Aug. 29, 1884.] 



• KNOWLEDGE • 



187 



goes round him in 7h. 30m. Deimos, the cater satellite, is rather 

 more than three and a half diameters of Mars from his centre, and 

 lias a period of revolution of 30h. ISm. Even with these discre- 

 ])ancies, though, the coincidence is sufficiently remarkable. — Ed.] 



A GHOST— A FACT. 



[1379] — As General Sherbrooke was sitting after dinner with 

 General Winyard, in America, a figure appeared between them and 

 the fire, dressed in uniform and a slrange-looiitij new hat. After a 

 pause, it retired through a door into an adjoining room ; the Generals 

 followed, and were somewhat alarmed on finding no one there, there 

 bein" no egress but by the door they had entered. General Win- 

 yard"remarked that the figure bore the strongest resemblance to his 

 brother, then in England. The time of its appearance was there- 

 fore noted down, and it was afterwards ascertained that that very 

 brother died at that very hour. Upon General Sherbrooke's return 

 to England he one day met in London General Winyard's father, 

 who introduced the subject and asked for a description of the 

 appearance ; General Sherbrooke, having never seen General Win- 

 yard's brother, observed that it was very like that gentleman, point- 

 ing to a person passing at that moment near them. Now it is very 

 singular that that gentleman was known to Mr. Winyard, the father, 

 and had always been reckoned a striking likeness of his late son. 

 It is further remarkable that the regiment to which the young 

 Winyard belonged was ordered about the time of his death to wear 

 a new kind of hat, of rather an extraordinary make, as the army 

 then thought, and this new military hat the ghost appeared in. 



Arthur S. Lodge. 



[Tlie very familiar story related by 5Ir. Lodge is told with 

 decided variations in the details. See for one version Howitt's trans- 

 lation of " Ennemoser's History of Magic," Yol. II. pp. 380, et seq. 

 in Bohn's " Scientific Library."' — Ed.J 



DAISIES. 



[1380] — Many months since Mr. Grant Allen, in Knowledge, 

 said some very elegant and pretty things in favour of daisies ; but 

 it didn't make me love his pets then, and I don't like 'em now. 



An amateur daisy-killer has, with sulphuric acid, turned half my 

 lawn into brown spots, and it has the queerest look of hybrid 

 efflorescence in a state of great discomfort. 



Will Mr. Grant Allen kindly take compassion on a distracted 

 lady, and say how she can get rid of his pets, being her pests, and 

 so relieve the heart of a Disconsolate Fejule ? 



LETTERS RECEIVED AND SHORT ANSWERS. 



F. Overton. — To give the prices of books noticed in these 

 columns would be to convert our reviews into advertisements. — 

 J. G. Fisher. Thanks for your very courteous communication. 

 Pray do not imagine that I consider our existing mode of spelling 

 as absolutely perfect or inexpugnable. My replies were rather 

 intended to indicate the impossibility of adopting Mr. Pitman's 

 or any other novel form of orthography in a paper like this. — 

 A.M.I. C.E. I shaD be pleased to accord you permission to make 

 whatever quotations you may require from the articles to which 

 you refer ; the sole condition being the acknowledgment that they 

 are derived from this journal. — Jclia Usher. Madler's idea that 

 Alcyone is the centre round which the orbit of our solar system 

 through space is performed, is now absolutely exploded. He went 

 BO far as to predicate that that star was actually the centre of gravity 

 of the entire visible stellar universe, an assumption now definitely dis- 

 proved by the proper motions of a considerable number of stars. 

 In reply to your second question, the instruments in use at the 

 Royal Observatory at Greenwich are by various makers. To begin 

 with, the oldest (I mean the oldest now ever employed), the 

 Shuckburgh Equatoreal : this is the work of that famous optician 

 Bamsden, who flourished during the latter half of the last century. 

 The Sheepshanks Equatoreal has a Cauchoix object-glass, but the 

 mounting is by Mr. Grubb, of Dublin. The capital instrument of 

 the Observatory, the Great Transit Circle, has an objective made 

 by Troughton & Simms, who are largely responsible for the rest of 

 tliis superb instrument. Messrs. Ransomes & May, Ips^vich, how- 

 ever, cast and turned the massive metallic parts of it. The 

 Altazimuth is by the same makers. The object-glass of the Great 

 Equatoreal was made by Merz & Son, of Munich ; the engineer's 

 work by Ransome & Sims (successors to Ransomes & May) ; the 

 graduation and mounting generally by Mr. Simms. There is a 

 reflecting telescope of 2-1 in. in aperture in the grotmds, constructed 

 by that eminent amateur, the late Mr. W. Lassell ; a 6-in. equatoreal. 



by Cooke & Sons, of York ; another of the same dimensions by 

 Simms, and so on. — C. E. Johnson. Speaking off-hand, I should 

 say that the Castle in the Arms of Northumberland had not any 

 connection with that in the Arms of Spain ; but that its origin wag 

 rather to be sought in something akin to what gave the name of 

 Newcastle to its chief town, i.e., the building of a fortress, or new 

 castle, by Robert, William the Conqueror's son, on his return from 

 Scotland, probably on the site of an ancient Roman fortification. 

