the sides of the furnace and the fuel on the grate-bars. The relative proportions of the inflammable body, and of water, necessary in such cases, vary materially. In three experiments on board the "Glasgow" steam-packet, it was found that about equal quantities of tar and water were consumed. The sides of the furnaces in that vessel form a part of the boiler, consequently their temperature never exceeds that of the contained water.

To estimate with accuracy the relative heating properties of the materials applicable to this process, which comprise bituminous, oleaginous, resinous, waxy, and fatty substances, in a fluid state,-as compared with coal and coke of various kinds, and other fuel, will require an extensive series of experiments. It is earnestly desired that practical men will make known to the patentee, from time to time, the results of their observations. That kind of information will enhance the value of the process by rendering its conditions better understood. With every desire to be on the safe side, he does not hesitate to affirm that, if the process be properly conducted, fifteen pounds of coal tar (weighing about eleven pounds per gallon), or the same quantity of Stockholm tar, with rather more than an equal bulk of water and twenty-five pounds of Newcastle coke, will be found equal to 120 pounds of Newcastle coal.

The cost of the process, as compared with that ordinarily employed, must necessarily depend on the relative cost of materials. In situations where coal, or other solid fuel, is plentiful and cheap, it is but reasonable to expect that the old system will be perpetuated. Not so where fuel is scarce or dear.

There are situations in which the relative cost of materials does not constitute the only consideration. For steam navigation, and especially in long voyages, fuel is not simply a question of cost, but of stowage. The period seems now fast approaching, when communications by steam may be established with every part of the globe.

New Books.

THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME.

[SOMEWHAT more than two years have elapsed since we first noticed this celebrated romance of Victor Hugo, then in the fifth edition, and just in the zenith of popularity in Paris. During the above period, its merits have been weighed in nearly every critical balance in this country, yet, not until within these few months has any publisher thought the translation of the Hunchback a safe card. Now, as if to make up for lost time, we have two translations, of which that before us, included in the Standard Novels, is published at one-fourth of the price of its compeer.

This work is universally allowed, by the

French critics, to be the best of Victor Hugo's works, and in England, it has been ranked with the most successful romances by the author of Waverley. This is praise to " the top of the tree," but it is scarcely characteristic of the merits of The Hunchback: it does not bespeak the highly wrought and poetic vigour of the descriptive scenes, the author's familiarity with the time of which he writes, or the graphic vraisemblance of the scenes of action. The idea is taken from the Gitanilla of Cervantes, and aims at showing the omnipotence of love. The heroine, La Esmeralda, a Bohemian gipsey, by turns ensnares the truckling priest; bewitches the poor poet with a fine frenzy; soothes the savage Quasimodo-the dumb, one-eyed bellringer of Notre Dame; while La Esmeralda is herself hopelessly attached to a hair-brained captain of the guard, whose only love is selflove. The scenes of these amours are in fifty-four flittering chapters, all of which are not, however, occupied by action. Some of them are, perhaps, the finest specimens of novel scene-painting ever read. They have the freshness of yesterday, but portray realities three centuries and a half since, and are so many slides in the magic lantern of Paris in 1482, or in the time of Louis XI. of this portion of the work we will endeavour to afford the reader some glance by a few flying extracts. The first scene is a notorious resort, whither Gringoire, an unsuccessful poet, has been driven by three begging impostors. This extraordinary place is named]

The Cour des Miracles.

"Where am I?" cried the affrighted poet. "In the Cour des Miracles," replied a fourth spectre, who had joined them.

"Miracles, upon my soul !" rejoined Gringoire," for here are blind who see, and lame who run."

A sinister laugh was their only answer.

The poor poet cast his eyes around him. He was actually in that dreaded Cour des Miracles, into which no honest man had ever penetrated at such an hour, a magic circle, in which the officers of the Châtelet and the sergeants of the provost, who ventured within it, were disposed of in a trice; the haunt of thieves; a hideous wen on the face of Paris; a sewer disgorging every morning and receiving every night that fetid torrent of vice, mendicity, and roguery, which always overflows the streets of great capitals; a monstrous hive, to which all the drones of the social order retired at night with their booty; the hospital of imposture, where the gipsy, the unfrocked monk, the ruined scholar, the blackguards of all nations, Spaniards, Italians, Germans, of all religions, Jews, Christians, Mahometans, idolaters, covered with painted wounds, beggars by day, transmogrified themselves into banditti at night;

mmense robing-room, in short, whither all the actors of that eternal comedy which theft, prostitution, and murder are performing in the streets of Paris, resorted at that period to dress and to undress.

It was a spacious area, irregular, and illpaved, like all the open places of Paris in those days. Fires, around which swarmed strange-looking groups, were blazing here and there. All was bustle, confusion, uproar. Coarse laughter, the crying of children, the voices of women, were intermingled. The hands and heads of this multitude, black upon a luminous ground, were making a thousand antic gestures. A dog which looked like a man, or a man who looked like a dog, might be seen from time to time passing over the place on which trembled the reflection of the fires, interspersed with broad, ill-defined shadows. The limits between races and species seemed to be done away with in this city, as in a pandemonium. Men, women, brutes, age, sex, health, disease, all seemed to be in common among these people. They were jumbled, huddled together, laid upon one another; each there partook of everything.

