234 MISCELLANEOUS. 



phenomena of the Polar Lights themselves, especially those which are susceptible 

 of precise measurement and instrumental observation, conspire to verify Faraday's 

 suggestion as to their immediate nature and cause. That they are truly electrical 

 in their nature, an inference rendered so probable by their obvious phenomena, 

 Mr. Brayley considered to be proved by their (electro-magnetic inductive) effects 

 on the magnetic elements ; nothing hitherto known having the power of producing 

 such effects but magnetism itself, and electricity, while no phenomena of the former 

 are luminous, — there is no magnetic light ; — and the absence of atmospheric elec- 

 tricity during the display of the aurora, paradoxical as it may seem, is a necessary 

 consequence, the electricity being absorbed, as it were, by its conversion into the 

 correlate magnetism, or, in other words, ceasing to be statically manifested while 

 being dynamically exerted. Some experimental illustrations of the electrical 

 nature of the Polar Lights were then exhibited, in which the luminous disruptive 

 discharge was taken in exhausted tubes, that is, in excessively rare media, resem- 

 bling in their attenuation the atmosphere itself, at the elevations where the aurora 

 occurs ; one of the tubes, prepared by M. Gassiot, showing the stratified discharge, 

 (originally obtained by Mr. Grove,) recently cited by Humboldt in evidence that 

 the dark spaces in the Aurora may be real, and not merely the effect of contrast. 

 The source of the electricity in these experiments being the apparatus termed the 

 Ruhmkorff coil, the close accordance between them and the natural phenomena 

 was pointed out, in the fact that the electricity was obtained by a process of mag- 

 neto-electric induction, exactly analogous, on the small scale, to the natural process 

 to which, operating in the globe itself, Faraday has referred the electricity m ani- 

 fested in the Polar Lights. The actual influence of the Aurora on the magnetic 

 elements was exemplified by three photographs from the self-registering apparatus 

 at the Kew Observatory, on which the vertical, the horizontal, and the total-force 

 mat^netometers, respectively, had recordered the disturbances produced in them by 

 the Aurora of December 3, 1858. The facts establishing the participation of the 

 Polar Lights in the great law of solar periodicity which it had been the object of 

 the lecturer thus generally to explain, were then briefly stated ; and the conclusion 

 was deduced, that the relation of the periodicity to the electrical causation of the 

 Polar Lights, is simply this, — that the magnetic action of the Sun periodically 

 affects the terrestrial magnetism, which, being converted into electricity by the 

 earth's rotation and moving conductors, agreeably to the theory maintained, exhibits 

 the period in the polar discharges of that electricity. 



MISCELLANEOUS, 



CHINESE BIVERS. 



At a recent meeting of the Geographical Society of London, one of the papers 

 read was entitled " Notes of a Voyage up the Yang-tse-Keang, from Wosung to 

 Han-kow, by Lawrence Oliphant, Esq., Secretary to the Earl of Elgin. With a 

 Chart of the River, by Oapt. Sherard Osborn, R.K, in command of Her Majesty's 

 Ship Furious," We borrow the following abstract of it from the report furnished 

 to the Athenaeum :— The author commented on the importance of the voyage of 

 the Earl of Elgin, in a political, commercial, and geographical sense, and observed 



