Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/295

Rh being eighteen days out, a difference of more than two degrees appeared between its indications and the shipmen's calculations. Harrison insisted that his time-piece was right, and told the shipmen that, if they turned in a certain direction, they would sight a certain island the next morning—if the maps were right. They did so, and the island was seen, according to his prediction. Like results were obtained as island after island was passed. On arriving at Port Royal, after a voyage of two months, the time-keeper was five seconds slow; and on returning to England, after five months, its error was less than a minute and a quarter. Harrison was not allowed the offered reward till more sure tests were made, but was given £5,000. The watch was tested on a second voyage, with triple precautions, and Harrison was allowed £5,000 more, and promised the rest of the £20,000 when he had taught others how to make the instruments. Having fulfilled all possible conditions, he was fully paid in 1767. His time-keepers are still preserved, in charge of the astronomers royal, in Greenwich Observatory.

Egyptian Identifications.—Dr. Edouard Naville, to whom the world owes the recovery of the cities of Bubastis and Pithom, in Egypt, gave a summary of the results of his work in excavating other cities of Egypt before a meeting of the Victoria Institute in June. His explanations related principally to places connected with the Exodus. He had found that Succoth, whither the children of Israel journeyed from Rameses, was not a city, as some had supposed, but a district. An inscription discovered at Pithom left it no longer doubtful that that place was the ancient Heroopolis, whence, according to Strabo, Pliny, and other authors, merchant ships sailed to the Arabian Gulf. This fact coincided with the results of modern scientific surveys, which showed that there had been a gradual rising of the land, and that the Red Sea once extended up to the walls of Pithom. The identification of Baal Zephon had been aided by some papyri, which proved that it was not a village or a city, but an ancient shrine of Baal and a noted place of pilgrimage. Other places were Migdol and Pi Hahiroth, in the identification of which the author had again been aided by a papyrus, and it seemed probable that the Serapeum was the Egyptian Maktal or Migdol. It was greatly to be regretted that a bilingual tablet discovered there a few years ago had been destroyed before being deciphered.

Forest Reproduction in New England.—The question whether our forests are disappearing is answered in one way by Mr. I. H. Hoskins, of Newport, Vt., who says, in Garden and Forest: "In northern New England they certainly are not. The farmer has a constant struggle against the persistent spread of seedling trees over his cleared land; and if man should abandon this region I think in a hundred years it would hardly be possible for a visitor to realize that it had ever been inhabited by civilized man. It is this constant back-pressure of the forest upon intruding settlements that prevents the average farmer from taking an interest in forestry. He has to fight for his life against the forest, and the idea that the forests are likely to be extirpated seems to him quite absurd. One of the largest and finest sugar orchards in this town was seventy years ago a wheat-field." While this is true of some regions. Garden and Forest remarks, there are other vast areas that will never reforest themselves; and the new forests are of inferior quality to the old ones which they succeed.

Astronomy and Numismatics.—A curious suggestion is made by Dr. A. Vercoutre, of a way in which astronomical knowledge may be made of service to numismatical science. Stars and members of the solar system often figure on antique medals, notably on coins of the Roman republic, and they sometimes appear as heraldic allusions to the magistrate by whom the coin was struck. Thus, on a coin of L. Lucretius Trio, 74 B. c, the seven stars in Ursa Major—called by the Romans Septem Triones—appear in evident phonetic allusion to the name, Trio, of the magistrate. On a coin struck in 43, Dr. Vercoutre noticed five stars, one of which was much larger and more brilliant than the others. As the constellation Taurus contains the only group of five stars, with one much the brightest recognized by the ancients, the