“STREAMER.—A Streamer shall stand in the toppe of a shippe, or in the forecastle, and therein be put no armes, but a man’s conceit or device, and may be of the lengthe of twenty, forty, or sixty yards; and it is slit, as well as a guydhomme or standarde.”—HARLEIAN MSS.
An item, in a bill of parcels, charged to the Earl of Warwick, in 1437, consists of “a great Stremour for the Ship, of xl yerdis lenghth, and viij yerdis in brede.”—BANNERS USED IN THE ENGLISH ARMY, &c.
[122] Meteorological Journal, Literary Gazette, Sept. 29th.
[123] Literary Gazette, as above.
[124] Encyclopædia Britannica. Art. Aurora Borealis.
[125] Encyclopædia Britannica.
[126] The individual, social, and political importance of making the art of drawing a branch of general education, is a subject which the author can never cease to urge upon the attention of his fellow-countrymen, and of all the civilised world. It is more than ten years since he first endeavoured to lead the public eye to its regard. In England, and with a view to the subsistence of a large and always increasing population, it is an EDUCATION IN THE ARTS which is the great want; and the art of drawing, besides being the assistant of all knowledge whatever, is peculiarly so of all other arts than itself, or of all other works of the hand. A recent Sermon, by the Lord Bishop of Bath and Wells, preached at Wells, for the benefit of the Diocesan National Schools, bears ample testimony to the deficiency, and even the dangers, to the poor not less than to others, in all the present popular education; and, so far, therefore, to the soundness of the author’s principles, and to the fitness of his remedy. His own design, however, is not only to remedy an evil arising from the present practice, but also to produce an independent good; and, not merely to aid the poor, nor merely to promote the political welfare of this kingdom, but to increase the resources, physical and intellectual, of all classes, and to promote the welfare of the whole world.
[127] The author has an opinion, that among the “agents of nature,” for equalising the temperature of the surface of the globe, is to be reckoned, not only the Northern and Southern Lights, but the entire Ocean; and that this agency is the immediate object aimed at in the existence of this last, as one body of water surrounding the entire globe. His evidence consists in geographical, hydrographical, meteorological, and physiological facts, as also in the apparent reason of the case. He supposes, in consequence, a perpetual circulation of the waters of the sea, longitudinally round the globe, or from North to South, and from South to North again; and the result of Captain Parry’s late attempt to reach the Arctic Pole, as also some of the facts which have transpired respecting Captain Franklin’s late land expedition, appear to confirm his theory, according to which the physical use, or final cause, of the existence of the Ocean has never previously been understood. His theory affects the question of the North-west Passage, which latter object he suspects to have never yet been pursued in the true direction; even the discoveries of Captain Parry appearing to him to have fallen short of ascertaining the communication with the Polar Sea by the channel of Davis’s Strait.—Some introductory observations upon this subject have been already made in an article in the New Monthly Magazine for October, 1826, (vol. xvii. p. 371.)
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