
NATURE 
47 

_‘-year 1715, at least it is most highly probable, from ¢izs peculiar 
__ circumstance, that no ancient writer zwatever has taken any 
notice of them, nor even any exe modern, previous to the above 
riod.” 
# The words restored are those italicised. The passage, as it 
came from Dr. Langhorne, is excusable for the knowledge dis- 
played, but cut up asit is by the moderz editor, shows great 
lack of it ; and more than this, the honesty is not what eyery one 
would admire. Both, however, are incorrect. Dr. Halley, in 
_ the Phil. Trans., No. 347, page 406, gives a history of auroral 
observations, and for the information of “C. P.” I have ex- 
tracted a few particulars showing that the ‘northern lights have 
_ been observed and recorded long before 1715. 
The first account, says Dr. Halley, recorded in English annals 
is that of the appearance which was noticed January 30, 1560, 
and called ‘‘ Burning Spears,” by the author of a hook entitled 
“* A Description of Meteors,” by W. F., D.D. London: 1654. 
The next of a like kind was the appearance recorded by Stow, 
which occurred on October 7, 1564. 
In 1574, Camden and Stow inform us, an Aurora Borealis 
was seen for ¢wo successive nights, viz., the 14th and 15th of 
~ November, with appearances similar to those observed in 1716, 
_ and which are not commonly noticed. The same phenomenon 
was twice seen in Brabant in 1575, viz., on the 13th of February 
and the 2Sth of September, and the circumstances attending it 
were described by Cornelius Gemma, who compares them to 
spears, fortified cities, and armies fighting in the air. In the 
year 1580, M. Mastline observed these phasmata, as he cails 
_ them, at Baknang, in the county of Wurtemburg, in Germany, 
no less than seven times in the space of twelve months ; and 
again at several different times in 1581. On September 2, 1621, 
the same phenomenon was seen all over France; and it was 
particularly described by Gassendus in his ‘‘ Physics,” who gave 
it the name of ‘‘ Aurora Borealis.”” Another was seen all over 
Germany in November 1623, and was described by Kepler. 
Since that time, for more than eighty years we have no ac- 
count of any such phenomenon either at home or abroad. In 
_ 1707 Mr. Neve observed one of small continuance in Ireland. 
In the years 1707 and 1708 this sort of light had been seen no 
less than five times. 
There is not the least doubt in my mind that the commentator 
of Collins must have been wholly ignorant of the literature of 
scientific records, else he would never have said what he did on 
_ the lines in question. 
; In the Orkneys the Northern Lights are known by the name 
of the ‘‘merry dancers.” ~ And it is not at all surprising among 
an unphilosophical people, that this, one of the grandest phe- 
nomena in nature, should be the subject on which the imagina- 
_ tion fondly dwells. 
The various conflicts of Odin may probably have been sug- 
gested by the dancing and flickerings of these Lights. 
Inthe ‘‘ Prosa Edda” there is a direct allusion to the Aurora 
- Borealis ; at least, the translation given in Mallett’s “ Northern 
Antiquities,” edited by J. A. Blackwell (1847), page 404. It 
says :—‘‘ From his skull,” continued Thridi, “‘they formed the 
_ Heavens, which they placed over the earth, and set a dwarf at 
the corner of each of the four quarters. These dwarfs are called 
East, West, North, and South. They afterwards took the 
_ wandering sparks and red hot flakes that had been cast out of 
Muspellheim, and placed them in the Heayens, both above and 
below, to give light unto the world, and assigned to every other 
errant coruscation a prescribed locality and motion.” 
If by ‘“‘errant coruscation ” he meant all the metcoric 
phenomena including the Northern Lights, then we have in this 
_ **Edda” the most ancient record of this observation. 
# JOHN JEREMIAH 
43, Red Lion Street, Clerkenwell, Nov. 4 







































wR 
, 

Hereditary Deformities 
—_- Tue following instance cf hereditary deformity is taken from 
Mr. L. W. Dulwyn’s ‘‘ Materials for a Fauna and Flora of 
_ Swansea and the Neighbourhood” (Swansea, 1848), a privately 
printed and therefore little known book. It will be seen that 
the evidence respecting the origin of the malformation is not 
conclusive : “‘ In 1804 there was in the Neath Valley a remark- 
able breed of a sort of sheep-dog, with nothing more than a 
flat depression, about half an inch broad, between the nostrils, 
and was said to have originated in a bitch which had her nose 
longitudinally cloven by some accident. The breed retained this 
deformity forseveral years, but I believe it is now extinct.” 

