♦ KNOWLEDGE 



[Marco I.'', 1885. 



I am unfortunately ignorant where the patent steel nose-band for 

 horses can be procured. — R. L. Maith (or Marth, or Maiti" ?). The 

 Conductor of this journal simply gare his personal testimony to 

 the }>ona jidcs of a system as far as his experience of it extended. 

 He in no sense whatever can or will accept any respoi.sibility for 

 the acts of its professor towards other people. — Flket-Si"rgeon 

 Bradlky, R.N. See reply to " Ponlton-Ie-Fylde" and " M. J. H." 

 in column two of page IIG of our current volume. — W. 

 PiCKARD. Please read the reply to Dr. Levvins above as 

 addressed to yourself too. — W. H. Godey very kindly seuds 

 the following list of lectures in course of deli%-ery at Derby, 

 under the auspices of the Gilchrist Educational Trust: — Jan. 21, 

 Professor Seeley, on "Ice, and its Work in Earth-shaping"; 

 Feb. 4, Professor Miall, "The Age af Reptiles" ; Feb. 18, Rev. W. 

 Dallinger, F.R.S., " An Hour with the Modern Microscope " ; 

 March 4, Mr. W. Lant Carpenter, " Principles of Electric Lighting" ; 

 March 18, the same lecturer, on " Electrical Storage and Trans- 

 mission"; March 25, Professor Duncan, F.R.S., *' Energies within 

 the Earth : Mountain-making." — C. W. P., who has a 48-in. central- 

 gear Sparkbrook tricycle, geared level, wishes Mr. drowning to 

 tell him whether 5G in. would be too great a height for it to be 

 geared up to, or whether 52 in. would be better. His own height 

 is 5 ft. in., and he is a light-weight. — W. F. Stanley. Unfor- 

 tunately delayed for a week through being addressed to the Editor 

 instead of the Publishers. — Ai'gusti's J. Harvey makes three sug- 

 gestions : 1, That had we compulsory gratuitous national education, 

 the needless waste of money incident in the purchase of a totally 

 new set of books at every fresh school need never take place ; 

 2, that the culture of edible iish in the lakes and rivers of the 

 United Kingdom would add largely to our food supply ; and 3, for 

 the establishment of associated homes, to enable the middle classes 

 to live in palaces instead of small and inconvenient houses. Com- 

 bined with this is a more Utopian scheme still, to which no 

 further reference is needed. — E. C. R., writing from County 

 Meath in connection with Mr. McMeister's letter (1619) 

 on inscribed rocks, suggests a comparison of Mr. M.'s 

 sketch with drawings in a letter of his own (784) on p. 212 of 

 Vol. III. of Knowledge. He alleges that inscribed monuments of 

 this class are more numerous in Ireland than elsewhere ; although 

 they have been found in England, Scotland, and near the shores of 

 the Baltic in a less rude and primitive form of sculpture. At 

 Locmariker, in Brittany, are inscribed stones strongly resembling 

 those of the great tumuli of Newgrange on the Boyne, referred to 

 by cur correspondent in his former letter. He invites attention to 

 the fact that these inscriptions nearly always occur in connection 

 with the burial of the dead. He further urges that drawings of 

 them should bo made for comparison, wherever possible, accom- 

 panied by a description of the kind of monument, locality, &c., 

 and published in some journal of wide popular circulation ; inas- 

 much as (as in the case of the inscribed stones in the Cairns 

 crowning the highest point of the Sliabh na Cailliagh hills in 

 Heath) atmospheric influences sooner or later weather all the 

 incisions down to a dead level. — Ad.\m Clarke Smith. I am 

 extremely unwilling to do anything that shall present even the sem- 

 blance of unfairness, but the insertion of your letter is absolutely 

 impossible. Every question discussed in these columns must be 

 so discussed in its purely scieiitijic aspect. Dogmatic theology 

 is utterly out of place here. Do you not see that if texts are to 

 settle a controversy, there is an end of all argument at once, 

 and that any appeal to reason becomes merely impertinent. If 

 the man of science is to investigate the origin of the human race 

 at all, he can, and must, only do so in the same spirit and by 

 similar methods to tho.se by which he would endeavour to arrive at 

 the genesis of the Tumbler pigeon or the Dachshund. In your 

 laudable efforts to maintain that the (so-called) Mosaic accouut of 

 the Creation is Idstorical and scientifically accurate, you are simply 

 playing into the hands of the Infidel and the scoffer, and giving 

 occasion to the enemy to blaspheme ; inasmuch as it is in glaring 

 contradiction to known and irrefragable facts. Suppose that before 

 dogmatising upon the subject you make yourself acquainted with 

 what is actually knoivn as to primitive man. You could obtain no 

 better primer for the purpose than Joly's " Man before Metals," in 

 the "International Scientific Series." Are you awaro that so 

 earnest a Christian and devout a Catholic as Professor St. George 

 Mivart freely admits the origin of man's existing bodily frame by 

 development ; while yet contending that his spiritual nature is a 

 special endowment ? You see that you cannot even claim a 

 monopoly of Christianity for those who vainly imagine that man- 

 kind have all sprung from a single pair, miraculously placed on the 

 earth some 0,000 years ago. — Tnos. W. Delves. There are two 

 ways of placing tho figures, both perfectly intelligible without 

 a diagram. The first is that universally employed in observatory 

 clocks, in which the hours run from (not 24) right round. Tho 

 second may be adopted to any ordinary watch or clock face by 



painting XIII (in rather smaller figures) under the I, XI \' undcv 

 the II, and so on. This is very simple and inexpensive. — Mars. 

