vessel bowling along before wind and sea | us one of the blue sea. The result is at the rate of fourteen or fifteen knots an precisely similar, and instead of obtaining hour. Suddenly we discover a whitish a bucket of blue water, we have, as in the hue in the water, which in a short while first case, one of equal clearness and assumes a snow-white aspect, and in the purity. In the latter case the deception course of a quarter of an hour extends to is of very easy explanation; in the former the outline of the horizon in all directions. case it is also the result of absorption and The transformation of the water is per- reflection of color. The vessel is passing fect, the limpid sea has been replaced by through a light, misty atmosphere inapa liquid as white as milk. We will now preciable to the eye when within its indraw a bucket of water for inspection and fluence, and the white, watery vesicles analysis. The operation to an experi- held in suspension are, in some favorable enced hand is the work of a moment; a condition of air and water, absorbed by bucket dropped on its side with its mouth the latter and reflected. The phenomenon canted downwards fills instantly, and in has now lasted an hour and a half, and to the course of three seconds the bucket the experienced eye there are visible with its freight is before us. Yes, a signs of its dissolution: the vessel is in bucket full of most beautifully clear, salt fact passing out of it; the sky-line of the water! Not a vestige of anything white horizon ahead, marking the limit of the is visible, and the microscope can dis- mist, assumes an intense blackness which cover nothing above the ordinary quan- rises rapidly in altitude; the stars shine tity of insect life always present in sea brilliantly through the darkness, which water within the tropics, take it from approaches at lightning speed until it where you will. As there are no present reaches the zenith, when the ship' apparsymptoms of the phenomenon dispersing ently shoots through it as if by some magwe will in imagination retrace our steps ical power. Now, cast your eyes astern to the Mediterranean, and place ourselves and the misty atmosphere through which about half-way between Malta and Alex- we have passed is distinctly visible; the andria, time one P.M., weather warm, intensely black sky descends in altitude bright and clear, and the water of a deep as the steamer speeds onward and speedindigo blue. The same expert individual ily dips below the horizon, and obliterwho procured so speedily from the white ates all traces of this grand and impressea a bucketful of water, will now draw | sive scene.

THE Times Geneva correspondent writes under date June 20 that a remarkable electrical phenomenon occurred at Clarens on the afternoon of Thursday last. Heavy masses of raincloud hid from view the mountains which separate Fribourg from Montreux, but their summits were from time to time lit up by vivid flashes of lightning, and a heavy thunderstorm seemed to be raging in the valleys of the Avants and the Alliaz. No rain was falling near the lake, and the storm still appeared far off, when a tremendous peal of thunder shook the houses of Clarens and Tavel to their foundations. At the same instant a magnificent cherry-tree near the cemetery, measuring a metre in circumference, was struck by lightning. Some people who were working in a vineyard hard by saw the electric "fluid" play about a little girl who had been gathering cherries and was already thirty paces from the tree.

She was literally folded in a sheet of fire. The vine-dressers fled in terror from the spot. In the cemetery six persons, separated into three groups, none of them within two hundred and fifty paces of the cherry-tree, were enveloped in a luminous cloud. They felt as if they were being struck in the face

with hailstones or fine gravel, and when they touched each other sparks of electricity passed from their finger-ends. At the same time a column of fire was seen to descend in the direction of Chatelard, and it is averred that the electric fluid could be distinctly heard as it ran from point to point of the iron railing of a vault in the cemetery. The strangest part of the story is that neither the little girl, the people in the cemetery, nor the vine-dressers appear to have been hurt; the only inconvenience complained of being an unpleasant sensation in the joints, as if they had been violently twisted, a sensation which was felt with more or less acuteness for a few hours after. The explanation of this phenomenon is probably to be found in Prof. Colladon's theory of the way in which lightning descends, as described in Nature, vol. xxii., p. 65. The professor contends that it falls in a shower, not in a perpendicular flash, and that it runs along branches of trees until it is all gathered in the trunk, which it bursts or tears open in its effort to reach the ground. In the instance in question the trunk of the cherry-tree is as completely shivered as if it had been exploded by a charge of dynamite.

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From The Edinburgh Review.

not inappropriately be termed the steamengine of the intellect. Yet, notwithstanding the utilitarian character of the prevalent philosophy, inventions of practical utility remained comparatively rare; and no advance, corresponding in any degree with that accomplished in science, was made in the comforts and conven

gular irony, a generation which sought in its experiments "fruit," found "light; while our own age, which, with the dying Goethe, demands "more light," has received instead "fruit" not always sweet to the taste.

