TENNYSON AS A MAN OF SCIENCE.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1019, 7 January 1911, Page 9

TENNYSON AS A MAN OF SCIENCE.

: That Tennyson was an accurate and delicato observer of nature has been known for a-.'tang - while by all lovers of his works,-and some critical labour has already been expended in'i.disentaugling the thousand and 0110 felicities of'imagery -which he' dreiwjfrom. nature,. living -and inanimate, 'from 1 tlieir setting. One :remembqrs that 1 -' he used tokeep a, notebook and jot down things lie saw :on liis 'walks'abroad,■•'working them up afterwards .into /Homeric' similes or into a word or two of vivid metaphor, so that the sight of a broken cliffsido tumbling headlong with a pine tree embedded in its mass canio to figure a' knight falling pierced with a lance at a tournament, and corn sheaves bowing , before the wind tho sloping handwriting of his "Princess." We know, too, that he was an evolutionist before Darwin discovered Natural Selection, and that he was deeply excited' ■ and impressed by tho vast and sudden widening of scientific vision which was contemporary with his writing. But few even of Jiis most .assiduous and qareful readers can liavo realised how closo his knowledgo of . science and how informed and intimate his observation of nature -really are.. .The demonstration of this, is tho purpose of a little book, "Tennyson as a Student and Poet of Nature," which -Sir Norman Loekyer and his daughter have just issued. Tho subject is mapped out with scientific accuracy, and experts in all branches of science are called in' to give, cvidenco of . the wealth and closeness of the poet's detail. -

Tho cumulative effect of their testimony is amazing, and perhaps the strongest part of tlieii? case comes when they aro demonstrating, what Tennyson did not know rather than when tliey are cataloguing what ho did. "The low sun makes tho colour," wroto tho poet in "Lancelot and Elaine," and the man of science is at hand to tell you that this single L ; ,ne condenses tho whole philosophy or tho atmospheric phenomena of sunrise mid sunset. On the other hand, "there is no cvidenco in the poems that the poet followed tho discoveries which had been made since 180S by means of the spectroscope." How should there be? Yet tho completeness of Tennyson's science and nature study leads Sir Norman Loekyer to look for it, and comment on its absence. Tennyson knows, you find, that bats hibernate,-that the starling constantly snaps together its mandibles ("claps his tiny castanets"), that serpents' rggs cling together, that tho fruit of the spindle-treo remains after all the leaves are gone and looks like a flower, that our sun is a remnant shaped put of a nebula, and the moon (this in anticipation of a thcol-y since worked out by Sir George Darwin) was detached from tho earth in the early stages—and a thousand other things, all .of them catalogued in this charming book. Sir Norman Loekyer has done an ossonti.il servico to tho Establishment of Tennyson's greatness, What a new province Im conquered for poetry 1 From Wordsworth, to whom the stars were things belonging especially to the flivWlers in every dale —"onnlf with his little patch of skv and littlo group of stars," to Tennyson's

silent licavcas roll and suns along (heir fiery 1 way, All their planets whirling round them, flash a million miles away,

there is 110 more Minn a generation in time—indeed the two poets' working lives overlapped each other. In thought it- is the divergence \ f two epochs.—"Manchester Guardian."

An electrical apparatus ivhcrcbv a sound wave is sent to the bottom i>f relatively shallow water, ailil, boiiis deflected back, is received bv another instrument, has been invented far sovnding.