the stoppings away and disarranged the circulation of air, and for a considerable time it was feared that a second explosion would take place. Although the explosion occurred very early in the morning, it was nearly noon before the first body was got out, and it was late in the evening before all the bodies were recovered. Some of the corpses were almost reduced to cinders.

FATAL BOAT ACCIDENT ON THE TYNE.-Nine men were drowned in a boat accident on the Tyne on the same day. The rapid thaw had greatly swollen the river, and quantities of broken ice were carried down the stream with great force. A number of labourers employed at Blaydon, but living on the south side of the river, were returning home from work, and, as usual, entered a wherry to cross it. They encountered much difficulty, even at the outset, in making progress towards the opposite bank, in consequence of the velocity and force of the stream. Persevering, however, they managed to reach nearly to mid-stream, when their craft was struck and driven rapidly along by a huge mass of ice, and in a moment the boat was upset and all its occupants were thrown into the water. The accident was witnessed by a large number of persons on shore, and several boatmen at once put off to their rescue, but before they could succeed in reaching them nine had been carried away and drowned. Five others having clung to the floating ice and trees which were being driven down the river, kept themselves on the surface and were saved. They were much exhausted, and terribly cut and bruised.

6. FREEMASONRY AT DUBLIN.-The Duke of Abercorn was installed to-day as Grand Master of the Freemasons of Ireland, in the room of the late Duke of Leinster. There was a brilliant gathering of the Masonic body, including the Marquis of Headfort, Senior Grand Warden; Lord Dunboyne, Junior Grand Warden; Viscount Bernard, Grand Secretary; the Hon. David Plunket, M.P., Senior Grand Deacon, and a number of representatives of foreign lodges. The ceremony took place in the Masonic Hall, Molesworth Street, Dublin. His Grace reinstated Mr. Shekleton as Deputy Grand Master; and the Marquis of Headfort having been installed Senior Grand Warden, and Lord Dunboyne Junior Grand Warden, the Grand Lodge was closed with the usual forms.

16. FIRE IN GLASGOW.-The most destructive fire that has occurred in this city for a long time broke out this day, when the well-known biscuit factory of Gray and Dunn, Kinningpark, was totally consumed. The damage was estimated at 50,000. Three hundred persons, male and female, have been thrown out of employment by the fire. By the time the Glasgow Brigade arrived the flames had obtained complete mastery of the premises. The city and local firemen therefore directed their efforts to prevent the flames consuming the neighbouring dwelling-houses and the Burgh police buildings. The occupants had fled for their lives, leaving most of their household goods

of Dr. Darwin, confirmed by Professor Dana, even the lowest peaks must once have been at the surface, because corals could not grow except within 20 fathoms of the surface. There must, therefore, have been a recent rapid subsidence."

At a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society in November, the President was able to exhibit a complete chart of the Lake Victoria Nyanza, sent by Mr. Stanley, the American explorer, who had almost circumnavigated its shores. It appears that Mr. Stanley reached in 103 days the southern shores of the lake, distant 730 miles from Bagamoyo, having fought a severe battle with the natives on the way, and having discovered and followed to the lake a new river which rises 300 miles beyond the Victoria Nyanza, and is thus, as far as present information extends, the true southern source of the White Nile. Mr. Stanley embarked in a portable boat on the lake, and coasted along its southern, eastern, and northern shores till he reached Uganda; and thus he showed that it was a lake, and not a mere collection of lagoons. The height of the Victoria Nyanza has been determined at about 3,800 feet above the sea-level. Mr. Stanley intended, after completing the survey of the Victoria Nyanza, to cross the intervening country to the Albert Nyanza, where he hoped, by means of his portable boat, to make a voyage of discovery round the hitherto almost unvisited lake. It appears, however, that he was likely to be anticipated by Colonel Gordon, who had forced his way from Egypt to a point above the principal rapids of the Upper Nile, whence the passage southwards to the Albert Nyanza would be tolerably free from impediment. Colonel Gordon was only 140 miles from the Albert Nyanza at the end of August. M. Linant was sent by him to Uganda, and there met Mr. Stanley. Unfortunately, M. Linant was killed, with thirty-six of his men, in an attack by the Bari tribe, when near Colonel Gordon's station, and this lamentable event would retard the execution of the Colonel's plans, inasmuch as he was obliged to give up for the time his visit to the Albert Nyanza, in order to go and punish the tribe that had attacked the party. Everybody speaks most highly of Colonel Gordon and his doings, the Khedive and his Prime Minister, English residents, and American missionaries. He has not only checked the slave-trade, and still more the slave-hunting, but he has made his expedition almost pay itself by economy and by judicious management of the conquered districts.

