In 1842-43 a Mr. Henson had proposed what he called an aeronaut steam-engine, and a Bill was brought in to incorporate an “Aerial Transit Company.” The present plan is altogether different, the moving power being the explosion of mixed hydrogen and air. Nothing came of it—not even a Bill. What the final destiny of the balloon may be no one knows: it may reasonably be suspected that difficulties will at last be overcome. Darwin, in his Botanic Garden (1781), has the following prophecy:—

“Soon shall thy arm, unconquered Steam! afar

Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car;

Or, on wide-waving wings expanded, bear

The flying chariot through the fields of air.”

Darwin's contemporaries, no doubt, smiled pity on the poor man. It is worth note that the two true prophecies have been fulfilled in a sense different from that of the predictions. Darwin was thinking of the suggestion of Jonathan Hulls, when he spoke of dragging the slow barge: it is only very recently that the steam-tug has been employed on the canals. The car was to be driven, not drawn, and on the common roads. Perhaps, the flying chariot will be something of a character which we cannot imagine, even with the two prophecies and their fulfilments to help us.

Referring to the hoax about Mr. Goulburn in No. XIV., Messrs. C. H. and Thompson Cooper have corrected an error, by stating that the election which gave rise to the hoax was that in which Messrs. Goulburn and Yates Peel defeated Lord Palinerston and Mr. Cavendish. They add that Mr. Gunning, the well-known Esquire Bedell of the University, attributed the hoax to the late Rev. R. Sheepshanks, to whom, they state, are also attributed certain clever fictitious biographies—of public men, as I understand it—which were palmed upon the editor of the Cambridge Chronicle, who never suspected their genuineness to the day of his death. Being in most confidential intercourse with Mr. Sheepshanks, both at the time and all the rest of his life (twenty-five years), and never having heard him allude to any such things—which were not in his line, though he had satirical power of quite another kind—I feel satisfied he had nothing to do with them. I may add that others, his nearest friends, and also members of his family, never heard him allude to these hoaxes as their author, and disbelieve his authorship as much as I do myself. I say this not as imputing any blame to the true author, such hoaxes being fair election jokes in all time, but merely to put the saddle off the wrong horse, and to give one more instance of the insecurity of imputed authorship. Had Mr. Sheepshanks ever told me that he had perpetrated the hoax, I should have had no hesitation in giving it to him. I consider all clever election squibs, free from bitterness and personal imputation, as giving the multitude good channels for the vent of feelings which but for them would certainly find bad ones.

Logic, though the other exact science, has not had the sort of assailants who have clustered about mathematics. There is a sect which disputes the utility of logic, but there are no special points, like the quadrature of the circle, which excite dispute among those who admit other things. The old story about Aristotle having one logic to trammel us, and Bacon another to set us free—always laughed at by those who really knew either Aristotle or Bacon—now begins to be understood by a large section of the educated world. The author of this tract connects the old logic with the indecencies of the classical writers, and the new with moral purity: he appeals to women, who, “when they see plainly the demoralizing tendency of syllogistic logic, they will, no doubt, exert their powerful influence against it, and support the Baconian method.” This is the only work against logic which I can introduce, but it is a rare one, I mean in contents, I quote the author's idea of a syllogism:—

“The basis of this system is the syllogism. This is a form of couching the substance of your argument or investigation into one short line or sentence—then corroborating or supporting it in another, and drawing your conclusion or proof in a third.”

This subject has been so fully treated by many writers, that it may be thought little or nothing new can be said in reference to it. It may, however, be useful to bring together and to compare the results obtained by the standard writers on the theory of life contingencies, to examine how far those results agree with each other, and when they differ, to ascertain the causes of the difference.