HARDWICKE" S SCIENCE-GOSSIP. 



17 



chief electrician to our General Post Office. For 

 many years past the special department of electrical 

 communication he has worked at, has been that of 

 induction. Naturally we should expect that a 

 brilliant electrician of Mr. Preece's fame, so largely 

 controlling the commercial correspondence of the 

 great British Empire, would turn his attention to any 

 great electrical interferences with the wires. Every 

 telegraph boy is aware that at every country post- 

 office, where a sixpenny telegram occasionally 

 comes, when there is a violent thunderstorm they 

 cannot telegraph. This is due to the more 

 powerful induction, overcoming the weakly genera- 

 tion of artificial batteries, by the fearfully more 

 intense batteries of the world outside. 



Hitherto we have trusted for our electric com- 

 munications to our wires, but Professor Preece, 

 " aware that induction often overcame conduction, has 

 for three years past been experimenting along various 

 parts of the British coast, with a view to seeing 

 whether communications proceeding along chief 

 main telegraph wires, could not be inductively 

 flashed to, and understood by, the lightships moored 

 along the coast, without the intervention of a wire. 

 In other words, the future history of telegraphy will 

 not be along wires, but from wire to wire. 



Probably Dr. Preece's discovery, which cannot 

 fail to be considered and taken up in every part of 

 the civilised world, is one of the most eventful 

 epochs in telegraphic communication, and there is no 

 question whatever, that within the next twelve months 

 we shall hear more and learn more concerning it. 

 It is a singular fact, that although many commercial 

 people apparently appear not to have too much 

 direct communication with each other, they all seem 

 as if they would like to wire one to the other if 

 necessity requires it. . 



An English king is said to have died from eating 

 too many lampreys. This eel-like fish is one of the 

 lowest organised, zoologically speaking, of the fish 

 family, and as an object of food is now seldom 

 sought after, if ever partaken of. It has a large 

 geographical distribution, there being few tidal 

 rivers in the world up whose waters it does not 

 migrate. To a philosophical naturalist, extensive 

 geographical distribution suggests that the animals 

 widely distributed must have had an ancient ancestry, 

 inasmuch as many physical changes on the surface of 

 the earth are required to distribute animals and 

 plants. As a matter of fact, it is taken for granted 

 that any group of living beings now found removed 

 from each other in different parts of the globe, must 

 have been thus transferred from point to point, 

 during those geological periods which demanded 

 such a vast amount of time. Iodeed, this idea is 

 ■now so largely accepted that a widely-distributed 

 organism is expected to have a geological ancestry, 



even if nothing representing it has been found as a 

 fossil. There is an illustration in point concerning 

 the lampreys. At a recent meeting of the Linnsean 

 Society, Mr. A. Smith Woodward exhibited some 

 specimens of fossil lampreys from the old red 

 sandstone of Caithness, in Scotland (that wonderful 

 storehouse of primeval fossil fishes, which poor Hugh 

 Miller was the first to make known to the world). 

 Fossil lampreys had not previously been known to 

 occur in formations older than the tertiary period. 



Professor Lebour, of Newcastle-on-Tyne, has 

 just made a most important communication and 

 explanation, equally interesting to astronomers and 

 geologists, concerning the so-called "canals" of 

 the planet Mars. It is many years since the 

 distinguished Italian astronomer, Schiaparelli, an- 

 nounced the discovery of a so-called " canal system " 

 upon the surface of our . neighbour planet. Since 

 then this idea has caught on to such an extent, 

 that when Mars approached nearer the earth during 

 last summer than it has been for years past, or will 

 be for years to come, some foolish people, inoculated 

 with a Jules Verne kind of idea, who took it for 

 granted that the canals were the construction of 

 some sort of intelligences equivalent to human 

 beings, thought it would be a good thing if we could 

 telegraph from our earthly planet to our supposed 

 neighbours in their martial world, and inquire of 

 them in some sort of scientific way, who they were, 

 and how they were getting on. 



Let us draw attention to the fact that the worlds 

 (suns, stars, moons, etc.) were not all made at once. 

 When we were lads, studying science on our own 

 account, people who were astronomically inclined 

 thought that suns, moons, and planets were all 

 inhabited by intelligent beings. Indeed, in clear old 

 Dr. Dick's "Christian Philosopher" (one of the 

 most infectious books ever remembered) was the 

 evangelical idea, that the souls of the saved would 

 ascend from planet to planet to the uttermost verge 

 of the solar system — say the planet Neptune. Milton 

 had a similar notion in his " Paradise Lost," only less 

 definitely expressed. Dante constructed his plot in 

 this wise — that, instead of having seven planets for 

 the saints to ascend to, he had seven hells for the 

 lost to descend to. Perhaps both were right — at 

 least, in their own opinions. 



Some of our readers may ask what this has got to 

 do with the "canals" of Mars. Simply there are 

 no inhabitants on the surface of the planet Mars, or the 

 odds are that they are not intelligent. What are 

 these Schiaparelli " canals " ? It can only be replied 

 to by geologists familiar with the fact that all worlds 

 are not of the same age or size. Some cooled down 

 at one time, some at another, and some are not 

 cooled yet. Supposing all the planets of the solar 

 system had been composed of highly-heated glass, 



