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Fan. 26, 1882] — 
NATURE 
289 
| style which, to say the least of it, is clumsy, and which in 
many places is so unique as to be almost ludicrous. Prof. 
Guthrie calls every thing either a stuf or a ching, for 
instance, clay is a stuff and a brick is a thing, so then he 
goes on to tell what stuffs are and how they are made into 
things. The different subjects are very carefully arranged 
in chapters and paragraphs, and questions are given which 
would prove very useful for a class. Some of the descrip- 
tions of common objects are graphic, in other cases there 
is rather too much brevity employed. 
A Lady's Cruise in a French Man-of-War. By C.F. 
Gordon Cumming. Two vols. Map and Illustrations. 
(Edinburgh and London : Blackwood, 1882.) 
THOSE who have read Miss Gordon Cumming’s ‘“ At 
Home in Fiji,” recently reviewed in these pages, will be 
glad to meet with her again, The present work is more 
slight and sketchy than the former, but no less interesting. 
‘It consists of a series of letters written from day to 
day during a cruise on board a French man-of-war, in 
the autumn of 1877. Miss Cumming was the guest of 
the French Bishop of Samoa, and accompanied him on his 
visits to the churches on various South Sea Islands. In 
this way she visited the Tonga, Samoa, and the Society 
Islands, making a specially long stay in Tahiti, and every- 
where received with the warmest hospitality. Besides 
the genuine interest of Miss Cumming’s narrative, it is 
valuable as giving a very full idea of the present condition 
of the islands visited. She has also a naturalist’s eye for 
geology and botany, and has occasional interesting notes 
on the products of the islands. The cover of her book 
is a novelty, and its delicate colours make one afraid to 
handle it. It bears a coloured illustration of the beautiful 
climbing fern, which twines round trees and shrubs in 
the Pacific Islands, and is called by the natives “Wa 
Kalou” (God’s Own Fern). 
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 
[The Editor does not hold himself responsible for opinions expressed 
by his correspondents. Neither can he undertake to return, 
or to correspond with the writers of, rejected manuscripts, 
; No notice is taken of anonymous communications. 
[The Editor urgently requests correspondents to keep their letters 
as short as possible. The pressure on his space is so great 
that it is impossible otherwise to ensure the appearance even 
of communications containing interestine and ncvel facts. | 
. The Mid-day Darkness of Sunday, January 22 
It is to be hoped that you will receive many and good 
“accounts of the wonderful, perhaps unprecedented darkness 
which obscured London for some three hours on Sunday last, 
in order that its range may be localized. 
It appears to have commenced about 10} A.M., though I 
cannot vouch for it, as I had been up till near dawn, and was 
“not roused till near noon. Then truly it was hard to believe 
the clock! To all practical intents and purposes it was night ; 
only the street lamps remained unlit. This however enabled 
one to realize more fully the wonderful absence of all ordinary 
daylight in the streets. After the first surprise, it occurred to 
“me to note such facts as would hereafter constilute evidence. 
In the first place I sought to establish that the phenomenon was 
not an ordinary thick London fog; secondly, to find some 
striking measure of the darkness, in one’s immediate vicinity. 
A third observatiow offered itself in corroboration of both, 
These I will give in detail. 
Looking out of a firsr-floor window, eastwards, I had on the 
right towards the south thesharp tall spire of Langham Church, 
clearly visible (at a distance of 65 yards) against the darkly 
lurid background afforded by the distant fog behind, which 
must have been the sun, then near the meridian and at about 
the proper elevation, but of course quite invisible. The clear- 
‘ness of the outline showed how slight was the fog—at any 
rate below the level of its apex. Next, looking across: the 
street, fourteen yards from wall to wall, the gas-lit interiors 
opposite were all plainly visible—blinds not being down, nor 
_ curtains drawn, in London, during the daytime, even if the gas 
is lit. It was obvious that there was no fog to speak of. Next, 
as to the darkness: I say that the street lamps were not lit ; 
consequently this observation was easy. I remarked that though 
one could ear the passers-by on the opposite pavement, they 
were guite invisible. I could only see the lower limbs as they 
crossed the dim lights in the opposite basement windows. Lastly, 
looking northwards, where a turn of the street brings a line of 
four-storied houses across the line of sight, at forty-five yards 
distance, many of the windows where the occupants were not at 
church, being lighted from within, were easily seen; but there 
was not the faintest sky-line: the sky, or rather background of 
foggy air, was utterly devoid of illumination. The windows 
alone stood in evidence that there were houses there, #of 
obscured by fog. 
