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

LAMBETH.

The nomination of candidates for this borough is
appointed to take place this morning at 10 o'clock, on
hustings which have been erected as usual at the Horns
Kennington. There are at present four gentlemen
really or nominally appealing for the support of the
constituency. We say really or nominally, because Mr
Haig, the Conservative candidate, has taken so little
pains to press his claims upon the electors, and has,
indeed, so ostentatiously announced his intention to
abstain from all the most ordinary electioneering
proceedings, that his nomination can hardly be
treated as a practical endeavour to obtain a seat in
the House of Commons ; but rather as a protest,
somewhat faint and imperfect at the best, against
the notion that the borough of Lambeth is wholly
Liberal in sentiment, and an assertion that there is,
after all, within its limits a Conservative minority,
no matter how small, which is dimly striving to
make its influence felt in Parliament. The other
three candidates are all Liberals, varying a good
deal in personal character and attainments ; but not
essentially differing as to the course which they are
likely to pursue upon any of the most important
political questions of the day. They are Mr. Doul-
ton and Mr. Alderman Lawrence (the late members
for the borough), and Mr. Thomas Hughes. All
three gentlemen have during the week been most
assiduous in their exertions to press upon the elec-
tors their claims to a seat in Parliament ; and on
Saturday they each of them addressed several well-
attended meetings in different parts of the borough,
at which resolutions were adopted approving their
principles, and pledging those who were present to
exert themselves to secure their return. One of
the meetings addressed by Mr. Doulton was an
open-air one, held in Union-square, Horsemonger-
lane.

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 tke 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
♦alue 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 oven of doubt-
ful precision. All those measures have to be reduced to the
level of the sea, and it is by no means certain that all the
seas of the globe are 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. Biot 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 that he might be right to a certain extent.