Their statement is based on the fact that all the famines which have devastated India for the last seventy years have occurred at intervals of eleven years, or thereabouts, working backward and forward from the central years 1880 and 1885–86 in the above table, the middle years, that is, between the pulses.
Mr. Willcocks, in a paper read at the Meteorological Congress at Chicago, remarked that “famines in India are generally years of low flood in Egypt.”
It is now pointed out that the highest Niles follow the years of the + and − pulses, as does the highest rainfall in the Indian area.
Even if these results, which were communicated to the Royal Society of London five weeks before the end of the century, be confirmed, it may be pointed out that Sir William Herschel’s suggestion of 1801 will have required a whole century for its fulfilment, so slowly do those branches of science move which have not already led to some practical development.
Norman Lockyer.
PHILOSOPHY
It is a natural illusion that makes us think of each century as exhibiting the continuous development of one tendency of mind through a series of stages whose differences are only of secondary importance, and, on the other hand, to regard the steps from one century to another as corresponding to some marked transition of thought, as if the world had been suddenly precipitated into a new sphere of existence. For some purposes a rough generalization of this kind, that breaks at stated intervals the continuity of time, may, perhaps, be convenient. When, however, we begin to look at things more closely, we discover that it is impossible thus to cut through the historical connection of events, as it were, “with a hatchet.” We discover, for example, that the characteristics of the eighteenth century were strongly marked only in one period of it; and that what we call the spirit of the nineteenth century was born some time before the year 1800, and has never quite prevailed over other tendencies. At the same time, there is an important difference indicated by these two loosely used names, and as it is always easier to define things by contrast, it may help us to make our subject more definite to consider what they mean.