The Press. — London, England, 1856-09-06 00:00:00

858 anticipated, by the return of Fremont. In whatever way the contest is decided, it will tend to heighten the exasperation of the two parties, by engaging them in a struggle for predominance, and may probably result in raising the yet broader question of Union or Separation. The Lost Solar System of the Ancients Discovered. By John Wilson. Two Vols. London: Longmans. IF this author, according to his own assertion, has really discovered the " solar system of the ancients," he has at all events kept the dis covery to himself : the reader is never allowed to share it. Through the course of two bulky volumes, filled as they are with laborious and sometimes ingenious computations, the result promised in his titlepage is kept as well ccn eealed as the meaning of the sacred Egyptian writings in their hieroglyphics Nor can we believe that this mystery is other than inten tional. if not, how comes it that he sends us wandering into his arithmetical labyrinth without a clue? Why does he vouchsafe no " Preliminary Chapter," no " Introduction," not even a half-page of " Preface," to explain the meaning of his multitudinous configura tions ? Instead of this, no sooner have we turned the first leaf than we are plunged up to the lips in an abyss of figures, symbols, and algebraic formula, where we can find no bot tom, and whence the author never stretches out a helping hand to lift us. And when, by dint of hard struggling, we reach the end of his second volume, we are suddenly dismissed without a word, either by way of explanation as to whither we have arrived, or of excuse for all the labour we have been required to undergo. Mr. Wilson's volumes are about five times as large as the twelve books of Euclid, and at first sight seem filled with the same kind of matter ; but there is not a single Q. E. D. from beginning to end. For a long while after beginning our con scientious perusal of the work, we were sorely puzzled to explain how any man happened to write it. At length we arrived at the conclu sion that the book was never written at all— at least in the ordinary or authorly sense of the word. If Sir Charles Barry and his assis tants had quarried so much stone, prepared so much cement and stucco, fabricated a certain quantity of brass grillage, mosaic tessera3, coloured glass, iron tubing, and lead gutters, and thrown the whole into a heap, the congeries would just as well deserve the title of a Palace of the Legislature as Mr. Wilson's collection of printed matter does that of a book. There are the materials, but not the result. We can only suppose that he expended enormous time in compiling his matter, made laborious calcu lations touching the " solar sy stem," and indefatigable researches upon all points of antiquity, but when he sat down to compose a work out of those materials, stopped short at the titlepage, and then sent his commonplace book to the printer just as it was, without ever taking the trouble to number its pages into any consecutive order. Books constructed upon ordinary principles can seldom be fairly represented by detached quotations, any more than the architecture or commodiousness of a house by the production of a brick. In a work, however, which is all materials and no architecture, the critic has nothing for it but to collect a few bricks, if he wishes to show the character of the intended edifice, should it ever come to he built. Now, in the present ease, the author's "bricks" are coincidences, which he has traced with infinite labour and ingenuity, between the material structures whose relics still attest the gigantic capabilities of human faith and science—whe ther exhibited among the Egyptian priests, the Indian magi, the British Druids, or the Mexican astrologers—and the known facts and relationships of the " solar system." These coincidences, we must premise, the author barely indicates. He places certain results in rather conspicuous j nxta-position, but ventures no further. For whatever inferences may be drawn, or hypotheses founded, on his configu rations, he leaves to the reader all the labour and responsibility. But hi s p ecu li ar p rocess can be described only by examples. Thus : THE PRESS. The Egyptians built obelisks. If the motion of a body falling to the earth, in obedience to the law of gravitation, he represented, accord ing to the recognised symbolisation of modern mathematicians, by an axis and ordinates, respectively propyrtional to the space passed through and the velocity attained in every consecutive unit of time, the resulting figure will have something like an obeliscal outline. This is the coincidence—the brick for, not from, the building. The reader must gather it, if he can, from fifty pages of puzzling arith metical combinations. The inference which it suggests, but which, as we have said, the author himself does not draw, is that the Egyptians, when building their obelisks, meant to symbolise the proportions of time and space as exhibited in the phenomenon of falling bodies, and therefore, we must pre sume, knew all about the law of gravitation, and had made themselves familiar with the scientific facts and analytical processes which the full comprehension of that law must involve. The Egyptians, again, built pyramids. Now, with pyramids the author performs a number of most wonderful feats. He slices them into horizontal strata ; he chops them up into " units ;" he perfects them into cubes ; he multiplies the area of their bases by the length of their axes, and, having divided the product by the angle of inclination of their sides, raises tire whole sum to the nth power. But the singular and odd results of his configuration can be described only in the author's own words. Having subjected the Pyramid of Cheops to this arithmetical manipulation, he dis2overs that— The cubical contents of the pyramid (pro vided only you add " somewhat more than " unity to the height ") is = 113689008 units = circumference of the earth (p. 218, v. i.) Four times the cube of the base of Cheops is " = 1088390015 units = to distance of the " moon from the earth " (p. 219). Six hundred cubes of Cheops are equal (very tolerably) to the distance of Mercury from the sun (p. 220). Continuing the computation, the author finds that fifteen thousand cubes of Cheops are = distance of