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POPULAR SCIEIsrOE NEWS. 



[JUNE, 1888. 



one or more of these, which are so familiarly 

 associated with "the opening 3'ear." We 

 need not therefore suspect that the sage of 

 St. Albans is masquerading under the guise of 

 the Stratford dramatist when we find the latter 

 writing in the Wiiiter's Tale (iv. 3) : — 



" When daffodils begin to peer, 

 Then comes In the sweet o' the year." 



But Bacon specifies the very month in which 

 violets, and blue violets (think of that!), as 

 well as daffodils and daisies, appear ; for he 

 says : " In March there come violets, especially 

 the single blue, which are earliest, the j-ellow 

 daffodil, the daisy," etc. Can it be other than 

 the same man Who in Love's Labour's Lost 

 (v. 2) alludes to " daisies pied and violets 

 blue," and in the Winter's Tale (iv. 3) to 



"Daffodils that come before the swallow dares, 

 And take the winds of March with beauty " ? 



And must we not exclaim with Leonato in 

 Much Ado (iv. 1 ) : — 



"Confirm'd, confirm'd ! O, that is stronger made, 

 Which was before barr'd up with ribs of iron!" 



when we actually find both Bacon and Shake- 

 speare referring to lilies in April and roses in 

 May? Moreover, Bacon goes so far as to 

 connect roses with " a morning's dew ; " and 

 in the Taming of the Shrew (ii. 1) is there not 

 writ, " Clear as morning roses newly washed in 

 dew"'i And j-et there be obstinate folk who 

 will persist in saying that here we have two 

 writers instead of one ! And they both call 

 violets "sweet," and honeysuckles also; and 

 both speak of '■'■velvet loaves; " and both of 

 flowers opening and closing when the sun 

 shines or is overcast. We have quoted nearly- 

 all the examples given bj- Mrs. Pott under this 

 head. She adds: "N.B. — Simple as these 

 observations seem, they were new in the days 

 of Bacon." We will not waste space in dis- 

 proving this amazing assertion. 



Under " Medicine " no examples are given. 

 We have onlj^ the general statement that 

 " there is scarcely any thing pointed out by Dr. 

 Bucknill in his Medical Knowledge of Shake- 

 speare which is not seen to have been the 

 subject of Bacon's notes and lucubrations." 



Under " General Science " we read : — 



Not only Bacon's theories, but his scientific 

 errors, are in the plays. In his early works he 

 spoke of heat as a kind of matter, of which one 

 mass could displace another, and of which two 

 masses could not mix (Nat. Hist., i. 31; Novum 

 Organon, xiii. 34). So in the plays, "One heat 

 another heat expels" (T. G. of V., ii. 4), " One 

 fire burns out another's burning" (K. John, i. 2), 

 " As fire drives out fire " {J. Ccesar, iii. 1, etc.). 



It is sufficient to say that the passages from 

 Shakespeare are in no sense " scientific," but 

 simply' allusions to the old-fashioned homoeo- 

 pathic treatment of a burn by holding it near 

 the fire, as unlettered folk had done long be- 

 fore Bacon's nonsense about "heat as a kind 

 of matter " had been put in print. 



In the Natural History (iii. 29) we read: 

 "For cold we must stay till it cometh." In 

 King John (v. 7) the fevered monarch 



" And none of you will bid the winter come, 

 To thrust his icy fingers in my maw," etc. 



This is an apt example of Mrs. Pott's intro- 

 ductory remark, that " the plays may be 

 elucidated by a study of Bacon's scientific 

 works." Bacon the poet makes the king com- 

 plain because his servants do not " bid the win- 

 ter come " in the middle of October ; Bacon the 

 philosopher makes it clear how unreasonable 

 John was. He couldn't have the icy weather 

 at that time of year : science declares that 

 " for cold we must stay till it cometh." " How 

 charming is divine philosophj'," as Milton ex- 

 claims, especially when it "elucidates" the 

 obscurities of poetry ! How much easier read- 

 ing Browning's poems might have been if Bacon 

 had only lived to write them ! The " parallel- 

 isms " in his philosophical works would have 

 poured a flood of light into their most abysmal 

 obscurities. 



There are some astounding coincidences in 

 acoustical science in the two Bacons. He of 

 St. Albans remarks: "One of the strangest 

 secrets is, that the whole sound is in ever^^ part 

 of the air ; " and he of Stratford several times 

 refers to music "in the air" {Tempest, i. '2, 

 iii. 2 ; and Ant. and Cleo., iv. 3). The follow- 

 ing (which we give verbatim, italics and all, as 

 Mrs. Pott puts it) is perhaps even more ex- 

 traordinary : • — 



For Bacon's study "of articulate sounds of the 

 voice of man throu(/h chinks and crannies . . . and 

 if you speak at the farther side of a close tvall " (^N. 

 H., 314, 321; see M. N. D., iii. 1, 65, vi. 130-211, 

 apropos to Pyramus and Thisbe). 