To Englishmen the seventeenth cen

THE ENGLISH PRECURSORS OF NEWTON.* THE seventeenth century must be regarded as the most memorable in the history of science; our own age has been remarkable for the skilful application of scientific analysis, but it has not produced a Bacon and a Galileo, a Harvey and a Newton. Between 1600 and 1700 theo-iences of every-day life. Thus, by a sinretical knowledge received an increase far outweighing in importance the sum-total of what has been achieved between 1700 and the present time. The definitive acceptance of the true theory of the world, and its triumphant establishment on a basis of universal and harmonious law; the constitution of physiology as a science tury is rendered of peculiar interest by by the great discovery of the circulation the circumstance that, during its course, of the blood; the vast stride made in the centre of scientific progress was mechanics by the clear recognition of the shifted, through the overwhelming force laws of motion; the knowledge of the of genius, from the Continent to this fundamental truths relating to light and island. When it opened, our countrycolor; the foundation of the sciences of men were in the position of disciples; magnetism, electricity, and chemistry, are when it closed, they were recognized as all due to that period. The nineteenth the teachers of Europe. The advance century is not more pre-eminent for the made in the interval was enormous. invention of mechanical agencies by which 1600, Tycho Brahe was still inculcating the external conditions of human life have at Prague the geocentric theory of the been revolutionized than the seventeenth universe; Galileo was expounding the for the production of those momentous "sphere on Ptolemaic principles; Har"aids to sense "t-the telescope, micro- vey was listening at Padua — the “Quarscope, barometer, and thermometer-by tier Latin of Venice," as M. Renan has which an indefinite series of new worlds called it to the cloudy conjectures of have been annexed to the domain of hu- Fabricius as to the purpose served by the man intelligence. In the abstract region valves in the veins. In 1700, the "Prinof mathematics, the performances of the cipia" had been for thirteen years the epoch under consideration are equally common property of mankind; Newton remarkable. By the invention of loga- was acknowledged as the arbiter of scirithms, calculation was hardly less expe- ence by the greater part of the civilized dited than communication has been in world; the principles of mechanics were our time by the discovery of the electric | telegraph; while the differential and integral calculus, through the enormous increase of power conferred by it, might

1. The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke, M.D., F.R.S. With the Author's Life. By RICHARD WALLER. London: 1705.

2. Micrographia; or some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies made by Magnifying Glasses. By ROBERT HOOKE, F.R.S. London: 1664.

In

settled on the same footing on which they stand to day; and the last cavil against the innovation of the Folkestone physician had long ago been forgotten. We propose, in the following pages, to sketch, in its broader outlines, the movement of thought which led to such great results, and to devote some brief attention to a man whose career was the most conspic

3. The Transit of Venus across the Sun. A Trans-uous failure of the century, and who, lation of the celebrated Discourse thereupon by the Rev. JEREMIAH HORROX. To which is prefixed a Memoir of his Life and Labors. By the Rev. ARUNDELL BLOUNT WHATTON, B.A., LL.B. London: 1859. ↑ Novum Organum, lib. ii., Aph. xxxix.

aspiring to play the part of the Octavius, was condemned to that of the Antony of science.

Dr. Robert Hooke not only was unable

to "command success," but we doubt | men of singular genius, Leon Battista whether he could have conscientiously Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci, led the asserted that he deserved it. He was way; and their example was followed by original, diligent, and ingenious; but he the astronomers, anatomists, physicians, wanted the concentration, disinterested- and botanists, with whom, in the followness, and, above all, the indefeasible ing century, Italy abounded. Mathematpatience, which mark the highest order ics were at the same time cultivated with of minds. Amongst the contemporaries signal success; and the learned enthuof Newton, he approached most nearly to, siasm which, a hundred years earlier, had and contrasted most strongly with, that hailed the unearthing of a long-forgotten great man, whose shining qualities and codex by Poggio or Filelfo, now greeted achievements have been set off by the the solution of a problem by Cardano, or convenient foil of his rival's defects of the discovery of a formula by Ferri or temper and fortune. It may perhaps be Tartaglia. Nor did these abstract enpossible to derive a larger lesson from quiries remain long unfruitful. The questhe consideration of his life's work than tions which had busied the brain of Arthe trite moral conveyed by his exhibition chimedes at the siege of Syracuse began in the character of the captive in the car to emerge from the neglect of well-nigh of triumphant genius. In Newton the eighteen centuries, and the "mechanical epoch was idealized; in Hooke it was powers " of lever, pulley, screw, and insimply reflected. We can study more clined plane, were once more, as our conveniently the varying impulses and neighbors say, the order of the day. The undefined aspirations of a period of tran- movement was now no longer limited to sition and progress in the versatility the sub-Alpine peninsula. Simon Stevin which obeyed, than in the steady purpose of far-away Bruges, and Michael Varro of which transformed and dominated them. Geneva, deserve to be named, with BeneThe greatest men are of all time; the detti of Venice and Del Monte of Pesaro, lesser are an epitome of their age. They as the precursors of Galileo, whose strongpass with it; but they teach in passing. est title to fame is that he first brought natural investigations under the rigid but salutary yoke of the sciences of number and of space.

Hooke believed himself to be the disciple of Bacon; but his real instructors were men of a widely different and far less pretentious stamp. Experimental In England the same impulse made science does not date, even in England, itself felt, although, amid the religious from the "Chancellor of England and of troubles of the time, its effects were at Nature." Roma ante Romulum fuit. first obscure and intermittent. It is, howThe Egremont Castle of traditional knowl- ever, much to the credit of our national edge shook, it is true, to its foundations sagacity and boldness that, within a few at the formidable blast of this new Sir years of the publication of Copernicus's Eustace, and the Peripatetic usurper great work, three Englishmen were found heard in it his knell. But the fortress to advocate doctrines so novel, so startwas already dismantled; a numerous and ling, and so repugnant to ordinary exunrelenting foe had silently taken posses-perience as those contained in it. The sion of its outworks and bastions, and, introduction into England of the new stone by stone, was busy turning the materials of the ancient stronghold to account in the construction of habitations of more modern aspect and accommodation.

views in astronomy was, in all probability, due to the notorious Dr. John Dee, the favored soothsayer of Elizabeth and Leicester, whose reputation as a mathematician has been eclipsed by his fame as Among the multifarious forms of activ- a magician. His career aptly illustrates ity stirred into life by the ferment of the an old proverb, exhibiting the evil effects Italian Renaissance, perhaps the least on later life of a bad name gratuitously be questionable in its results was that lead- stowed in youth. The suspicions roused ing to the love and study of nature. Two | by his ingenious contrivance of an autom