The Sun.
London, England, 1865-07-10 00:00:00

SOUTHWARK.

There is no note of preparation for a contest, nor
scarcely anything to show that an election is at
hand in " the Borough." The signs that are to be
met everywhere in the City, in Lambeth, in Fins-
bury, in Westminster, and in Marylebone are wholly
wanting. No committee-rooms are to be seen ; no
meetings summoned to hear the addresses of the
candidates. Besides the hustings there is to be but
one polling-booth. The votes in all but two dis-
tricts—" in the event of a poll being demanded"—
are to be taken at schools, a vestry-hall, and a work-
house. The paths are quite smooth for Mr. Locke
and Mr. Layard to walk over.

AN ELECTOR'S JOKE.—Mr. Adam Black is at
present very unpopular with his constituency in
Edinburgh, which has given rise to a respectable joke
" What can have caused Adam's Fall ?" asked one consti-
tuent. " The Eve of an election," was the reply.

THE FIGURE OF THE EARTH.—The Cosmos pub-
lishes an article by M. W. de Fonvielle, on the sub-
ject of certain remarks made in Germany on the measure of
an arc of the meridian of Barcelona, comprised between
that city and Formentera. In this article he contends that
Biot and Arago, in measuring that arc, did not by any
means intend to correct the length of the metre, but only
to verify the results obained by Delambre and Mecbain.
Since then numerous arcs have been measured without any
addition to our knowledge of the figure of the earth; on
the contrary, difficulties have arisen in proportion as the
means of investigation have become more powerful. The
academicians of our days are not half so sure of the real
value of the spheroid we inhabit as the contemporaries of
Picard and Lacaille were. It is found that the vicinity of
mountains may cause the plumb-line to deviate from the
perpendicular. Nay, they have even been led to suspect
existence of a repulsive force in certain localities of the
earth, such as Moscow ; and they have even been induced
to start the question whether all meridians are identical
curves or not, or the terrestrial spheroid may not have
suffered some depression or elevation of surface sufficient
to deform it and prevent its assimilation to a spheroid of
revolution. M. de Fonvielle shows that geometricians are
greatly embarrassed in their choice between various con-
tradictory measurements, some of which are even of doubt-
ful precision. All these measures have to be reduced to the
level of the sea, and it is by no means certain that all the
seas of the glebe aro on the level; and hence our author
concludes that the only way to get out of the difficulty is
to follow the example of MM. Blot and Arago, and mea-
sure a certain number of marine arcs. Considering the
discrepancies so ably exposed by our author, we
are reminded of M. de Gumpache's work on the
Figure of the Earth, an abstract of which we
gave about two years ago, and in which he endeavours to
show that the earth is an elongated and not a flattened
spheroid. We remember having read that work with great
interest, and though we cannot presume to declare his ar-
guments perfectly correct, we cannot divest ourselves of a
strong suspicion pat he might be right to a certain extent.