Science in the Magazines

Abstract

THE Fortnightly again takes the first place, as regards scientific articles, in the magazines received by us. Mr. Herbert Spencer contributes to it a paper on the late Prof. Tyndall, Prof. Karl Pearson, writes on “Science and Monte Carlo,” and Mr. H. O. Forbes states the grounds of his belief in “Antarctica: a Vanished Austral Land.” Mr. Spencer does not dwell upon the more conspicuous of Prof. Tyndall's intellectual traits, but upon a few characteristics concerning which little has, been said. Chief among these powers of thought was “the scientific use of the imagination.” Tyndall insisted upon the need for this. “There prevail, almost universally,” Mr. Spencer points out, “very erroneous ideas concerning the nature of imagination. Superstitious people whose folk-lore is full of tales of fairies and the like, are said to be imaginative; while nobody ascribes imagination to the inventor of a new machine … strange as the assertion will seem to most, it is nevertheless true that the mathematician who discloses to us some previous unknown order of space-relations does so by a greater effort of imagination than is implied by any poetic creation.” The faculty with which Tyndall was largely endowed was that of constructive imagination, and he used that talent in all his work. Among other points upon which Mr. Spencer dwells in the eulogy of his dead friend, are Tyndall's intellectual vivacity, and the x Club described by Prof. Huxley. The, influence that the Club eventually exercised in the scientific world is shown by the fact that it contained four presidents of the British Association, three presidents of the Royal Society, and presidents of the College of Surgeons, of the Mathematical Society, and of the Chemical Society. The number of members is now reduced to five, and the Club is practically dead. The object of Prof. Pearson's essay is to show that chance as it applies to the tossing of an unloaded coin has no application in Monte Carlo roulette. The discussion of records of the roulette tables leads to the strange result that “the random spinning of a roulette manufactured and daily readjusted with extraordinary care is not obedient to the laws of chance. ” In the Fortnightly of May last, Mr. Forbes gave reasons for believing that “there must have existed in the Southern Seas an extensive continuous land similar to that in the Northern Hemisphere, on which the common ancestors of the forms unknown north of the equator, but confined to one or more of the southern extremities of the great continents, lived and multiplied, and whence they could disperse in all directions. ”He then remarked that this lost continent “lies in part beneath the southern ice-cap, and it approached to, or included, the Antarctic Islands, as well as extended northward to unite with the southern extremities of South America, perhaps with Africa, and with the Mascarene, the Australian, and the New Zealand continental islands.” Mr. Forbes now brings forward a mass of evidence in support of his view, dealing in detail with the distribution of different divisions of the animal kingdom.