December 26, 1901] 



NA TURE 



There seems to be no suspicion of fraud in the case of the 

 phenoniena with which Prof. Hyslop is concerned, so ithat, 

 accepting the observations as records of actual occurrences, an 

 explanation of them is required. The physiologist might be 

 able to throw some light upon them, but he is told that the 

 problem has gone far beyond physiology. " Only the psycho- 

 logist can any longer deal with the complexities and signifi- 

 cance of the Piper phenomena.'' Telepathy with its necessary 

 adjuncts is also thrown overboard, and spiritism is held to provide 

 a sufficient hypothesis for the data in hand until a better supersedes 

 it. Upon this view there must be a survival of consciousness 

 after death, in a form which is incomprehensible to materialistic 

 philosophers. Prof. Hyslop defines his position as follows : — 

 "I have given a preference for the spiritistic theory in explana- 

 tion of my alleged facts, in order to force the issue on an impor- 

 tant investigation and in order to devolve upon those who have 

 not accepted any supernormal phenomena at all the duty of 

 rescuing me from illusion." Unfortunately, it is not possible for 

 every investigator to study such psychical phenomena as those 

 described by Prof. Hyslop and thus test the value of the obser- 

 vations, so he usually has little interest in them. 



Two papers on " La preparation industrielle et les prin- 

 cipals applications des Gaz liquefies " are contributed by Prof. 

 E. Mathias to the Revue Geiu'ra/e des Sciences of October 30 and 

 November 15. Within the limits of twenty-eight pages of a 

 review, much of that space being occupied by illustrations, it is 

 impossible for the author to go deeply enough into the details of 

 the subject to make his papers useful to those who have a fair 

 acquaintance with them, and he does not always give the latest 

 models of apparatus described by him. For general readers, 

 however, the papers form a collection of facts and methods 

 which will give them some insight into an interesting branch of 

 work involving a clearer and closer connection than usual be- 

 tween scientific and industrial pursuits. In the first paper Prof. 

 Mathias gives an account of various processes for liquefying the 

 gases employed in refrigeration. In the second he describes 

 and illustrates a number of machines in which the liquids are 

 employed, and the purposes to which the results are or may be 

 applied. In this connection it is to be regretted that the wild 

 schemes of American company promoters are treated with so much 

 respect, side by side with the descriptions of useful refrigerating 

 machines being a serious account of two companies' automobiles 

 designed to work with liquid air, with an illustration of one 

 of them. The author does not give his readers fair guidance by 

 stating that one of these companies is already in liquidation, 

 and th;it neither of them has got better practical results than a 

 specially arranged experin\ental run at a ruinous cost. Those 

 who undertake to instruct the public in these matters with the 

 voice of aut hority ought to make it clear that liquid air will be 

 far too dear for employment as a source of power until an 

 entirely new method of producing it is invented, and that no 

 such method is as yet even in sight. 



A CONSIDERABLE amount of work has been done recently on 

 the ionising properties of liquefied gases, with especial reference 

 to the hypothesis of the connection between the dielectric 

 constant and the dissociating power. An interesting contribu- 

 tion by M. Centnerszwer to this field is contained in the 

 current number of the Zeitschrift fiir physihalische Chemie, in 

 which the conductivity of liquid cyanogen and of anhydrous 

 hydrocyanic acid and of solutions of salts in these is given. In 

 the case of cyanogen, the results of Gore, obtained in 1872, 

 are extended and confirmed. Pure liquid cyanogen was found 

 to have a scarcely measurable conductivity, its solvent power 

 is very slight, and in no case could a proof of dissociation into 

 ions be proved from the conductivity measurements Liquid 

 NO. 1678. VOL. 65] 



hydrocyanic acid proved to have a measurable conductivity, 

 which varied, however, in different experiments. Conductivity 

 measurements were successfully carried out with solutions of 

 potassium iodide and trimethylsulphine iodide, with the result 

 that the solutions were found to possess about four times the 

 conductivity of aqueous solutions of the same salts at equal 

 temperatures and concentrations. In connection with the high 

 value of the dielectric constant, these results furnish a new con- 

 firmation of the views of Thomson and Nernst on the parallelism 

 between the dielectric constant and dissociating power. 



