April 29, 1875] 



NA TURE 



507 



under its eastern declivity, were overwheltned with their unfor- 

 tunate occupants, to the number of fifty or sixty, and, to quote 

 the words of an epitaph in St. George's Churchyard descriptive 

 of the event — 



" The wind and sea its fury broke, 

 The wondrous works of God bespoke : 

 Man's dwellings levelled with the ground, 

 When some were killed and some were drowned." 



The grandfather of my informant fared worse still, for he, 

 poor man, "was killed fust and drownded aterwards." I men- 

 tion Leland's report in order to suggest that since his time the 

 inroads of the sea and rivers must have reached flint-bearing 

 strata more prolific than any before attacked. 



The supply of flints at the present day is greater than the loss 

 caused by attrition, and so the Chesd Bank is very gradually 

 creeping up to the height it had acquired at the date of the 

 " Outrage," when the ridge was equally steep on either side, and 

 the present eastern expanse of pebbles had no existence. 



Weymouth, April 2 Thos. B. Groves 



Flowering of the Hazel 



Although in the vast majority of cases the male and female 

 flowers of the hazel, as stated by Mr. Bennett in Nature, 

 vol. xi. p. 466, mature simultaneously on the same bush, with, 

 I think, rather some tendency to begin the shedding of pollen 

 before the expansion of the neighbouring stigmas ; yet I have 

 seen very striking exceptions to this rule, in the same sense as 

 have been formerly recorded in Nature. Thus, on March 5, 1874, 

 I was astonished to find in a neighbouring copse a row of hazel 

 bushes with beautifully expanded stigmas, their male catkins 

 being still in a very undeveloped condition, and other bushes, 

 very near those, had long lost their stigmas — the buds unfolding 

 — while the male flowers were still shedding their pollen. Pro- 

 bably this exceptional " proterogyny " of the hazel is peculiar to 

 individual bushes, and it is to be desired that such bushes may 

 be observed in succeeding years. 



Dr. H. Miiller, in his admirable work on fertilisation of flowers 

 by insects, states that he once observed many honey-bees col- 

 lecting the pollen of the hazel, "but none of them ever sat down 

 on a female flower." However, one can scarcely avoid connect- 

 ing, in a Darwinian sense, the brilliant red colour of the stigmas 

 with the occasional dichogamy and with the bees, often seen 

 collecting the pollen of this shrub, at a season when there is 

 scarcely any other pollen within their reach. 



Frankfort-on-the-Maine, April 26 F. D. Wetterhan 



OUR ASTRONOMICAL COLUMN 

 The Total Solar Eclipse of 1715, May 3.— The 

 circumstances of this eclipse, the last in which totality 

 was witnessed in London, and of which Halley gave so 

 full and interesting an account to the Royal Society, are 

 very closely represented by the following elements, wherein 

 the Greenwich corrections to the principal lunar motions 

 have been incorporated with Leverriei^s Tables of the 

 Sun : — 



Conjunction inR.A. May 2, at 2ih. 52m. 317s. G m.t. 



R.A 39 4'S 2"2-5 



Moon's hourly motion in R. A 38 29 '8 



Sun's „ » f 23-3 



Moon's declination 161630-4 JN. 



Sun's „ «S 32 157 N. 



Moon's hourly motion in Decl 8 123 N. 



Sun's „ „ o 44-5 N. 



Moon's horizontal parallax ''% 



Sun's „ Y 



Moon's true semidiameter 10 3*7 



Sun's ,, J5 5'-3 



The sidereal time at Greenwich mean noon, May 2, 

 ■nas 2h. 39m. 07s., and the equation of time 3m. 23s. 

 additive to mean time. Hence the middle of general 

 eclipse occurred at 2ih. 36m. 46s. ; the central Ime com- 

 menced in long. 46" 54' W. and lat. 31' 58 N and ended 

 in long. 129' 39' E. and lat 54' 3°' '^■■: ^'^^ *e middle of 

 totality took place with the sun on the meridian in long. 

 ^1° 1' E. and lat. 62° i\' N., or on Lake Ladoga. 