Saturn, and that ninety thousand cubes are = distance of Belus. This " distance of Belus " continually recurs among the author's calculations, and is de tailed among a multitude of combinations in which the bases, the areas, or the contents of various monuments, in all parts of the world, are worked together. What or where " Belus " may be, we have failed to discover; but from the measurements in the hook before us it seems to be about six times as far from the sun as Saturn, and we must therefore presume it to be a planetary body, recognised in the " solar system of the ancients," but not yet known to the moderns, whose astronomical researches on the outskirts of the system have been limited to the discovery of Neptune, and who were more than sufficiently proud of that achievement, although, as the author would express the fact, the distance of that planet is not quite = I the "distance of Belus." Other pyramids and monuments of Emit, the Indian temples and excavations, the Chinese pagodas, the ruins found in Mexico and other parts of America. the round towers of Ireland, the Druidical mounds and circles of stones, suggest similar combinations. Wherever Mr. Wilson can light upon a mea surement of any sort, he begins to throw the figures about like an Indian juggler with his balls, and never fails to educe some astrono mical coincidence. Even in Otaheite the " solar system of the ancients" is equally symbolised. Some missionaries in 1797 de scribed the great " Moral " in that island, and stated that in length at the base it was 270 feet, and in width 94 feet. This is hint suffi cient. We plunge at once into a labyrinth of numerals, and bring away the following figures : Side of base 270 by 94 feet, = 233 . 4 by 81 - 3 units. 233 3 =.6 distance of moon. 24 cubes of 10 times greater side, or three cubes of 20 times greater side, =-- distance of Venus. 14 cubes of 10 times the sum of two sides = distance of earth. And so on What renders the laborious elucidation of these coincidences the more wonderful is, that SATURDAY, the measurements on which they are founded possess no certainty and authenticity what ever. The missionaries who measured the base of the Otaheite Morai seem to have corn. puted its magnitude in the loosest possible manner, by merely pacing round the enceint. Mr. Wilson himself opens his chapter relative to the Cheops pyramid by candidly confessing that he " had abandoned all hope of arriving " at any satisfactory conclusion" respecting its magnitude. He even cites the proportions given by different authorities from Herodotus to Niebuhr, all of whom differ from one another in almost every dimension through the wide interval between 440 and 800 feet. Yet he proceeds through many pages to calcul a t e proportionals and bring out coincidences from the very measurements which he allows to be so utterly vague and uncertain. Another class of coincidences" are worked out most elaborately. These relate to the outlines of certain ornaments, sculptures, &c., still traceable in ancient monuments ; and their coincidences are thus derived. Arith metical series of proportionals, when repre sented by the notation employed by modern analysts in the relationships of an axis and its ordinates, generate curves of various charac teristics, but all belonging to the various sections of a cone. Somewhat similar curves are found among the sculptures in question ; and the author accordingly suggests the con clusion that the form was given merely to typify the particular series of which it is the representative in the system of " conic sec tions." Thus au hyperbolic curve represents a particular set cf proportionals, if rendered infinite Therefore, concludes Mr. Wilson, this curve symbolises infinity, and could have been nowhere introduced except for the pur pose of such symbolisation. As a few out of many deductions drawn from this hypothesis, he tells us that the curves of the cap of Osiris are "symbolical of eternity," the serpents on the sides of the cap are " typical of infinity ;" the obeliscal beard also " typifies eternity." The serpent has obtained its prominent posi tion in Egyptian monuments because in its erect attitude and with swollen neck it " resembles " the parabolic curve of contrary flexure." Even the sacred bird of Egypt, the Ibis, in his opinion may only have attained sanctity from a like geometrical analogy, " its head " and long beak having a resemblance to the " parabolic curve of contrary flexure." The " constrained appearance ' of all the Egyptian divinities—and mortals too, for that matter — when represented in a sit"ng posture, is caused by no immaturity of set in the sculptor, but solely that they may assume the " hyper. " bolic attitude which is typical of infinity." Buddha, also, in his Indian temples, and the " Virginian Obee," are placed in the "con strained attitude " necessary for them when " assuming the form of the hyperbolic solid," and consequently " representing eternity or infinity." With matter like this, interspersed with facts and descriptions relating to public works and monuments of all times and countries, from the Tower of Babel to Battersea-bridge, and from the ships of Sesostris to the Himalaya steamer, has the author filled more than nine hundred pages. His specialty, however, as we have intimated, is for arithmetic. The " organ of number " clearly predominates in his phrenological development, and by its magnitude seems to have put the other facul ties somewhat out of equipoise. When the " calculating boy " was taken to see a ballet in which Heberle danced, it was found that his attention during the whole performance had been absorbed in counting her steps. The present author looks. upon the " planetary dome," or examines the grand and mysterious monuments of antiquity, with a similar pre possession. For his own sake it may be regretted that he was born some centuries too late. There have been times when all science, in the belief of a large claSs of its professors, began and ended with arithmetic. For some generations a whole section of philosophers devoted themselves to the study of figures, believing that in them could be found a key to all the mysteries of the universe. One of these experts fancied that the number 64, if patiently studied, would unlock all the secrets of this world and the next, because it was not