identity of terrestrial weight with the force
which retains the moon in her orbit was made
in 1666. Newton, who was born on the 25th
of December, 1642, was then, therefore, three-
and-twenty years of age. Later (in 1670),
Picard, one of the first and most illustrious
members of the French Académie des Sciences
(founded also in 1666), undertook a new
measurement of the earth's dimensions, which
sensibly altered the value of the terrestrial
radius. About the middle of 1682, at a meeting
of the Royal Society of London, Newton
heard speak of Picard's new measurement, and
of the care with which it had been executed.
He obtained the fresh result arrived at, and as
soon as he got home, resuming the calculation
he had essayed sixteen years ago, he tried to
work it out again with his corrected data. As
he went on, and the favourable tendency of the
amended figures became apparent, his agitation
was such that he could not continue it, but
begged one of his friends to finish it for him.
Its success was complete. It was no longer
possible to doubt that the same force which
brings an apple to the ground also prevents the
moon from parting company with us.

Newton was, therefore, authorised to assert
that the planets are drawn by weight, or
gravitate, towards the sun, exactly as the satellites
are drawn by weight, or gravitate, towards
the planets to which they belong; and that the
weight of bodies on the surface of the earth is
only a particular case of the gravitation
manifested in celestial space by the revolution of the
planets round the sun and of the satellites
round their respective planets.

How natural, then, to generalise the idea by
stating that all material bodies dispersed in
space are impelled by weight, or gravitate,
towards each other, in obedience to the
magnificient law which is known in science as
universal attraction or gravitation, first revealed
through the vagaries of the changeful moon!

THE ENGLISH GENTLEMAN'S OWN
PROFESSION.

THE belief, once extant, that no person with
a claim to be regarded as nobly born, could
possibly follow any other profession than that
of arms has got to be effectually exploded. Yet
still there lingers in the minds of all sorts of
people a tacit conviction that the military
profession more than others is an aristocratic one,
and that to be known to belong to it is a sort
of proof of being a person of some consideration.
The tradesman who has made money will put his
son into a crack cavalry corps, and will pay the
prodigious bills which are the inevitable result
of this step, comforted by the thought that his
son is an " officer and a gentleman." The
mother and sisters of this officer and gentleman
are proud of his social position as they would
not be if he were in some other line of business,
and when the neighbours make enquiry after the
lad, reply that he is " with his regiment" with
much internal satisfaction. This feeling of
reverence for the position of an officer in the
army is indeed very widely diffused among
English people. By many members of the
lower classes, especially, it is considered
complimentary to credit you with the possession of
a commission in her Majesty's service. In
Leech's caricatures, his favourite little snob is
taken by the cunning crossing-sweeper and the
Hansom cabman for an officer, and is gratified
accordingly. The crossing-sweeper would never
pretend to take the little gent for a doctor or a
civil engineer by way of flattering him. He
professes to connect the miserable fool whom he
intends to fleece with the army because it is
supposed to be a profession peculiar to the
higher classes, and so he conveys by implication
his conviction that this his victim is of the
higher classes too.

It is a common argument with that large
class of persons who see danger in every effort
which we make to advance, that one of the
greatest advantages belonging to our purchase
system is, that it keeps our army supplied with
officers who are above all things, and par
excellence, gentlemen. Now, assuming for the
moment that this particular element, in the
character of the men whose business it is to work
the war machinery of the country, is as
important an ingredient as so many of these
obstructive individuals believe it to be, we come
next to the question: does the purchase system
secure this object of officering our army with
gentlemen so entirely and so certainly, as to
make it for the sake of that consideration alone,
a desirable thing to retain?

If we take the trouble of taxing our memories
a little, still more if we take the additional
trouble of looking back through a file of old
newspapers, the chances are that we shall come
upon many instances of behaviour on the part
of English officers, sometimes acting
individually, sometimes collectively, which it is not
easy to reconcile with the rules by which
gentlemen should be guided in their dealings with
each other. We light upon many cases, in the
course of such a scrutiny—which though we
should not be surprised to hear of them in a
company of ordinary human beings—we are
surprised to encounter among the members of
so exclusively aristocratic a race as the officers
of the British army are considered to be. We
come, for instance, upon cases of peculation and
cheating, if so vulgar an expression may be
allowed, such as that of a gallant captain forging a
bill for nine hundred and fifty pounds wherewith
to pay a previously contracted debt; or another
gallant captain tried by court-martial for having
"fraudulently applied" a sum of twenty-one
thousand nine hundred and fifty-three rupees,
received by him as paymaster of his regiment.
We come also upon cases—not a few of these
—of quartermasters found guilty of "conduct
unbecoming an officer and a gentleman," in
making private profit out of stores of wood,
oil, beef, coals, &c., ostensibly supplied to the
regiment which they represented; or in