Nov. 17, 1882.] 



KNOWLEDGE 



397 



k^ MAGAZINE OFFENCE ^ 



|g: PUINUffORDED -£XACTI^I)£SCRIB£D , 



LOXDOJSf: FRIDAY, XOVEMBER 17, 1882. 

 Contents op No. 55. 



PAGE PAGB 



. 397 Leaf-Copying 406 



'" Much Ado about Nothing", 



COEBB 



8cieoce and Art Gossip 



M. Faye on Interplanetary Air ... aay 

 Earthquakes in the British Isles. 



UI 100 



Hair Eels. By Dr. Andrew Wilson, 



F.H.S.E . F.L.S., &c *n 



The Type-Writer. ByE.A. Proctor 403 

 The Amateur Electrician : Electrical 



Measurement. V. (lUuttraUd.) 103 

 Transits o( Venus. {lUiutrateJ.) | Our Whint Col 



by H. A. Proctor 404 i Oor Chess Colu-nn 



Luminous Seas -Milky Sea and 

 Joshua — University of London — 

 Brain Troubles — Intelligence 



^tiemt anil art 



Some of our professedly religious papers are either 

 illogical or rather uncharitable. The Newtoii of biology 

 says (as u-e have said, by the way, since Knowledge was 

 started) that science has nothing to do with the Christian 

 (or any other) religion ; tltrnfore, say they, Darwin 

 objected to Christianity: This is akin to Pat's'logic — " Is 

 not one man as good as another 1 " said the orator. " Of 

 course he is," acquksni' Pat (as he thought), "and a good 

 ■deal better." 



But Darwin accepted no revelation, tlifm'ore either he 

 was an atheist or had unworthy thoughts of God. How if 

 the reverse were the case I if Darwin knew of no w-ords 

 ever written by man which lie thought worthily repre- 

 sented a Being iniinitel y beyond man's conceptions 1 How 

 if he agreed with Elihu, described as approving of Yahveh, 

 in believing that " As touching the Almighty we cannot 

 hnd Him out 1 " He may not have understood the Oriental 

 imagery which ascribes to the Creator the qualities of 

 Oriental despots. His mind, of essentially Western consti- 

 tution, may not have been able duly to grasp these ideas. 

 There are others equally unfortunate ; but we ought not 

 to be angry with them. 



Dk. Freeman says in Longinnn's .Vugnzine that some 

 features of American pronunciation are to be explained by 

 the habit of forming an idea of the pronunciation of words 

 from their appearance as printed. In illustration of this 

 we note that we have heard Burns's line, " A man's a man 

 for a' that," quoted with the "a" sounded " ay ; " and tlie 

 word "pages" in a theatre bill pronounced "paggies." 



Mr. Edison has lately advanced the opinion that fatal 

 accidents from electric currents would continue to increase 

 with the multiplication of over-house wires, carrying power- 

 ful currents, till some dreadful accident occurred to arouse 

 public indignation and compel the placing of all such wires 

 underground. In cases of fire, particularly, the breaking 

 of a great number of wires, which would be thrown down 

 in inextricable confusion by the falling of a roof, might 



have serious results. Mr. Park Benjamin, a weU-known 

 scientific man, has called attention in New York to the 

 fact that a stream of water from a hose nozzle, striking a 

 broken arc-light wire, might easily serve to conduct the 

 current through the body of the fire'man who held the hose, 

 with fatal consequences ; while the cutting of such a wire 

 ^\ ith an axe, particularly if the handle of the axe were wet, 

 might have a like effect. One of our scientific contem- 

 poraries, presumably from sheer ignorance of the dangers 

 which must attend the transmission of strong currents 

 through over-house wires, and of the fatalities already re- 

 corded, absurdly adds, that "if one fireman were to hit 

 another hard over the head with an axe, whether the handle 

 was wet or dry, the man hit would receive a violent shock. 

 Mr. Park Benjamin has curiously enough omitted to call 

 attention to this fact. It would, perhaps, be Ijetter, under 

 the circumstances, either to give up the use of electricity, 

 or else to have no more conflagrations. By either expedient 

 comparative safety would be secured for fire brigades." 

 This may be meant for wit, but we fail to see it. The 

 danger is a real one, and in justice to the public themselves 

 we are constrained to again re-echo the warning. 



The fishing in Sir Joseph Hooker's park at Kew is also 

 good — so his friends say. Ilis enemies, and some who are 

 neither one nor the other, speak in a diSerent way about 

 both the fishing and the shooting. They say it "may be 

 abundant, but it is not altogether the right thing. 



The Garden — we beg his pardon, Sir Joseph's estate — 

 is positively open now to the public for no less than two 

 hours and a quarter on Sundays, on weekdays for three 

 hours and a quarter. 



The gate which was to be blocked up is now only 

 lumbered up, and seems likely so to remain. 



The Xortli Timi>s has suddenly become an ardent (an 

 amazingly ardent) advocate of the most uncompromising 

 school of vivisectionists. After quoting our remark that 

 most of us cannot tolerate the thought of vivisectional 

 experiments "on even the most worthless of human 

 beings,' the Xorth Times remarks that it makes the blood 

 run cold to read these lines, that they are entirely un- 

 christian and irreligious, nay, "constructive blasphemies 

 and appalling outrages on the very name of our common 

 humanity." We are sorry for it; but at the risk of still 

 further hurting our contemporary's feelings, we must repeat 

 that to us, and we believe to most men, the very thought 

 of experiment on human beings, however worthless they 

 may be, and however valuable or dear the lives in whose 

 interests such experiments might be made, is utterly 

 intolerable. We cannot see why this shoidd be considered 

 a "constructive blasphemy" (not that we have the least 

 idea what a constructive blasphemy may be). There may 

 be some recondite reference to the sacrifice of life for life 

 in Christian annals ; but, apart from some such reference 

 (if there is any), we find our contemporary's indignation 

 inexplicable, astounding, almost staggering. Anything 

 more barefaced than this advocacy of the most pronounced 

 views of vivisectionists we have never heard of, and could 

 hardly have believed credible in a civilised community I 



At a recent meeting of the Buda-Pesth Society of 

 Katural Science, Professor Than (a member of the com- 

 mittee appointed to investigate theatre fires) spoke on tlie 

 danger of ordinary gas, and the means of reducing it 