The faint and flickering light of the fires enabled Gringoire to distinguish, in spite of his agitation, all round the immense place a hideous circumference of old houses, the decayed, worm-eaten, ruinous fronts of which, each perforated by one or two small lighted windows, appeared to him in the dark like enormous heads of old hags ranged in a circle, watching the witches' sabbath rites and winking their eyes. It was like a new world, unknown, unheard of, deformed, creeping, crawling, fantastic.

Gringoire-more and more terrified; held by the three mendicants as by three vices; deafened by a crowd of other faces bleating and barking around him-the unlucky Gringoire strove to rally his presence of mind, and to recollect whether it was Saturday or not. But his efforts were vain: the thread of his memory and of his thoughts was broken, and, doubting everything, floating between what he saw and what he felt, he asked himself this puzzling question :-" If I am, can this be? if this is, can I be?"

At this moment a distinct shout arose from amidst the buzzing crowd by which he was surrounded:-" Lead him to the king! lead him to the king!"

wretched plight, was utterly ruined in this struggle.

While crossing the horrible place, the ver tigo which had confused his senses was dispelled. He had taken but a few steps before a conviction of the reality flashed upon him. He began to become used to the atmosphere of the place. At the first moment there had risen from his poetic brain, and, perhaps, to speak quite simply and prosaically, from his empty stomach, a fume, a vapour, which, spreading itself between objects and him, had permitted him to catch a glimpse of them only in the distorting haze of the night. mare, in that darkness of dreams, which shows all outlines as shaking, all forms as grinning, all objects as heaped together in preposterous groups, dilating things into chimeras, and men into phantoms. By degrees this hallucination gave place to views less wild and less exaggerating. Reality burst upon him, paining his eyes, treading upon his toes, and demolishing piecemeal the whole frightful poesy by which he had at first fancied himself to be surrounded. He could not help perceiving that he was not walking in the Styx, but in the mud; that he was not elbowed by demons, but by robbers; that his soul was not in danger, but merely his life, because he lacked that excellent mediator between the ruffian and the honest man-the purse. In short, upon examining the scene more closely and more coolly he fell from the witches' sabbath down to the tavern. The Cour des Miracles was in fact nothing but a tavern, but a tavern for ruffians, quite as much stained with blood as with wine.

The sight which presented itself when his ragged escort had at length brought him to the place of his destination, was not calcu lated to carry him back to poetry, were it even the poetry of hell. It was more than ever the prosaic and brutal reality of the tavern. If our history did not pertain to the fifteenth century, we should say that Gringoire had descended from Michael Angelo to Callot.

"To the king! to the king!" repeated every voice.

He was hurried away. The rabble rushed to lay hands on him, but the three mendicants held him fast in their gripe, tearing him away from the others, and bawling, "He is ours! The poet's doublet, previously in

sect each other at too unusual angles. On these tables shone pots flowing with wine and beer, and round these pots were grouped a great many jolly faces, empurpled by the fire and by drink. Here a man, with huge paunch and jovial phiz, was whistling the while he took off the bandages from a false wound, and removed the wrappers from a sound and vigorous knee, which had been

swathed ever since morning in a dozen ligatures. At the back of him was a shrivelled wretch, preparing with suet and bullock's blood his black pudding for the ensuing day. Two tables off, a sharper, in the complete dress of a pilgrim, was twanging a stave of a religious hymn. In another place a young rogue was taking a lesson in epilepsy from an old cadger, who was also teaching him the art of foaming at the mouth by chewing a bit of soap. By the side of these a dropsical man was riddling himself of his protuberance, while four or five canters of the other sex were quarrelling about a child they had stolen in the course of the evening. Circumstances these, which, two centuries later, "appeared so ridiculous to the court," as Sauval tells us, "that they furnished pastime for the king, and were introduced into a royal ballet, called 'Night,' divided into four parts, and performed upon the stage of the PetitBourbon."-"Never," adds a spectator of this performance, 66 were the sudden metamorphoses of the Cour des Miracles more successfully represented."

From every quarter burst forth the coarse laugh and the obscene song. Each did just as he pleased, swearing and descanting, without listening to his neighbour. The pots jingled, quarrels arose, and broken mugs occasioned a destruction of rags.

A large dog was seated on his rump, looking at the fire. Young children were present at these orgies. The stolen boy was crying bitterly. Another, a stout fellow about four years old, was sitting on a high bench, dangling his legs at the table, which reached up to his chin, and saying not a word. A third was gravely spreading with his finger the melted tallow which ran from a candle upon the table. The last, a little urchin, crouching in the dirt, was almost lost in a kettle, which he was scraping with a tile, and from which he was extracting sounds that would have thrown Stradivarius into a swoon.

