and now and again even in front of a 

 railway station. The blossoms on these were as profuse and 

 as beautiful as those I have seen in the warmest parts of the 

 South of Spain. Autumn blossoms, too, on the magnolias 

 were frequently seen, but this I find is not so rare. What 

 surprised me most was an avenue of horse-chestnuts from 

 which all the leaves had fallen, but the trees were covered 

 with recently opened blossoms. Again and again have I seen 

 horse-chestnuts, from which the leaves had fallen, covered 

 with new leaves, as though it were spring-time ; but here were 

 masses of blossom covering trees which were otherwise bare. 

 Is all this a development of buds recently formed, or a 

 development of the dormant buds of a previous year ? 



This year has been worse than 1912, for the July of that 

 year was a warm month, whereas the heat this year has come 

 much too late. One peculiarity of the Neckar Valley is the 

 occurrence during the first fortnight of August of multitudes 

 of Ephemeridae, which are known there as August-Fliegen or 

 Weisse-Fliegen. Sometimes these are so abundant as to 

 fill the street lamps, and they are swept from the pavement 

 in barrow-loads, to be used afterwards as bait for fishing in 

 the Neckar. This year the little white flies have never been 

 seen. The pomegranates and oleanders have not blossomed, 

 the grapes are not sugar-sweet, and apricots and some other 

 fruits will never ripen. The fruiterers must import what they 

 want from Spain or the South of France, or depend in part 

 upon fruits which have been ripened under glass. 



One thing which I have just seen is worth mentioning. Not 

 far from the dusty road which runs parallel to the Neckar 

 between Hirschhorn and Eberbach there is an apple-tree in 

 full blossom. Now what is the cause of that ? Certainly not 

 the warmth of the season. It is not the sun which has wooed 

 those blossoms from the buds. What one would like to know 

 is, what buds have been developed, and what will, in all 

 probability, be the history of that tree in the near future ? 



76, Neuenheimer Landstrasse, 

 Heidelberg. 



E. J. DUNGATE. 



FRESH WORLDS TO CONQUER. 



To the Editors of " Knowledge." 



Sirs, — The other day when reading a scientific work (Mr. 

 Soddy 's excellent little book on Matter and Energy) I came across 

 the expression, " There is no fear that Science will yet awhile 

 be sighing, like Alexander, for fresh worlds to conquer." I am 

 happy to believe that this is true of Science ; but I strongly 

 object to having such a worse than childish aspiration put into 

 the mouth of one of the most highly educated heroes this 

 earth has ever seen. No doubt hundreds have said the same 

 thing before Mr. Soddy, and hundreds will say it again. But 

 no amount of repetition will make the phrase other than what 

 it is, namely, not only false, but the very reverse of what is 

 true, a piece of arrant nonsense and an insult to the memory 



of a great man, who certainly had his faults, but who never 

 could have accomplished such wonders had his hold on the 

 reality of things been less steadfast and complete. And 

 precisely the fact that so eminent an authority as Mr. Soddy 

 should repeat the absurdity shows that the time for correcting 

 it has arrived. 



Alexander did not conquer this world, and was perfectly 

 aware that he had not done so by a long way. It was with 

 bitter grief that he turned back from his Indian expedition in 

 deference to the remonstrances of his army. He must have 

 known, like every other Greek, that the Adriatic limited his 

 power to the West, that Italy, Sicily, and Carthage still 

 remained unsubdued, that his fleets had not doubled the 

 southern cape of Africa, long known to be circumnavigable, 

 nor even sailed to the Pillars of Hercules. And the interest- 

 ing thing, not merely for his biographers, but for the history of 

 science, is to read the true story which has been converted by 

 an almost inconceivable blunder into the false story commonly 

 circulated. 



The true story runs as follows in the version given by 

 Plutarch : 



" When Alexander heard from Anaxarchus [a philosopher 

 from Abdera] that there were an infinity of worlds, he burst 

 into tears, and on being asked what ailed him replied, ' Is it 

 not deplorable that while there are infinite worlds we should 

 not yet have made ourselves masters of this one world ? ' " 



Plutarch tells the story, not where we would expect it, in his 

 Life of Alexander, but in his Moral Anecdotes, though what 

 particular lesson we are expected to draw from it does not 

 appear. Perhaps it was the same as that suggested to 

 Tennyson, when after looking through a telescope at the great 

 star-cluster in Perseus, he observed, " One doesn't think much 

 of the county families after that." Anyhow, the interesting 

 thing to find is that, contemporaneously with the strictly finite 

 world of Aristotle, Alexander's own teacher, revolving con- 

 centrically round our Earth, and enclosed by the outermost 

 solid star-sphere, conceived as a single body rotating once in 

 about twenty-four hours, the older and much truer Ionian 

 idea of infinite worlds should still have prevailed. 



Thus by a path the reverse of Hamlet's we may follow in 

 imagination the noble dust of Alexander, or at least of 

 Alexander's table-talk, until it mingles with the star-dust of 

 the Milky Way. 



ALFRED W. BENN. 



THE PARTIAL ECLIPSE OF THE SUN, 1913, 

 SEPTEMBER 29. 



To the Editors of" Knowledge." 



Sirs, — This phenomenon 5 " was observed at the Union 

 Observatory, Johannesburg. At the time of sunrise a low- 

 lying bank of heavy clouds extended along the Eastern horizon, 

 but the sun began to appear above these clouds six minutes 

 after the calculated time of sunrise. The first appearance of 

 the sun was a very interesting sight. The eclipse was then 

 about at its middle phase and the sun, as it rose above the 

 cloud-bank, was exactly like a lion's claw. When the sun was 

 clear of the clouds it was possible to trace the dark outline of the 

 moon against a slightly lighter background for nearly a minute 

 of arc beyond the sun. This projection of the moon was 

 observed in the neighbourhood of both cusps of the sun. The 

 observation was made with a three-inch refractor through a 

 rather light dark glass. Definition throughout was too poor 

 to enable irregularities on the edge of the moon to be seen. 

 The last contact was observed at 16 h 32 m 50 s Greenwich time. 



(Mrs.) H. E. WOOD. 



Union Observatory, 

 Johannesburg, 

 South Africa. 



See Figure 536, page 452. 



