“If the Earth did not turn on its axis, it is probable that a relatively feeble shock would suffice to give a movement of rotation round an axis arbitrarily chosen; but the Earth is like an enormous gyroscope moving at high velocity, and it is a natural law that such an apparatus has a tendency to turn round the same axis, as Foucault demonstrated in his well-known experiments. It will therefore be very difficult, if not impossible, to shift it.” But after asking what would be the effort required by the engineers of the North Polar Practical Association, it was at least as interesting to know if the effort was to be suddenly or insensibly applied. And if it was to be a sudden effort, would not the proceedings of Messrs. Barbicane & Co. produce some rather alarming catastrophes on the face of the earth? Here was something to occupy the brains of the wise and foolish. A shock is a shock, and it is never agreeable to receive the blow or the counter-blow. There was a likelihood that the promoters of the enterprise had been so busy with the advantages the world was to possess that they had overlooked the destruction the operation would entail. And with considerable cleverness the Major and his allies made the most of this, and began to agitate public opinion against the president of the Gun Club. Although France had taken no part in the syndicating, and officially treated the matter with disdain, yet there was in that country an individual who conceived the idea of setting out for Baltimore, to follow, for his own private satisfaction, the different phases of the enterprise. He was a mining engineer of about five and thirty years of age. He had been the first on the list when admitted to the Polytechnic School, and he had been the first on the list when he left it, so that he must have been a mathematician of the first order, and probably superior to J. T. Maston, who, though he was a long way above the average, was only a calculator after all—that is to say, what Leverrier was compared to Newton or Laplace. This engineer was a man of brains, and—though he was none the worse for that—somewhat of a humourist, and an original. In conversation with his intimates, even when he talked science, his language was more that of the slang of the streets than of the academical formulæ he employed when he wrote. He was a wonderful worker, being accustomed to sit for ten hours at a stretch before his table, writing pages on pages of algebra with as much ease as he would have written a letter.