The next season, the same contests took place, which terminated, like the former, by the victory of the herons. From that time, peace seemed to have been agreed upon between them; the rooks relinquished possession of that part of the grove which the herons occupied; the herons confined themselves to those trees they first seized upon, and the two species lived together in as much harmony as they did before their quarrel.
When Mr. West, grandson of Sir Benjamin, was in this country, exhibiting the great picture of “Christ rejected,” he employed a man to hang it up in the exhibition-room. Accordingly, the latter brought in a bill “for hanging Christ rejected by your grandfather.”
Dr. Vince seeing the images of a ship in the air.
Spectral Illusions.
The atmosphere has the power of bending the rays of light, so that we see the sun before it actually rises above the horizon, and after it has actually sunk below it.
This bending of the rays, produces some curious appearances, and which were formerly viewed with superstition. Dr. Vince, an English philosopher, was once looking through a telescope at a ship, which was so far off, that he could only see the upper parts of the masts. The hulk was entirely hidden by the bending of the water, but between himself and the ship, he saw two perfect images of it in the air. These were of the same form and color as the real ship; but one of them was turned upside down.
When Captain Scoresby was in the Polar Sea with his ship, he was separated by the ice from that of his father for some time, and looked out for her every day with great anxiety. At length, one evening, to his utter astonishment, he saw her suspended in the air, in an inverted position, traced on the horizon in the clearest colors, and with the most distinct and perfect representation. He sailed in the direction in which he saw this visionary phenomenon, and actually found his father’s vessel by its indication. He was separated from the ship by immense masses of icebergs, and at such a distance that it was impossible to have seen her in her actual situation, or to have seen her at all, if her spectrum had not been thus raised several degrees above the horizon in the air by this most extraordinary refraction.