Abstract
IT has been from time to time a pleasure during the protracted civil war in Spain to receive the Boletin del Observatorio del Ebro and to realize that the famous Jesuit observatory was working away peacefully in Republican Spain. Father Rodes and his staff have been carrying on their heliophysical, meteorological and seismological work steadily with support from the Government—last year their grant was paid in full—the autonomous Government of Catalonia and the municipal councils of Villanova and Geltru, though they have been faced with severe difficulty in securing necessary scientific material and have been naturally unable to collect meteorological data from their observers scattered throughout Spain. Now comes the sad news, reported by the Burgos correspondent of The Times (April 25), that the tide of war has swept over them and that instruments have been dismantled and damaged during the hostilities, while the director, Father Rodes, has been taken to Barcelona. It is to be hoped that he will soon be released and enabled to return to his observatory and to restart the many series of observations of international importance that have been thus forcibly interrupted. Nothing much has been reported about another famous Jesuit geophysical observatory, that at Zi-Ka-wei, close to Shanghai, with its astronomical sub-station at Zô-Sè, some forty miles away. They, too, have lain in a ravaged war zone, but their latest publication from Zô-Sè ("Perturbations générates par Jupiter et Saturne sur 40 petites planetes", par le P. E. de la Villemarqué, S.J.) received less than a week ago, suggests that the astronomers have been allowed to carry on unmolested.
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The Ebro and Zi-Ka-wei Observatories. Nature 141, 822–823 (1938). https://doi.org/10.1038/141822b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/141822b0