Almost the single outstanding recollection of a brief stay here is that of a tall, spare German guest who sprung from his chair and rose to "Attention" whenever a lady entered the room. Who is that gentleman?" "Oh, that is Baron Johannes von Gumbach, the scientist, who quarrelled with Sir Robert Hart."
The latter was then as for most of the rest_of his long life, the Inspector General of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs, and had engaged the baron as teacher of astronomy in the new Tungwen College in Peking. The views of j the professor, however, differed from those of most of the rest of the human. race in_ regard to celestial physics. "What contributed most to his notoriety," said Dr. Martin, who knew him well, "was his announced determination to overthrow the Newtonian theory of gravitation,—for attraction substituting the pressure of space, which he defined as the unagglomerated or unitary portion of the cosmos. The earth, he asserted, is not like an orange, but like a lemon, a prolate instead of an oblate spherald. In theology he was a pantheist, believing, as Dr. Williams phrased it, that there was not enough God in any one place to hurt him'. Many other strange notions he held, which like am electric spark required only the approach of the opposite to leap forth, One day in summer he was on his way to the Western Hills nexwr Peking, when his cart, laden with books, was swept away by a torrent caused by a sudden shower, the subsiding waves leaving books and manuscripts as landmarks for miles on both sides of the road." This disaster he laid to the charge of the Chinese Government, demanding a largo indemnity, claiming that it was net his fault that this sudden freshet had lost him the labour of 20 years, and "prolonged the reign of Newton for centuries."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.