Mysteries

IN spite of the advance of our general knowledge we -find ourselves reminded from time to time that there are things beyond our understanding. And this is not true only of those vast questions which are outside the scope of science. The last man will find as much mystery in these as the first man found. Sometimes, however, our ignorance is proved in more trivial ways, and we begin to feel that even in the sciences we have no great justification for boasting.

Perhaps the most celebrated instance to chasten us is in the work of Pierre de Fermat. This mathematician, who died in 1665, discovered apparently, valid theorems -which . no mathematician since his day has ever succeeded in proving. They have stood every test to which they have been sub- mitted, and he himself professed to have found proofs for them. One of these theorems seems simple enough. Put in non-technical language, it asserts that though the sum of the squares of two whole numbers may be a square, the sum of two cubes can never be an exact cube, the sum of two numbers to the fourth power can never be a number to the fourth power, and so on for ever. This thecirem Fermat wrote on the margin of a book and professed that he had a "wonderfully sound proof" for it. The margin, however, was too narrow for the proof and it died with him. As late as 1907 a money prize was offered for its rediscovery. Within three years the judges had received nearly a thousand attempts

and no successes. _

In Lieut.-Commander R. T. Gonld's book of Oddities the story of Fermat's Theorems is told, along with many other unexplained mysiteries, in a bright, cheerful, and vivid fashion. His essays are various ;' for his only aim 'was "to collect and digest the facts relating to a number of incidents which-have not, at present, been satisfactorily explained." He tells ms, for example, of the strange footprintsi found -in the snow on Febtusity r8th;-1855-. They- travelled without, -deviation through gardens and fields, Over Walls and .house-tops, for a

• hundred miles in South Devonshire. Foot followed foot in a single line. The distance between the treads was a regular 81 inches and all of the prints were Made in the space of a single night. "Birds could not have left these marks," said one matter-of-fact correspondent, "as no bird's foot leaves the impression of a hoof."

The footprints excited Wide attention and much discussion in the newspapers. One clergyman supposed that a kangaroo was bounding over the .countryside. Some of the scientific experts of the day came forward With pontifical _remarks 'which did not in the least fit the evidence. Even to-day there is no known animal which could have made such prints. Lieut.-Commander Gould plays with the idea that some unknown beast issued from the sea and vanished back again ; but the mystery has never been solved. j Countrymen con- tinued to believe that the author of the footprints was the Old Gentleman himself, and for a- long time refused to go out of

doors after sunset. _

One article tells. us of Various queer juggling's which have .happened in burial venni.. In More . than onerecorded instance, whenever a vault was Opened, it' was seen that the coffins had been lifted up and thrown round in disorder. A -chapter; perhaPi more interesting than those in which we are introduced to incidents that are a strain on our credulity, tells the story of the wizard of Mauritius. The wizard Was a certain obscure individual called Bottineau, who .became notorious at Mauritius for his faculty of being able to foretell the arrival of ships in harbour as much as four days before they appeared over the horizon. His prophecies were Checked -by the Governor and the official staff ; they certified that within six months he had prophesied the arrival of 109 vessels and had only been mistaken twice. These two mistakes; moreover, could be explained by contrary winds or currents.

There seems little doubt that he was able to observe appear: ances in the sky which marked the approach Of a vessel. His Own explanation was that the vessel carried with it an atmo- sphere, or, as he called it, a meteor. It wis not necessary, he 'affirined, to have particularly keen eyesight to-See it ; it was visible to any man who knew hoar to recognize it. His art Of" nauscopie was never imparted to any pupils. He asked for a reward larger than the French Government was willing to give him and died before his negotiations were completed. There is no reason to doubt that he possessed. the faculty he claimed ; it can be compared with the ability of Polynesian steersmen, to which we referred recently, to note the approach of land long before it appears on the horizon.

Lieut..-Commander Gould discusses also the two ships which were seen stranded by the crew of the ' Renovation ' on a great ice-floe off the Newfoundland Bank. The captain, . _ _

who, being a little off colour, was spending the morning in bed, refused to put himself out for a couple ofwrecks, and the 'Renovation' sailed on. Besides the not insurmountable difficulty of deciding how the ships came to be resting on the top of an ice-floe, one of them interesting points of the story is the possibility that they were the •' Erebus' and the 'Terror,' the two lost ships of Sir John Franklin's last expedition.

None of the inventors of perpetual motion machines merits attention, unless it should be that of J. E. E. Beisler, known to the scientists and the populace of eighteenth-century Germany as Orffyreus :— " Orffyrens' Wheel, in fact, is the only instance on record of a machine, capable of doing external work and Yet not depending on any external or known souree of power, haling been exhibited in public, and subjected to official tests. These test, while not stringent, certainly seem to have precluded the very natural supposition that the whole thing was a clever trick. The machine Underwent them succesafully, but 'its construction was never disclosed."

A turn of the hand set the wheel in motion ; it then aicelerated until it reached its maximum speed of twenty-six turns a minute, and at "this - rate 0 motion continued revolving for f months. The maker of the machine' allowed only one man tO see within the canvas cover of the wheel, but the test was Sufficiently severe to remove the criticisms that were made on another Wheel exhibited in London later in the century. A 'magazine 'recorded of this later 'invention

,

• ." The wheel was stated to be a pure mechanism ; but a simple

. .

test showed that it could -not only sneeze, but Swear, too. like

a Christian, when a small paper of snuff was blown into a hole at the side cif the •drum."

In this very entertaining book we are told also of nautical searches. for doubtful islands, of various false discoveries of the supposed planet Vulcan, of the strange fulfilment of the prophecies. of • Nostiadamus, and of many other remarkable incidents. We are reminded, too, of it modern instance of an indisputable fact having been discovered and remaining

Mr. E. A. Reeves, the Map Curator of the Royal Geographical Society, published in 1922 his discovery that a freely suspended piece of paper, when exposed to strong sunlight, will always tend to set itself north and south. The fact has been repeatedly verified, but so far no scientist has offered an explanation.