 Write to Trhbner, Lippincott, or any other American scientific 

 bookseller in London about the " Popular Science Monthly," which 

 is published in the United States. They would doubtless supply it. 

 — E. W. Young. Y'ou begin by insisting on the impossibility of 

 our regarding life otherwise than '* as a force inseparable from a 

 living body," and on our total inability to conceive mind apart from 

 a thinking brain. So far your position is unassailable. But whcii 

 you talk about forgetfulness of former events as an enormous 

 change in a man's mind ; and the soul (whatever that may be from 

 a scientific point of view as distinguished from mind) constituting 

 his " identity," you seem to me (forgive tho expression) to be 

 floundering a little. If my entire terrestrial existence is to become 

 tahula lasa, it is assuredly no longer 7 who am to enjoy a future 

 state. Admitting the probability of the existence of life in in- 

 numerable other worlds in the universe, it is hard to see, on your 

 hypothesis, with ivJtat weare to live it. You rememberthe cherubs, 

 in the " Ingoldsby Legends," who "couldn't sit down — for they 

 hadn't dc quoi." — Sigma. Allow me to recommend Scott's. 

 " Elementary Meteorology," in the " International Scientific 

 Series" to your careful perusal. — John A. Stew.\rt. Thanks for 

 Paisley paper duly received. — A. Barxe.s Moss. Will you be good 

 enough to read the italicised paragraph on p. 473, and elsewhere, in 

 the last volume of Knowledge ? — John Silcock asks for an article 

 on the Ornithorhyncus, Echidna, &c., from Mr. Grant Allen. 

 Sec Vol. v., p. 209. The Ornithorhyncus has recently been 

 conclusively proved to be oviparous. — Commentator. Un- 

 doubtedly suns and their attendant orbs are in all stages 

 of formation in various jjaits of the universe, as probably as 

 not the Pleiades, among them. Apart from the intrinsic 

 improbability that any galaxy should be so placed that we 

 should look straight at what you call its " butt end," and the prac- 

 tical impossibility that we should do so in several cases, do you not 

 see that under such circumstances we should have no central con- 

 densation, Ijut a homogeneous mass of light. Both Brewster and 

 Mitchell were wrong as to their facts. Spectrum analysis was 

 as unknown to the latter as the Queen's great grandchild. 

 You can hardly describe a body like the sun, with its torrents 

 of metallic rain, &c., as " a mass of glowing gas," in the 

 sense in which a nebula can be so spoken of. The beat proof 

 we have that our sun, if removed to the distance of Sirius, would 

 continue to exhibit the same spectrum that he does now, is found 

 in the fact that Vega and other stars, no less than Sirius, exhibit 

 the hydrogen spectrum, while those of Arcturus, &c., conform to 

 the type of our own sun. Get the " Catalogo delle Stelle, di cui si 

 o determinato lo spettro luminoso," by the late Father Secehi, 

 published by Gauthier-Villars, Paris. You are mistaken in sup- 

 posing that nebuUe are necessarily more remote than isolated stars. 

 Some of them are doubtless nearer to us. Y'our question as to 

 " what direction " the constellations are moving in is practically 

 meaningless, since parts of them are moving in one direction, parts 

 in another, and there is no up nor down. East, West, North, or 

 South, ill space. The term "fixed stars" is a convenient conven- 

 tional one. They are called "fixed" to distinguish them from the 

 appreciably moving planets. The night sky that Hipparchus. 

 looked out upon differs but little indeed from that visible as I write. 

 — "Hallvard.s. There is a double star composed of two seventh 

 magnitudes, some 3" apart, in the spot you now indicate, which, 

 if visible at all, would, of course, affect the eye as a single very 

 minute point of light. It is 559 in Otto Struve's catalogue. 1 

 stand almost appalled at the infinity of space, but its contemplation 

 scarcely affects me in the way you indicate. The use of science under 

 the conditions postulated is to add to the know leilge and power of the 

 human race, of which we form but infinitesimal atoms. An 

 individual cell in an oak absorbs liquid and gas, and assimi- 

 lates them, only to die ; but it helps to build up a glorious 

 tree notwith-tanding. — Anonymous Correspondents send me the 

 E.reler and Pltjinonth Gazette, and the Himtlc'j Exjvess, the latter 

 containing a marked paragraph, in which (I trust unintentionally)" 

 a grossly inaccurate rendering of Professor Huxley's views is given, 

 founded on a short isolated sentence, picked out of an essay of his 

 written two-and-twenty years ago. Impartial people, with no pre- 

 conceived ideas to support, are apt to speak a little rudely of this 

 sort of garbling. — The Author of "Whi.^t or Bumblepufpy." I 

 have received your tiny Tolume, which (if breathing a little of the 

 spirit of that pre-genetic race of whom Courier alleged that at 

 the creation they exclaimed, " Mon Dieu, conservcns le Chaos ! ")■ 

 is as witty and entertaining as anything I have read for a long 

 time. Fearing to " rush in where angels fear to tread," I have 

 sent it straight on to the Conductor. — Sampson Low, Marston, 

 & Co. Delayed for nearly a week through its having been 

 addressed to a former private residence of the Conductor of Know- 

 ledge, instead of to this oflice. 