 Perhaps some heraldic reader will notice this question. In reply 

 to your second question, the late Mr. John Payne Collier, the emi- 

 nent Shakespearean scholar, wrote a work entitled " Punch and 

 Judy ; " I forget the publishei'd name. There are, too, references 

 to that subject scattered up and down Notes and Queries. Or, again, 

 you will find an excellent precis of what is known — or conjectured 

 — on the origin of our popular street drama, in an article entitled 

 "Punch and the Puppets," on p. 517 of Yol. VII. of the New Series of 

 All the Year Round. This is, I imagine, exactly what you require. — 

 Pall Schctz. Received. — S. G. Your bees have no doubt been 

 both decapitated and eviscerated by Tits, those destructive little 

 birds being among the worst enemies they have. Cockchafers, too, 

 will sometimes destroy them in somewhat similar fashion. — 

 H. G. F. Taylor. I am unable to add to the four names you men- 

 tion, save with those of men who have merely temporarily influenced 

 laro'e masses, such as Peter the Hermit, Savonarola, &c. — Exhibi- 

 tioner. Mr. Twiss must have an intellectual twist of a remarkable 

 description. He might approximately measure the diameter of a 

 carden-roUer by his method; but to acertain that of a cylinder 

 J inch in diameter — for any accurate purpose — in the same way, 

 would be utterly impossible. Plenty of people can ''square the 

 circle" with a two-foot rule and a piece of string; albeit, the 

 actual operation is denaonstrably impracticable. — Reader. The 

 mammae is the male sex, like the os coccyx (or rudimentary tail at 

 the end of the spinal column), the incisor teeth of ruminants 

 which never penetrate the gums, itc, are one and all organs which 

 have become rudimentary from disuse. They were doubtless 

 originally parts acquired by one sex and partially transmitted by 

 inheritance to the other, and afford yet another proof of the evolu- 

 tion — as contradistinguished from the special creation — of species. 

 At a ver\- early embryonic period both sexes possess true male and 

 female glands. Hence in the dimmest ages of the past it would 

 seem that the progenitor of the mammalias — nay, of the whole 

 vertebrate kingdom — must have been hermaphrodite — G. Lacy 

 Hillier. Received.— X. B. T. There is no such (recognised) 

 society as that which yon name. It is absent from the exhaustive 

 list on pp. 221 to 221 of " Whitaker's Almanack." Its title suggests 

 some sort of quackery or paradox. — Alex. Smith. The idea of 

 01bers,that the planetoids are fragments of a larger body which has 

 exploded, has long since suffered that fate itself. Dismissing this, 

 though, bow about the dynamics of your " wobbling " ring — and 

 whence its "wobble"? "See, moreover, pp. 173 to 192 of "The 

 Expanse of Heaven." Some of the most remarkable of the variable 

 stars (judged by the colour-test) are among the very oldest — 

 e.j., T.Cassiopeia?, R. Scnlptoris, R. Doradus, R. Leporis, S. Auriga', 

 s! Orionis, and so on. Are you familiar vrith Pickering's admirable 

 researches on variable stars? — J- Greevz Fishee. Received. — 

 W. G. Reeve. It is impossible for me to make a personal appoint- 

 ment to view your orrery.— Mrs. Robert Langton. I regret my 

 inability to help you. Type-writing is a thing rarely if ever per- 

 formedj if I mav so speak, vicariously. I question if the posses- 

 sion of that accomplishment would be of the smallest use to the 

 young lady, who, by the by, already writes a hand scarcely sur- 

 passed in beauty and legibility by any merely mechanical work. — 

 A. B. As the most absolutely contradictory opinions have been 

 expressed on the question of the influence of sun-spots on terres- 

 trial temperature, it is safest to say that no evidence exists that 

 they affect it at all. — M. M. Heron. The lady to whom your letter 

 is addressed is at present not in England. — T. B. Clapham. Thanks. 

 Perhaps " Our Place among Infinities." — H. Romeke. We number 

 everv scientific journal of repute or standing among our Ust of 

 weekly receipts, and so obtain, at first hand, what you obligingly 

 proffer. — J. T. Routledge. You have hit the blot in Professor 

 Stewart's reasoning (?). Those who argue after this fashion pos- 

 tulate such a perfect knowledge of the entire physical universe as 

 the majority of those whom they address will scarcely credit them 

 with possessing. There would be no insuperable difficulty in show- 

 in" that 2-1-2 = 5 if snch arguments as you quote were valid. — 

 wT H. Harrison. To print your letter would be simply to give to 

 the paper to which it refers a gratuitous advertisement in Know- 

 ledge, for which it has been long striving. Its efforts to provoke 

 me into a discussion to this end have been so transparent as to be 

 amusing ; but I have treated it with a contempt which I am a little 

 surprised to find that you do not seem to share. Why in the world 

 need you or I take the very slightest notice of abuse in a publica- 

 tion of such an order as that ? 



