102 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. V., No. 104. 



strike the heads of the wedges. The wedges, when 

 all in place, were driven in the proper order to bring 

 the pier back to its original position, and were then 

 fastened by iron spikes driven by a ram-rod dropped 

 through a gas-pipe as a guide. The work was done 

 on the three piers by three divers in ninety days, and 

 three hundred wedges were used. 



— On an obscure passage in the Koran, Mr. W. T. 

 Lynn, late of the Koyal observatory, Greenwich, 

 writes as follows: "In reference to Sir George Airy's 

 letter in the Athenaeum, suggesting that the famous 

 passage in the fifty-fourth Sura of the Koran does not 

 relate to any phenomenal or supposed miraculous 

 appearance in the moon, but to the ordinary semi- 

 lunar phase when she is said, in the language of 

 astronomers, to be dichotomized, perhaps I may 

 quote Mr. Kod well's rendering of the passage: 'The 

 hour hath approached, and the moon hath been cleft. 

 But if the unbelievers see a miracle, they turn aside 

 and say, "magic that shall pass away." And they 

 treat the prophets as impostors, and follow their own 

 lusts; but every thing is unalterably fixed.' 



" This hardly reads like a reference to an ordinary 

 appearance of the moon as a chronological datum. 

 The ' unbelievers ' could surely not speak of that 

 which occurs every fortnight as 'magic;' though 

 many might conclude from previous experience that 

 a peculiar appearance, produced by some meteoro- 

 logical condition, even though of a more remark- 

 able kind than they had seen before, would pass 

 away, and had no prophetical meaning. As to 

 the expression, ' every thing is unalterably fixed,' 

 Mohammed would probably mean that even miracles 

 took place, like ordinary phenomena, by divine ap- 

 pointment. Mr. Kodwell, like Sale, thinks the word 

 translated ' hath been cleft ' may mean ' will be cleft,' 

 the future ' being expressed by the prophetic preter- 

 ite, and the reference being to one of the signs of the 

 last day.' Nevertheless, he admits that the passage 

 may refer to a miracle said to have been wrought by 

 Mohammed ; and this is, I believe, the general im- 

 pression of Mohammedans with regard to it. I well 

 remember travelling many years ago to Oxford with 

 an Egyptian who had some scientific acquaintance 

 with astronomy, and was at the time visiting the 

 English observatories; and, on my remarking that 

 Mohammed laid no claim to miraculous powers, he 

 exclaimed, 'Oh, pardon! il a fait des miracles; il 

 divisa la lune en deux parties, et puis ' — Here my 

 companion broke off his own sentence with a hearty 

 laugh, sufficiently indicating his own scepticism of 

 the alleged miracle. He was evidently about to refer 

 to the later accretions of the story with which I was 

 familiar as given by Gibbon from Maracci ; but he 

 gave the Koran as his authority, and his primary 

 reference was undoubtedly to the passage quoted by 

 Sir George Airy." 



— The Swedish academy of sciences has recently 

 published the results of the measurements of the 

 level of the Baltic, begun in 1750, to decide the con- 

 troversy on the point between Celsius and the German 

 scientific men of his day. The verdict of these hun- 



dred and thirty-four years is that both parties were 

 right, and both were wrong. The Swedish coast has 

 been steadily rising, while that along the southern 

 fringe of the Baltic has been as steadily sinking. The 

 dividing-line, along which no change is perceptible, 

 passes from Sweden to the Schleswig-Holstein coast, 

 over Bornholm and Laland. The northern part of 

 Sweden has risen about seven feet. The rate of ele- 

 vation gradually declines as we go southward, being 

 only about one foot at the Naze, and nothing at 

 Bornholm, which remains at the same level as in the 

 middle of the last century. An example will best 

 illustrate the process. The cliff near Pieta, known 

 as 'Stora Reppen,' was, in 1851, ninety-three centi- 

 metres higher above the water-level than it was in 

 the year 1750; and on the 12th of August, 1884, it 

 was found to be about fifty centimetres higher than 

 in 1851, showing that the rate of elevation had been 

 quickened during the thirty years immediately pre- 

 ceding. The general average result would be that the 

 Swedish coast has risen about a hundred and forty- 

 three centimetres (nearly fifty-six inches) during the 

 last hundred and thirty-four years. 



— Writing to Kosmos from the Brazilian province 

 of Rio Grande do Sul, Dr. H. von Ihreng, in regard 

 to a case of polydactylism in a horse, which came 

 under his own observation, says he has scarcely 

 spoken to any one, who has travelled much in that 

 region, who has not himself met one or more cases of 

 the kind. The extra toes are on the inner side of the 

 fore-feet. The question, he says, forces itself upon 

 one, whether there has not been a survival of the old 

 race of Equus in a few regions, which has escaped 

 the notice of the discoverers and early settlers of the 

 country. "The horse certainly still existed in the 

 Rio Grande during the pleistocene era, as I have re- 

 ceived horse-teeth from alluvial soil which were found 

 in digging a well, and which agree in the very slight- 

 est details with the corresponding teeth of Equus 

 Caballus. It is possible that among the wild horses 

 of South America there are still to be found descend- 

 ants of the native horses of the alluvial." 



— Human skulls and other bones were lately dug up 

 from the kjokkenmoddings at Muyem,^near the Tajo, 

 Portugal, which, judging from the character of the 

 deposits and accompanying fauna, can almost with 

 certainty be ascribed to the quaternary epoch. The 

 earlier race was dolichocephalic. To this belonged a 

 number of skulls of wonderful uniformity, offering 

 so few differences, except of a sexual character, that 

 we have unquestionably to do here with a homoge- 

 neous race. The prognathism of the skulls, and the 

 length of the fore-arm, such as is only met with among 

 negroes, recall at once the African races ; while the 

 capacity of the cranium is so small that it can be 

 compared only with that of the Australian. There 

 are also but few races of so small stature as these old 

 inhabitants of Portugal. Only three brachycephalic 

 skulls were found; and, judging from the organic 

 marks, these belonged to a larger race than the doli- 

 chocephalic. 



