Forbes, recently of Edinburgh, but now Provost of
the University of St. Andrews. The former was a great Zooelogist and
Botanist, and did not occupy himself with investigations in Physics;
the latter is an eminent Physicist, the author of the viscous theory of
Glaciers; and it is he who made the observations here ascribed to the
'Professor Forbes, whose untimely death the friends of science have
had so much reason to deplore.' The author adds the further mistake
of supposing that the numerical constant, 549 feet for each degree,
determined by James Forbes for Scotland, is equally correct for all
latitudes."
[This hardly needed confutation. No university requires any numerical
constant of height as qualification for a degree; and if they did, 549
feet would be excessive, unless, perhaps, at Warsaw, where everybody is
tall enough to end in _ski_.]
"5. Our essayist discloses but an imperfect inkling of knowledge on the
subject of capillarity in barometers, when he speaks of this complex
action as equivalent to _the attraction between the mercury and the
glass tube_; and he commits a yet graver mistake, practically speaking,
in reiterating the long exploded error, that 'the weight of the
atmosphere at the level of the sea is the same all over the world.' No
fact in Meteorology is better established than that the mean pressure at
the sea-level is different for different latitudes. In the vicinity of
Cape Horn the barometer is three-fourths of an inch lower than at the
Equator, and according to Schouw the pressure increases from the Equator
up to a certain latitude (38 deg.
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