Artificial earth sculpture

William Newsham Blair (1841-91) was born in Scotland, and trained there as an engineer and surveyor. He emigrated to Dunedin at the end of 1863 and took employment with the Otago Provincial Survey Department at the beginning of the new year. In 1871, he became District Engineer of Public Works, and in 1878, the year after election as a Member of the Institution of Civil Engineers, was appointed Engineer-in-Charge of Public Works in the South Island. In 1884, Blair moved to Wellington as Assistant Engineer-in-Chief. In 1890, he became Engineer-in-Chief and Under Secretary for Public Works (Furkert 1953: 117). During his career as engineer, Blair had many opportunities to travel throughout New Zealand. For example, in the 1870s he travelled widely throughout Otago and Canterbury (including traversing the Southern Alps five times) while on reconnaissance surveys for possible railway routes, and in the 1880s he visited the King Country to report on the proposed North Island Main Trunk. It was no doubt on these and similar journeys that Blair became very much aware of the changes which man was making to the landscape. A few earlier writers had expressed concern about the wholesale clearing of the natural vegetation, but none had noted the scale of man-induced erosion and change. Similarly Blair refused to accept a commonly held theory that rainfall increased if forests were planted, and decreased if the land was denuded. In some ways, Blair may be compared with George Perkins Marsh in the United States. Over two decades earlier Marsh had already recognised that man was a potent force in changing his environment. It is interesting to speculate if indeed Blair had found his inspiration in the writings of this American naturalist. Introduction by R.P. Hargreave

Observation of hard scattering in photoproduction events with a large rapidity gap at HERA

Events with a large rapidity gap and total transverse energy greater than 5 GeV have been observed in quasi-real photoproduction at HERA with the ZEUS detector. The distribution of these events as a function of the $\gamma p$ centre of mass energy is consistent with diffractive scattering. For total transverse energies above 12 GeV, the hadronic final states show predominantly a two-jet structure with each jet having a transverse energy greater than 4 GeV. For the two-jet events, little energy flow is found outside the jets. This observation is consistent with the hard scattering of a quasi-real photon with a colourless object in the proton.Comment: 19 pages, latex, 4 figures appended as uuencoded fil