249 
PHENOMENA OF WINTER. 
As the year approaches to its close, and we cannot meet our readers again for 
some little time, it will be of some moment to claim their attention to inquiries, 
retrospective and prospective, that may tend to correct misconceptions in science, 
and remove obstacles that retard improvement. 
We have formerly adverted to the instrumentality of the electric element in 
all the phenomena of vegetable life ; and the period is not remote since we 
announced the theory that the sun was a luminous body, containing in itself the 
elements or principles of light, magnetism, electricity, and heat ; that the beams 
contain electrizing and calorific principles, which, when brought into action in a 
proper medium, produce and develop electricity and heat. 
Arguing upon these mental inductions, it was maintained that the doctrine of 
caloric and latent heat were delusions, by which effects were mistaken for, and 
assigned as, causes. 
Gradually, truth has dawned, clear and more clearly from time to time ; and 
.now, if the announcement in the Times newspaper of Nov. 5 be literally correct, 
discovery appears to confirm, what theory pointed to as more than probable. 
A letter addressed to the Editor on the 4th, by Sir James South, states that, " in 
addition to other scientific discoveries of the highest order, made during the last 
forty years in the laboratory of the Royal Institution, Mr. Faraday, its 
Fullerian Professor of Chemistry, yesterday announced to the members present 
that, in the prosecution of his researches in electricity and magnetism, he had 
succeeded in obtaining experimentally, what he had long sought for — namely, the 
direct relation of electricity and magnetism to Light. The details of his 
experiments, which exhibit the magnetization of light, the illumination of the lines 
of magnetic forces, and a new magnetic condition of matter, will be presented to 
the Royal Society immediately," &c, &c. 
Thus far only are we for the present informed of the position of this important 
confirmation of those views that, above fifteen years ago, were offered to the 
public as a Theory of Light, — which defined it as a material fluid, — in its nature 
the most subtile, penetrating, and energetic, the source of all the phenomena of 
heat, electricity avid magnetism, — in itself subject to decomposition, or exerting 
an inductive energy, by which it effects the most astonishing electro-chemical 
changes." 
It is thus that the scientific gardener ought to contemplate and study the 
phenomena of vegetable developments ; he should not be content to admit light by 
means of glazed sashes into his horticultural erections, and to think that by so 
doing he permits the rays of the sun to stimulate his plants. To do so, without 
further reflection, would be to yield servile admission to a bald fact. It is true 
VOL. XIT,-— NO, CXLIII. K K 