The deaths of Sir Charles Wheatstone and of Sir Charles Lyell were events which may well call for some record in our Scientific survey. M. Dumas, perpetual secretary of the French Academy of Sciences, delivered an address at the funeral service of Sir C. Wheatstone, in which he said: "There were no delicate questions relating to acoustics, to optics, and particularly to electricity, which he had not grappled with and thrown a clear light upon. In several instances his studies led to discoveries most valuable to science, and of a practical character, which rendered them popular. When we survey through the stereoscope those astonishing views of distant scenes and inaccessible mountains, those reproductions of the grand monuments of Egypt, Greece, or Italy, we cannot but remember that the instrument which presents them thus with their perspective, their surface, their solidity was invented by Sir C. Wheatstone, not by a happy accident nor by painful struggles, but through a course of delicate and profound study of the physiology of vision. Thence has sprung the new industry, which, brought to perfection by his illustrious fellow-countryman, Brewster, affords employment to-day to thousands of artists and workmen, and contributes to the intellectual enjoyments of millions of civilized beings. About the same period of his life Sir C. Wheatstone gave a practical form to the idea

of Ampère. His electric telegraph, one of the first which was worked over a line of any length, has been replaced by more convenient arrangements, but the name of our colleague will retain its place in the history of the new telegraphic system. He has entitled himself to that, not only by this effort, but also by a long and persevering succession of studies and inventions intended to render the arrangements of telegraphic apparatus more certain, their working more easy and simple. It was thus that Sir C. Wheatstone was led to inquire into the speed with which the electric wave passes along a metallic wire, by what causes its passage may be retarded or diverted back to its starting-point. It was thus, by changing the nature of the metals along which the electric current passed, that he ascertained that the sparks given forth by each emitted special coloured rays, thus shadowing forth the discovery of the spectroscope, which was soon to surprise the scientific world. Again, it was while engaged in measuring the rapid pasasge of electricity over a metal wire-equal to that of light-that he invented the admirable method of revolving mirrors, of which Arago, who has described them, and his fellowworkers were to make such noble use. The admirable plan, indeed, enabled Arago-crowning the work of his scientific life-to trace with certainty the plan of fundamental experiment which should decide whether light is a body emanating from the sun or the stars, or an undulatory motion excited by them. Carried out by a consummate experimentalist they put aside the theory of emission. This method, therefore, has supplied to the philosophy of science the certain data upon which rest our ideas of the nature of forces, and especially of that of light. By the aid of this or a similar method we have been enabled to ascertain the rapidity of light by experiments purely terrestrial, which, carried on by a skilful physicist, have governed the admeasurement of the distance of the earth from the sun. The duration of movements rapid as thought, or even more rapid still, is measured with certainty by the method of revolving mirrors, or by other methods of analogous principle. This method, which will render the name of Sir C. Wheatstone immortal, marks a date and characterizes an epoch in that difficult art of consulting nature, the solid basis of modern science. It is thus that Sir C. Wheatstone, associated by his most brilliant discoveries with the labours of the French school, and honoured by the friendship of Arago, was in the habit of coming among us sometimes for recreation, but more frequently to favour us with the first fruits of his recent labours. The noble traditions which for more than two centuries have caused so close an union between the Paris Academy of Science and the Royal Society of London were personified in our illustrious colleague."