The same hook contains the following very remarkable illus- 
tration of the dispersion of species by means of oceanic currents : 
“On the sandy sea-shore, opposite the race-course on Crumlyn 
Burrows, and more than a mile from any sort of house or garden, 
Mr. L. L. Dillwyn, in 1839, found a thriving young plant of 
Yvect gloriosa, and it had all the appearance of having risen 
from a seel which the tide had cast there. Notwithstanding its 
exposed situation, and the looseness of the soil, this native of 
Carolina was not materially injured by the unusually severe 
winter of 1840-1, and Mr, Moggridge informs me that for two 
or three years it continued to thrive, till it was destroyed by a 
heap of shingle, which a violent storm and high tide threw over 
IE. RG: 
London, Nov. 7 
Fertilisation of Plants 
Witit candle in hand I have pored through all that you have 
printed of the speeches delivered by the members of the British 
Association at Liverpool, till I made a full stop at page 482, 
where I found ‘‘ Observations on Protandry and Protogyny in 
British Plants, by A. W. Bennett, F.L.S.—The arrangement 
of the reproductive organs in hermaphrodite plants, the presence 
in the same flower cf both pistil and stamens, suggested to the 
minds of theolder botanists no other idea than that of self- 
fertilisation. It is, however, now gererally admitted that even in 
hermaphrodite flowers, cross-fertilisation is the rule, self-fertilisa- 
tion the exception. Two sets of facts have been especially 
observed—-in particular by Darwin in this country, Hildebranit 
in Germany, and Delpino in Italy—to favour cross-fertilisation 
in hermaphrodite flowers, the phenomena of dimorphism and 
trimorphism, and the special arrangements which render it easier 
for the pollen to be brushed off by insects visiting the flowers 
than to fall on its own stigma.” I cannot understand what this 
special arrangement which renders it easier for the pollen to be 
brushed off by insects visiting the flowers, can mean, when 
applied to the flowers of our forced peaches, French beans, &c., 
in blossom during the dark months of December, January, 
February, and March, when there is no insect on the wing. 
As I do not keep bees in my garden, and there are none 
kept within a mile of it, and if there should a swarm of bees 
take up an abode near us, I destroy it, my peaches blossom and 
set their fruit without the assistance of the bee or any other 
insect. It is the sun that sets the blossoms, so to speak, and 
consequently we make the best use of every gleam of sunshine 
that by chance may visit the earth during the blooming time of 
our forced ‘‘ things.” 
From this fact it must be evident that the Creator did not leave 
the all-important functions of the fertilisation of flowers to the 
insects which are simply in search of food, though it amuses our 
great thinking and closely observing philosophers to try to assure 
us plodding practicals of our sheer ignorance in the modus 
operandi of the fertilisation of hermaphrodite flowers. 
That insects disperse the pollen of flowers there cannot be a 
doubt. Neither is there a doubt that hermaphrodite flowers 
fertilise their own pistils during the dark months of winter, with- 
out the presence of plundering insects. An industrious morpho- 
logist might find much employment in an early forced peach- 
house, in flower, say in January, on which the sun may not have 
gleamed since the first blossom opened. A PEACH-GROWER 
[Our correspondent should read the article in Nature, No. 1, 
by Mr. Bennett, ‘‘On the Fertilisation of Winter Flowering 
Plants,” which he will find to be in accordance with his own 
views. —Zd. ] 
Chip Hats 
IN the last number of NaTuRt it is stated that palm-leaf was 
formerly imported to St. Alban’s for the purpose of making chi 
hats. Allow me to state that the trade has never ceased. Large 
quantities of palm-leaf are imported under the name of ‘‘ Brazi- 
lian grass,” and many persons are constantly employed in St. 
Alban’s and the villages around in plaiting these hats, principally 
for exportation. They are called gvass hats. 
Kew, Noy. 16 F, H. Hooker 
The Electric Telegraph and Earthquakes 
THE use of the electric telegraph for recording earthquakes is 
not so new as the Zcke (quoted in your last number, p. 35) 
supposes. Dr. Hector, Director of the Geological Survey, 
has, ever since the last great conyulsicn>, systematically 
