of Edinburgh , Session 1881-82. 585 
of the north face must be 27°‘54" north of west. But the sun’s 
amplitude at 7 h. on the 6th of August is only 21 °*57, and the 
altitude 4° ; wherefore the north faces of the building should 
have been in shadow. 
The distance between the two places is 1 4 J miles, which on 
the scale of the drawing is represented by 26 '6 inches. Com- 
puting thence the dimensions of the building, we find its 
Length = 16,000 feet = 32 miles 
Breadth = 7,346 „ =1*4 „ 
Height = 4,895 „ = 0*9 „ 
which would make Dover Castle to be, not the Eighth, but The 
wonder of the world. 
There are many unacquainted with the laws of perspective 
drawing ; for their sake we may take another view. It is 
generally known, that the apparent size of an object, its space 
upon the picture, diminishes as the distance increases. How the 
breadths, measured on the paper, of the north-west and south-west 
towers are 51 and 28 hundredths of an inch; the nearer is 141- 
miles away, wherefore, since 28: 51 :: 14*5 : 26*4, it follows that 
the other is 264 miles off; so that from north face to north face 
of the towers must be 11*9 miles, or the wdiole length more than 
12 miles ! The drawing must be sadly out, for this is nearly four 
times what was previously found. 
Again, if we look at the western sides of the turret-tops, we observe 
the depth of the parapet to decrease rapidly toward the south. On 
the north-west tower the diminution is almost exactly as two to one ; 
wherefore its farther corner must be twice as far from us as the 
nearer, and so the top of the tower must measure 14 miles. In 
Brewster’s drawing this most outrageous of all the blunders is 
rectified. 
These prodigies, however, are far outshone by the artistic extra- 
vagance of the foreground ; there the blades of grass expand at our 
feet, and the very veins of the leaves are seen. 
All this was seen through a good telescope which the Professor 
could hand to his companion. I have somewhere read of a spyglass 
bringing people so near that you could hear them speak ; this one must 
have had the equally wonderful property of transporting the user 
bodily to within a hundred fathoms of a building fourteen miles away. 