If this were printed as a burlesque of the 

 Baconians, who would doubt its being a bur- 

 lesque? The clowns' interlude in the Mid- 

 summer-Night's Dream is a burlesque ; but 

 when Bacon wrote it he could not entirely sink 

 the scientist in the dramatist, and the amorous 

 confidences of Pj'ramus and Thisbe through 

 Wall's parted fingers must find their perfect 

 "elucidation" in the " stud3' of articulate 

 sounds " in the Natural History. 



We can give but one more pair of quotations 

 under this head ; and we solemnly assure the 

 reader that this also (italics and all) is from 

 Mrs. Pott, not a malicious joke of our own : — 



"Aristotle dogmatically assigned the cause of 

 generation to the sun " {Nov. Org., ii.) 



Hamlet (to Polonius). " Have you a daughter? 

 . . . Let her not walk in the sun. Conception is a 

 blessing, but not as your daughter may conceive." 



Mrs. Pott's 20th " reason " reads thus : — 



That where there are several editions of tlie same 

 play. Bacon's increased knowledge and new inter- 

 ests will be seen reflected in the latter edition, 

 though they are absent from the earliest edition. 



The first scientific illustration under this 

 heading is as follows : — 



The study of " The Winds " does not appear in 

 the earlier editions of Hamlet; the poet had not 

 made up his mind to make use of them until he 

 prepared the edition of 1605. 



Hence the expression, "as the winds give 

 benefit," is not used by Laertes in i. 3 in the 

 1603 edition, but appears first in 1605. So in 

 the former edition Hamlet (v. 2) says, "By 

 my troth, methinks 'tis very cold ; " but in the 

 latter he says, " No, believe me, 'tis very cold ; 



the wind is northerly." Whether nowadaj's 

 a man's remarking that " the wind is north- 

 erly " would indicate that he had been making 

 a special study of the winds, or writing a sci- 

 entific treatise thereupon, we cannot say ; but 

 that we should have missed this anemological 

 addition to Hamlet's comment on the weather 

 if Bacon, between 1603 and 1605, had not 

 turned his mighty mind to ventose investiga- 

 tion, is clear as proofs of hoh- writ — unless 

 Mrs. Pott is mistaken. 



The above are fair specimens of these care- 

 fully selected "parallelisms" of a scientific 

 character which Mrs. Pott finds in the works 

 of Bacon and Shakespeare. The}' are of a 

 piece with those cited in illustration of the rest 

 of her " 32 Reasons." And Mrs. Pott is the 

 ablest advocate of the Baconian theory in Eng- 

 land (and, aside from this monomania, a very 

 bright woman), as Judge Holmes is in this 

 countr3-. 



[Special correspondence of the Popular Science News.] 

 PARIS LETTER. 



Two newly appointed professors have recently 

 delivered their inaugural address. The one. Pro- 

 fessor Ch. Richet, appointed professor of physi- 

 ology to the Paris Medical School, is already well 

 known to students as a lecturer and as the author 

 of many good works and interesting experiments. 

 The other is M. Th. Ribot, appointed professor of 

 experimental psychology in the College of France 

 by the energy of M. G. Renaii. Professor Ribot's 

 appointment was opposed by the old school of psy- 

 chology, and energetically advocated by the young 

 one, the disciples of Spencer's, Bain's, and Wundt's 

 schools of the modern psychology. M. Ribot is a 

 very able writer and psychologist, who has done 

 a great deal for the dis.«emination of knowledge 

 concerning the modern English and German psy- 

 chology in France, and thus rendered good service. 



M. J. Dis GuERNE is about to publish a very in- 

 teresting work concerning the results of his investi- 

 gations with the Prince of ^lonaco in zoology and 

 marine biology. In this work a very good chapter 

 concerns the manner in which the author supposes 

 the Azores to have been peopled. The general 

 character of the Azorean fauna is quite European. 

 Among Coleoptera, eighty-two per cent are Euro- 

 pean, the remainder being American or belonging 

 to other parts of the Atlantic. A single species of 

 birds is special to the Azores, but among mollusks 

 over a half of the species is peculiar to these islands. 

 The sweet-water fauna is entirely European, save 

 three or four species. M. de Guerne notices that 

 the geographical distribution of aquatic species (of 

 fresh water) is much wider in the Azores than in 

 many parts of the Continent. This he explains on 

 tlie ground that the .\zorean species are nearly or all 

 of types that are easily disseminated. To the wind 

 itself M. de Guerne ascribes but a feeble part in 

 the process, and believes that most has been done 

 by birds. He shows that many eggs of inverte- 

 brated animals are easily taken up by the feathers 

 of aquatic birds, and that these eggs will easily 

 withstand a long drought, and develop when favora- 

 ble circumstances recur; that is, when the bird 

 again alights in a stream or lake. Birds also help 

 in dispersing animals, mollusks especially, which 

 cling in some way or other to their legs, or are 

 embedded in the mud which is frequently found 

 on their feet or feathers, as Darwin has seen. 

 M. de Guerne does not feel inclined to consider the 

 fauna of the Azores as bearing any Alpine character, 



