of Edinburgh, Session 1881-82. 
593 
The exceeding clearness of the two images is remarkable ; day- 
light is seen between the mainsail and the mast in the intervals of 
the reeving rings ; the wind must have been strong. The end of 
the boom is connected to the stern of the vessel by a loose line ; 
yet the duty of this line is to resist the pressure of the wind upon 
the mainsail, keeping that sail to the proper inclination. Again the 
pressure of the mainsail, and the pull of the foresail and jib tend 
to break the mast ; this pressure is usually resisted by the shrouds, 
which, for that purpose, are placed abaft the mast. No sloop, nor 
indeed any other craft was ever rigged with the shrouds before the 
mast, as is seen in these images ; the arrangement is nonsensical. 
Yet again, the jib is shown as if it were reeved to the fore-stay. If 
this were actually done the sail, being in the ship’s mesial plane, 
could be of no service for propulsion ; it could only keep the ship’s 
head from the wind. The lower edge of the jib is shown curved 
away from the bowsprit as it should be, but the sheet is hauled 
close to the stem. More than all this, the ship should have a 
rudder, the rudder should have a tiller, and at the end of the tiller 
there should be the steersman, who, standing between the spectator 
and the main-sail, should have been a conspicuous object on board. 
Judging from the other minutiae we should have been able to re- 
cognise the articles of his dress. But neither helm nor steersman 
is to be seen. 
This drawing does not represent any thing that was seen through 
the telescope. 
While attending to the ship, we have been forgetting the sea on 
which it floats. The rays forming the images in the air must have 
passed at heights of from 40 to 70 feet above what appears as the 
edge of the horizon ; they must have been representations of the 
vessel as seen from these heights. Now, from a height of 70 feet 
the visible horizon is 10 miles off; that is 2J miles beyond the 
sloop ; therefore each of the images should have been accompanied 
by a horizon ; of these, however, there is no trace. 
The intricacy of the arrangement of strata needed, within these 
narrow limits, to have produced with such wonderful clearness, both 
an inverted and an erect image, needs only to be mentioned. 
From whatever point of view we regard the matter, we find 
inaccuracy, incongruity, impossibility ; the psychological aspects of 
the narrative being identic with those of the vision of Dover Castle 