 " If we calculate directly from the above elements for the 



position of St. Paul's, we find totality commenced in the 

 metropolis at gh. jm. 5S3. a.m. on May 3, and ended at 

 9h. 9m. 19s., so that the computed duration is 3m. 21s. 

 Halley observed the eclipse from the house of the Royal 

 Society in Crane Court, Fleet Street : he made the dura- 

 tion of totality 3m. 23s., and the middle at gh. 7m. 22s. 

 mean time ; and De Louville, of the French Academy of 

 Sciences, who came over to observe the eclipse, and was 

 with Halley at the time, found the duration of total dark- 

 ness 3m. 22s., or only one second less thin was noted by 

 the latter. The calculation is therefore within 2 sees, as 

 regards continuance of total eclipse, and only 17 sees, later 

 than the observed time of middle, an agreement which 

 has not often been exceeded in predictions of recent 

 phenomena. Again, if by equations of reduction founded 

 upon this direct calculation for St. Paul's, we deduce 

 the circumstances for Greenwich, there results gh. 

 6m. 27s. mean time for beginning of totality, and gh. 

 9m. 39s. for ending, or a duration of 3m. 12s., which is 

 in exact accordance with Flamsteed's observations. 



The track of the shadow across this country will be 

 pretty correctly given by the following figures : — 



North Limit, Central Line. South Limit. 

 Long. Lat. Lat. Lat. 



4° W. 52° 19' 6 50° 37' -8 48° 59' 7 



3 52 4S'0 5' 6 'o 49 27-8 



2 53 16 -2 51 34-1 49 55-8 



I W. 53 44 -2 52 2 -I 50 23 7 



54 12 -I 52 29-9 50 51 -6 



1 E. 54 39. S 52 57 -6 51 19 -4 



Halley concluded that the south limit passed over 

 Cranbrook, in Kent, where "the sun was extinguished 

 but for a moment : " our elements indicate a duration of 

 only seven seconds, and therefo-e the limits must be 

 assigned with consider.ible precision as well as the 

 track of central eclipse. At Northampton, close to this 

 track, the error of calculation is again only two seconds. 

 At Plymouth it was supposed that the totality continued 

 4m. 30s., but it does not appear to have lasted more than 

 about 4m. 6s. in any part of England, and the longest 

 duration would fall on the Norfolk coast, about midway 

 between Cromer and Wells. 



Should any reader be desirous of further examining 

 Halley's table of the circumstances of totality, printed in 

 the Pliihsophicai Transactions, 1715, the following equa- 

 tions of reduction will assist him : — 



Cos. 71/ = 45 4600 -[i'7s;33l sin. ^-(- [i^iog;] cos. /, cos. (£ - oi'28"9) 

 / = 2ih.33m. 2S-9T [208660] sin. !(- -I- [3-36371] sin. / 

 -[3 86ii7]cos./, cos. (Z-h43'2.'-4) 



Here L, the longitude from Gieenwich, is to be taken, 

 positive if east, negative if west ; I is the geocentric lati- 

 tude, and / represents Greenwich mean time ; the quan- 

 tities within square brackets are logarithms. 



In a future column we shall give particulars of the total 

 solar eclipse of 1724, May 22, founded upon elements 

 similarly derived. This phenomenon has an especial 

 interest, as having been the last in which totality was 

 observable in any part of England, and the subject of the 

 description given by Dr. Stukeley in his " Itinerarium 

 Curiosorum." 



The Transit of Venus, 1631, December 7.— It is 

 known that Gassendi at Paris watched attentively during 

 several days, despite of interruption from stormy weather, 

 for the transit of \'enus, which Kepler, on the com- 

 pletion of the Rudolphine Tables, had predicted for the 

 6th of December, 1631, and that his observations were 

 unsuccessful, the first view of the planet upon the sun's 

 disc being reserved for our illustrious countryman Horrox 

 eight years subsequently. Gassendi was able to watch 

 the sun occasionally on the 6th and during the whole 

 morning of the 7th, and it now appears that he very 

 narrowly missed being the first observer of the rare 

 phenomenon of a transit of Venus. We have before us 

 elements of the transit of 1631, carefully deduced from 

 Leverrier's Tables of Sun and Planet. As regards the 