Of Sir Charles Lyell, an English critic in the Saturday Review said: "The death of Sir Charles Lyell ends a stage in the history of geology in England. He was the last of the veteran geologists the labours of whose lives kept England famous in spite of the dearth of eminent successors in the younger generation, and one cannot but feel that his departure severs the tie that connected us with the infancy of geology. These men found geology uncertain as to the nature and scope of its investigations, feeble and hesitating in asserting its claims to attention, wild in its notions of their possible causes, and submitting to be dictated to as to both by the narrow theological views of the time. They have left it one of the soberest and least flighty of the many branches of natural science, taking its rank unquestioned among those which it is important for all to study; and though it never has lost, and probably never will lose, the charm which is given to it by the vastness of the scale upon which the operations of

which it speaks have been carried on, and the dim mystery of the countless ages through which we have to look back in reading its records, yet such is the mass of facts it has accumulated as compared with the amount of theory that can possibly be framed upon them, that it is rapidly getting to be regarded as consisting mainly of observations of minute details, to be enjoyed only by specialists, and at which a theologian would as little think of cavilling as he would think of cavilling at the daily meteorological observations at Greenwich. The jealousy with which its progress was watched has become a thing of the past, save so far as its teachings bear upon the controversy on evolution; and a clergyman who should treat his congregation to the invectives once so common against those who would weaken the authority of Scripture by throwing doubt on the literal descriptiveness of the Mosaic account of the Creation would trouble the minds of none but his ecclesiastical superiors. Of all the men who have aided in effecting this revolution by far the highest place must be assigned to Sir Charles Lyell. We would not for a moment disparage the labours of such men as Murchison, Phillips, and Sedgwick; but all these, though vying with him perhaps in their actual knowledge of the subject, and the extent and value of their original researches, stand far below him in that grasp of it as a whole and that power of generalization by which he made his knowledge fruitful. Under his hands the science took shape, its phenomena were shown to be parts of a consistent whole, and the vast accumulation of facts which threatened to encumber rather than to aid those who sought to reach from facts to causes, fell into their proper places, and ceased to be subjects of special explanations, because they needed He found the subject a heap of building-stone; he left it a building; and such was his freedom from bias and his capacity for weighing evidence, that the results of his labours are in but little danger of being superseded. Every day we learn something new which bears upon his conclusions, and they must necessarily be greatly modified by advancing knowledge; but, so far as its main features are concerned, his system is too firmly based upon sound reasoning and trustworthy observation to be shaken." Between the publication of the ninth and tenth editions of Sir C. Lyell's Principles of Geology, the celebrated work of his friend Mr. Darwin on the Origin of Species appeared. Sir Charles, though upwards of sixty years of age, gave his adhesion to the new doctrine, and, first in the work on the Antiquity of Man, which appeared in 1863, and subsequently in the tenth edition of his Principles of Geology, he incorporated it with his system, elaborated, and defended it. Some of his old companions in research declined to follow him in the step he took, and remained to the end of their days firm opponents of the Darwinian theory; but Sir Charles Lyell so completely adopted it and made it his own, that it is hard for one who reads the later editions of his works to figure to himself how the hypothesis of special creations could ever have formed part of them. Thus his system represents the world past and present as the result of a continuous process exactly similar to what is going on now. And whatever may be thought of the conclusions of the arguments by which he supports some parts of his theories, his works must ever remain a monument of his genius and one of the most valuable productions of our age.

none.

PART II

CHRONICLE

OF REMARKABLE OCCURRENCES

IN 1875.

JANUARY.

1. THE WEATHER.-The opening of the year found the country white with the unusually severe snowstorms which we chronicled last year; but a thaw commenced on or about the first day of this month, the remainder of which was mild. The scene in Paris on the evening of New Year's Day was such as has not often been seen there. The streets were already slippery when, at nine in the evening, the rain began to fall and to freeze instantaneously; it was frozen before it could run off an umbrella. The roads were quickly sheeted with ice, and it was impossible to obtain a cab at any price. Along the boulevards when the theatres were over the sight was at once painful and ridiculous, for ladies and gentlemen who had counted on their carriages were forced to face the road on foot, and the only way to walk with any safety was to pull off your boots and trust to your stockings. A gentleman said he never saw so many horses down except at Champigny, when the German batteries played sad havoc with the French artillery teams. In many instances the poor animals remained where they fell, either too much frightened or too much hurt to rise, and it is said that the omnibus company lost no fewer than 200 horses from broken legs or severe strains. One gentleman cut up a railway wrapper, and, making stockings for his horse, drove home; and an enterprising smith established himself on the boulevards, and roughed a number of steeds. A man with a quantity of list slippers made a little fortune, but his stock was soon exhausted. In some of the worst places, at the Pont Neuf, for example, there were dozens of vehicles unable to move, and in fact all over Paris were to be found deserted carriages and omnibuses, in which persons who despaired of getting home took