Finally, so strong was the impression of mere darkness that, 
haying sat down to write, I started up and went again to the 
window, with the ejaculation—‘‘ Why, one ought to see the 
stars !”” and I should hardly have been otherwise than satisfied 
if I Aad seen some. 
Others may have seen this kind of thing in London before. 
Certainly I have not ; and I have a strong impression that if it 
had happened on a week day, instead of on a Sunday during 
the morning service, we should have had a storm of complaints 
from the City, which even the Z%es would have noticed ! 
1, Langham Street, January 24 J. HERSCHEL 
Earth-Currents 
A REMARKABLE and unusual sudden appearance of earth 
currents occurred between 10.15 and 10.20 p.m, Greenwich 
time on the evening of January 19, on lines running east and 
west. They disappeared as rapidly as they arrived. They were 
weak, measuring, when at a maximum, 3.3 milliamperes. Traces 
remained until 10.50. It will be interesting to learn if simul- 
taneous disturbances occurred in our magnetic observatories. I 
have not heard of any aurora being visible that night. 
January 24 W. H. PREECE. 
The Storage of Electricity 
WE have heard a great deal of late in reference to what is 
called the storing of electricity, and not long since we had a long 
account in the Z7zzes of the journey from Paris to Scotland of a 
gentleman who carried with him a number of cells ‘‘ filled with 
electricity,” and representing ‘‘ hundreds of thousands of foot- 
pounds of force.” The daily papers and the scientific serials 
have vied with each other in telling how electricity can be stored, 
or bottled up and transported from place to place, to be drawn 
upon as circumstances may demand, The result is that the 
majority of those practically unacquainted with the subject have 
very false ideas as to the nature of the Planté, the Faure, or the 
Sutton accumulators. In no sense of the word can these beautiful 
forms of batteries be called storeis of electricity. A man who 
should carry with him a piece of copper, a piece of zinc, and a 
little sulphuric acid, and should then boast that he was transporting 
electricity from place to place, or carrying half-a-dozen thunder- 
storms in his pocket, would be rightly regarded as committing 
an abuse of language. A man who carries a box of lucifer 
matches in his pocket has no right to say he is transporting fire 
from place to place, or to speak of them as storers or accumu- 
lators of fire. In like manner it is an abuse of language, to 
speak of electricity being carried from place to place, or stored 
up for future use in the Faure secondary battery. Nor is it less 
incorrect, or less misleading to speak of ‘‘ charging” such bat- 
teries with electricity. The dynamo machine may render the 
amalgamated lead and copper of a Sutton battery capable of 
being unequally acted upon by sulphuric acid, and of thus giving 
rise to an energetic current of electricity, and the reversing action 
of such batteries is undoubtedly very beautiful and certain to be 
of the greatest possible practical convenience, but there is nothing 
in the principle of their action to justify the very misleading 
language used in reference to them, not only by writers to the 
provincial press but by scientific men in high-class journals. 
Practical electricians understand generally perfectly well what 
they mean by the figurative language they use, but it would be 
well, if in lectures and articles of a didactic nature, or intended 
for the information of the general public, they were to use 
language of a less metaphysical character and to describe a thing 
as‘it really is. It is because as a teacher I know how apt people 
are to give’a concrete significance to abstract or figurative expres~ 
