Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/337

 F L I F L I 325 1807 (when Flinders was a prisoner in the Mauritius) by M. Pcron, the naturalist to the expedition, much of the land west of the point of meeting was claimed as having been discovered by Baudin, and French names were exten sively substituted for the English ones given by Flinders. It was only in 1814, when Flinders published his own nar rative, that the real state of the case was fully exposed. Flinders continued his examination of the coast along Bass s Strait, carefully surveying Port Phillip. Port Jackson was reached on May 9, 1802. After staying at Port Jackson for about a couple of months, Flinders set out again on July 22 to complete his circumnavigation of Australia. The Great Barrier Ixeef was examined with the greatest care in several places. The north-east entrance of the Gulf of Carpentaria was reached early in November ; and the next three months were spent in an examination of the shores of tho gulf, and of the islands that skirt them. An inspection of tho &quot;Investi gator &quot; showed that sho was in so leaky a condition that only with the greatest precaution could the voyage bo com pleted in her. Flinders completed the survey of the Gulf of Carpentaria, and after touching at the island of Timor, the &quot;Investigator&quot; sailed round tho west and south of Australia, and Port Jackson was reached on June 9, 1S03. Much suffering was endured by nearly all the members of the expedition : a considerable proportion of tho men suc- c -.imbed to disease, and their leader was so reduced by scurvy that his health was greatly impaired. Flinders determined to proceed home in II. M.S. . &quot;Por- p &amp;gt;ise ;&amp;gt; as a passenger, submit the results of his work to the Admiralty, and obtain, if possible, another vessel to com plete his exploration of the Australian coast. The &quot; Porpoise&quot; left Port Jackson on August 10, accompanied by the H.E.I.C. s ship &quot; Bridgewater&quot; (750 tons) and the &quot;Cato&quot; (450 tons) of London. On the night of the 17th, tho &quot;Porpoise&quot; and &quot;Cato&quot; suddenly struck on a coral reef, and were rapidly reduced to wrecks. The officers and men encamped on a small sandbank near, 3 or 4 feet above high water, a considerable quantity of provisions, with many of tho papers and charts, having been saved from tho wrecks. The reef was in about 22 11 S. and 155 E., and about 800 miles from Port Jackson. Flinders returned to Port Jackson in a six-oared cutter in order to obtain a vessel to rescue tho party. Tho reef was again reached on October 8, and all the officers and men having been satisfactorily disposed of, Flinders on the llth left for Jonei Strait in an unsound schooner of 29 tons, the &quot;Cumberland.&quot; with ten companions, and a valuable col lection of papers, charts, geological specimens, &c. On December 15 he put in at Mauritius, when he discovered that France and England were at war. The passport ho possessed from tho French Government was for tho &quot; In vestigator &quot; ; still, though he was now on board another .ship, his mission was essentially tho same, and the work lie was on was simply a continuation of that commenced in the unfortunate vessel. Nevertheless, on her arrival at Port Louis tho &quot;Cumberland&quot; was seized by order of the governor-general Do Caen. Flinders s papers were taken possession of, and ho found himself virtually a prisoner. We need not dwell on the sad details of this unjustifiable captivity, which lasted to Juno 1810. But there can be no doubt that the hardships and inactivity Flinders was compelled to endure for upwards of six years told seriously on his health, and brought his life to a premature end. He reached England in October 1810, after an absence of upwards of nine years. The official red- tapeisin of the day barred all promotion to tho unfortunate explorer, who set himself to prepare an account of his explorations, though unfortunately an important part of his record had been retained by Do Caen. The results of his labours were published in two large quarto volumes, entitled A Voyage to Terra Australis, with a folio volume of maps. The very day (July 19, 1814) on which his work was published Flinders died, at the early age of forty. The great work is a model of its kind, containing as it does not only a narrative of his own and of previous voyages, but masterly statements of the scientific results, especially with regard to magnetism, meteorology, hydrography, and navigation. Flinders paid great attention to the errors of the compass, especially to those caused by the presence of iron in ships. Ho is understood to have been the first to discover the source of such errors (which had scarcely been noticed before), and after investigating the laws of tho variations, he suggested counter-attractions, an invention for which Professor Barlow got much credit many years afterwards. Numerous experiments on ships magnetism were conducted at Portsmouth by Flinders, by order of the Admiralty, in 1812. Besides the Voyage, Flinclera wrote Observations on the Coast of Van Diemen s Land, JJass s Strait, etc., and two papers in tho Phil. Trans., one on the &quot;Magnetic Needle&quot; (1805), and the other &quot;Observa tions on the Marine Barometer&quot; (180G). (j. s. K.) FLINT is a calcedonic variety of silica found in tho form of irregular concretionary nodules of varying size, chiefly in the Upper Chalk beds and in other similar lime stone deposits. The mode in which flint originated is not altogether satisfactorily explained ; but as traces of somo of tho humbler marine organisms are almost invariably found in the nodules, it is assumed that the silicious mattei- was partly derived from these organisms themselves, and that they formed nuclei around which soluble silica accumulated. From the prevalence of silicious spiculre of sponges in the nodules, it is affirmed by Dr Bowerbank that all flints had, for their primary nuclei, the silicious framework of the sponges which flourished in the depths of the sea during the Cretaceous epoch. Flints occur in tho chalk in stratified order, and the various beds are possessed of a uniformly distinctive character. In some cases they are found in continuous layers, at other places they occur as isolated nodules. In the county of Norfolk, huge flints termed &quot; potstones,&quot; of a pear-shaped outline, measuring as much as three feet in length by one foot across, aro obtained ; and these aro imbedded in the chalk at right angles to the horizontal layers of small flints. Flint is a compact homogeneous substance, externally coated with a white silicious coat, and frequently hollow in the centre. It has a dark steely grey, almost black, sometimes brownish colour ; it is faintly translucent, and it breaks with a con- choidal or glassy fracture. In composition it consists of almost pure silica, partly in the crystalline or non-solublo quartzy form, and partly in the non-crystalline soluble state. It contains traces of lime, iron, and alumina, and when tho proportion of lime present is largo it passes into chert. When newly obtained from the pits the contained moisture of flint renders it easily flaked and other wise worked, but after exposure to the air it becomes dry, hard, and intractable. From the earliest times flint has been employed as a fire-producer, by percussion with iron pyrites, and subsequently with a steel implement in the yet familiar form of &quot;flint and steel&quot; In classical authors occasional allusions are made to the use of flint knives ; and the employment of flint and steel to produce fire is very pointedly described by Virgil and other writers. Except to a trifling extent in tho preparation of strike-a light flints, the only form in which flint industry now con tinues is in the fabrication of gun-flints, an occupation carried on at Brandon, and to a smaller extent at Icklingham, two villages in Suffolk. In 1876 there were 21 flint knappers in Brandon, and about 80,000 flints were sent away weekly, tho greater proportion of which go to West