eaking,
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.) in both hemispheres, and diminishes
thence towards the Poles."

[The connection between capillarity and the fat of the common bear is
well known to all manufacturers of trycoverus compounds, and they are
probably right in advertising that grease of this description restores
tone to the hair,--of course a fine beary tone. As the weight of the
bear depends on his fat, the inference to a bear-ometer is obvious. It
is a familiar fact that the bear supports life during hibernation by
sucking his paws; but it may not be so generally known that the waste
thus induced in the anterior extremities is restored by the moral
consciousness of the animal that the fat he is so carefully hoarding is
to confer a posthumous blessing on mankind. This is a touching example
of the adaptation of means to end, and Shakspeare, the great natural
philosopher, has made use of it for one of his most striking metaphors,
where he says, "that the thought of something after death must give us
paws."]

"6. Discoursing on the elasticity of the air, the writer styles it
'the most compressible of bodies,'--as if it had any advantage in this
respect over the numerous other species of gaseous matter. As to the
illustration which he gives, namely, that 'a glass vessel full of air,
placed under a receiver and then exhausted by the air-pump, will burst
into atoms,' we can only say, what every schoolboy knows, that the
_bursting_ would be _inwards_, unless, indeed, our meteorologist means
that the external receiver was to be exhausted, and in that case he
should so have expressed himself."

[The theory of exhausted receivers is, in our opinion, worthy only of
the childhood of science, when chemistry and astronomy were alchemy and
astrology, and people would believe anything. In this enlightened age of
the universal subscription-paper, exhausted givers are familiar objects,
but a receiver who finds the labors of his calling excessive is as
non-existent as the harpy, his mythological prototype.]

"7. In