AN OLD PROBLEM SOLVED.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XVIII, Issue 6051, 9 April 1881, Page 7

AN OLD PROBLEM SOLVED.

A great deal has been written about what came of the buried treasure of Captain Kidd the pirate. The New York I'imes, by the application of the scientific method of investigation which has proved so successful in astronomy, thus solves the mystery :—The orbit of Captain Kidd was a greatly elongated ellipse, extending from New York to Madagascar along its greater diameter, and having a smaller diameter of only a few hundred miles. Ho left New Yorkin April, 1796, and returned in April, 1799. His periodic time was thus precisely three years, and his rate of revolution can be accurately calculated. In the early part of April, 1796, Ividd was among the West India Islands, where his vessel was detained for several weeks. The astronomer will naturally ask what it was that thus retarded his motion. When Leverrier found that something was retarding the motion of Uranus he instantly saw, knowing as he did the tastes and habits of planets, that it must be another planet, and thereupon he looked for the other planet, and found it. Now, we know that the object which has the strongest attraction for sailors, and that produces the most important perturbations of their orbits, is rum. It was, then, rum which delayed Kidd and entangled him among the West India Islands. The next question is, where should we search for this disturbing rum, to which a scientific echo at once replies, Jamaica. That island is the native habitat of rum, and when Kidd passed in its vicinity he must have felt its attraction. Beyond any doubt, he was detained for some time at Jamaica, and it is there that traces of him, such as gold and silver, should be sought. No man lias ever thought of digging for Kidd's money at Jamaica, because no scientific man has over paid any attention to the matter; but it is clear that Jamaica is the place in which to search. After disentangling himself from the influences of Jamaica, Kidd reached his perihelion at NewYork, and in the natural course of things should have gone on revolving in his orbit toward his aphelion at Madagascar. Instead of so doing we find him shooting off at a tangent in the direction of Boston. As in the former case, the disturbing influence was, of course rum. The potency of New England rum is -well known to all scientific mon, and its power of attraction is, bulk for bulk, nearly three times that of Jamaica rum. Kidd was detained so long at Boston that when he finally shook off the influences of New England rum, he was unable to regain his original orbit. He set off in a hyperbolic -jurve and reached London, from whence he passed into space, never again, in all probability, to revist our system. Next to Jamaica, Boston is the mo3t probable place in which to find Kidd's money. As for Peekskill and other places lying entirely out of his orbit, it is the merest folly to search them for traces of Kidd. Not only have people searched the wrong places, but they have been guilty of the unscientific folly of digging in ground and dredging rivers for money which no sane pirate ever would have placed there. Kidd's money went, of course, into the pockets of the Jamaican and Bostonian rum-sellers. It is those pockets that must be searched if-the missing treasure is to be found. How to search them is a matter of detail belonging to the engineer rather than to the astronomer. •The true scientific method of ascertaining the proper places in which to search is what we should require of the latter. When -this method has been unfolded to us we can then discuss how to search with the greatest ease and best prospects of success.