TYCHO BRAHE IN PRAGUE?- 

 ""PHE two papers mentioned below were published by the 

 ^ Bohemian Society of Science on the occasion of the 300th 

 anniversary of Tycho's death. The first one forms a continua- 

 tion of Prof. Studnicka's " Prager Tychoniana," published 

 about a year ago (Nature, Ixiii. p. 206), and gives the titles 

 of about a dozen volumes from Tycho's library which now 

 belong to the University library at Prague. Several of 

 these volumes contain three or four books bound together, 

 with a few leaves of MS. inserted, among which is a MS. 

 of eight pages (reproduced in facsimile) containing the calcula- 

 tion of the horoscope of Andreas Schoner, who is stated to have 

 been born at Nuremberg on June 21, 1530. This is of interest, 

 not only as showing the various steps of the modus operandi of 

 judicial astrology, but also because the date of the younger 

 Schoner's birth has hitherto been unknown (Poggendorff only 

 gives the year 1528). In another volume of mathematical books 

 there is a MS. note to the effect that 7r = 88 : ^785, which value 

 ( = 3'I409) does not seem to occur elsewhere. On the title page 

 of this memoir is a figure of a medal which Tycho caused to be 

 struck in 1595, probably to commemorate the completion of his 

 star catalogue. 



The second paper contains a report on the examination of 

 Tycho Brahe's tomb in the Teyn Church at Prague in June last 

 and on the state of his remains. As it was known that the 

 bodies of some Protestants had been removed from the church 

 after the battle of Prague in 1620 (though nobody has ever 

 alleged that Tycho's tomb had been disturbed), the municipality 

 of Prague allowed the tomb to be opened in order to ascertain 

 whether the great astronomer's bones were still in it. On 

 opening the floor of the church the vault was found to have 

 partly fallen in, so that the two coffins were completely covered 

 with debris and rubbish. We learn from another account (in 

 the journal Das IVeltall) that this is supposed to have happened 

 in 1679, when part of the roof of the church took fire and fell 

 down after being struck by lightning. The two coffins, which 

 were falling to decay, contained the skeletons of a man and a 

 woman, obviously Tycho and his wife, and slight remains of 

 clothing on the former. Tycho's bones were taken out and put 

 in a box in the vestry until a new metal coffin could be provided, 

 but the writer of the report carried off the front part of Tycho's 

 skull (all that was left of it) in order to examine, measure and 

 clean it, whereby he found that the nose showed distinct signs 

 of having been damaged (in the duel in Tycho's youth), while 

 the green colour of the edges of the injured part no doubt wa 

 caused by some composition of copper in the false nose, which 

 in course of time had been completely dissolved. Two illustra- 

 tions give front and side views of the face, and the account 

 Das Wellall gives pictures of the same before and after the 

 cleaning of the remains. Though we are assured in a footnote 

 that everything was done in a dignified manner, this part of 

 the report is painful to read and reminds one too much of the 

 custom in ancient Brittany, where the inhabitants at the solstices 

 or on the anniversary of the death of a relative took his bones 

 out of the tribal ossuary, scraped them and put them back again. 

 The whole proceeding may possibly have been interesting to an 

 anthropologist (though Tycho did not belong to an extinct or 

 otherwise peculiar race), but we think astronomers will be glad 

 to know that their colleagues at the Prague Observatory had 

 no part in this investigation. 



1 Bericht iiber die astrologischen Stitdien des Reforinators der beobath 

 \ tenden Astronomie Tyc/w Brtihe. Von F. J. Studnicka. Pp. 54. (Prag 

 1901.) 

 Bericht itber die Uuterstichiing der Gcbeine Tyciio Brahe's. Von D 

 I H. Matiegka. 'Pp. 14. l(Prag, 1901.) 



