The Earth's Past History. By Major-General Drayson. (Chap- man and
Hall.)—The author declares that he has discovered the second rotation of the earth, and that by this fact properly grasped thirty thousand years of the earth's past history can be understood, especially in regard to the extraordinary changes of climate. According to him, it is not the whole axis of the earth which traces a cone, but the two semi-axes, a result of a second and slow rotation, and that the axis traces a circle round some point not the pole of the ecliptic, and that the decrease in the obliquity of the ecliptic is not owing to the lateral or the movement towards the pole of the heavens, but to the second rotation. If this is so, it is curious that astronomers should have missed such a discovery by so little, and that little compelling them to use perpetual corrections, and making, according to the author, a grand revolution of the equinoxes 31,682, instead of 25,868 years. The writer has con- structed an ingenious model to explain this phenomenon. As- tronomers, we hope, will now condescend to answer him, and settle once for all the reasons here given for the gradual decrease in the obliquity of the ecliptic.
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