Near the fire stood a hogshead, and upon this hoghead was seated a mendicant. This was the king upon his throne. The three vagabonds who held Gringoire led him before the hogshead, and for a moment the whole motley assemblage was silent, excepting the kettle inhabited by the boy. Gringoire durst not breathe or raise his eyes.

[The poet narrowly escapes hanging, and by the interference of La Esmeralda, is adjudged by the king to be her husband for four years. His first transports are thus exquisitely described.] Whether this young female was a human being, or a fairy, or an angel, Gringoire, sceptical philosopher and satirical poet as he was, could not at the first moment decide, so completely was he fascinated by the dazzling vision. She was not tall, though she appeared to be so from the slenderness and

elegance of her shape. Her complexion was dark, but it was easy to divine that by daylight her skin must have the beautiful golden tint of the Roman and Andalusian women. Her small foot too was Andalusian. She danced, whirled, turned round, on an old Persian carpet, carelessly spread on the pavement; and every time her radiant face passed before you as she turned, her large black eyes flashed lightning.

Gringoire ventured upon a delicate question. "Then you will not have me for your husband?" said he.

"The damsel looked at him intently for a moment, and replied "No."

"For your lover?" asked Gringoire. She pouted her lip, and again replied "No."

"For your friend?" continued Gringoire. She again fixed her eyes stedfastly upon him. Perhaps," said she, after a moment's reflection.

66

This perhaps, so dear to philosophers, emboldened Gringoire. "Do you know what friendship is ?" he inquired.

66

Yes," replied the Egyptian; "it is to be as brother and sister, two souls which touch each other without uniting, like two fingers of the same hand.”

"And love?" proceeded Gringoire. "Oh! love!" said she, and her voice trembled, and her eye sparkled. "It is to be two and yet but one-it is a man and a woman blending into an angel-it is heaven itself."

The street-dancer, as she uttered these words, appeared invested with a beauty which powerfully struck Gringoire, and seemed in perfect unison with the almost oriental exaggeration of her language. A faint smile played upon her pure and rosy lips; her bright and serene brow was now and then clouded for a moment, according to the turn of her thoughts, as a mirror is by the breath; and from her long, dark, downcast eyelashes emanated a sort of ineffable light, which imparted to her profile that ideal suavity which Raphael subsequently found at the mystic point of intersection of virginity, maternity, and divinity.

Gringoire nevertheless proceeded. “And what should one be," said he, "to please

you?"

"A man."

"What am I, then ?"

"A man has a helmet on his head, a sword in his fist, and gold spurs at his heels." "So then," rejoined Gringoire," without a horse one cannot be a man. Do you love any one ?"

She remained pensive for a moment, and then said with a peculiar kind of expression : "I shall soon know that."

"Why not to-night?" replied the poet tenderly. "Why not me?"

The Topographer.

ANCIENT AND MODERN LONDON.

HISTORICAL facts tend to prove, that our cities, and even London, originally consisted of wooden or wood-framed houses plastered; and this fashion of building continued long after the Romans had introduced into Britain the use of stone," such cement as we cannot now equal," and the use of bricks. The uncertain tenure of all property in times anterior to the Norman Conquest probably discouraged the citizens from erecting substantial mansions; though, after London increased, and property became secure, the houses were certainly slight and combustible; and hence the devastating fires which are recorded between the time of William the Conqueror and the year 1666. Stone, it may be presumed, was almost exclusively used for palaces and the mansions of the richest citizens. Long after bricks were made, the mass of

the people did not use them in building. Malcolm says: " the affluent used them both in London and in the country; but the unhappy public, fascinated with their wood and plaster, at last saw one fatal flame destroy all their frail tenements at one blow. The year 1666 expelled wooden buildings from our metropolis; and from that year brick reigned with undiminished sway, has crept beyond all reasonable limits, and even aspired to compose churches and chapels."

The Great Fire spared but, comparatively, few of these wood and plaster fronted houses. Yet some remained till the present century. The most celebrated of these relics is probably the house, once the residence of Sir Paul Pindar, in Bishopsgate-street, which preserves to this day a few of its original florid enrichments. Within a few houses of Sir Paul's dwelling, we remember a mansion with a very extensive frontage of bay windows, the lower portion being covered with fanciful plaster-work, and the upper filled with small diamond-shaped casements; all which have been displaced by a modern stuccoed front. The old White Hart Tavern, figured in the fifteenth volume of our Miscellany, has disappeared within these four years, from the same vicinity; but Crosby Hall, of the same period as was the White Hart, has a nobler claim to the veneration of the present age, and is now in course of restoration. Another inte resting specimen of olden domestic architecture was lately removed from High-street, Southwark, and has been represented in vol. xvii. of our Journal.

Malcolm, by way of an illustrative contrast,

has etched in his Anecdotes of the Manners and Customs of London, the subjoined view of two old houses, which had been erected in or before the reign of Elizabeth, and were standing in Goswell-street in the year 1807. Next adjoining was a dwelling-house, built in the year 1800, and this juxtaposition shows the difference in London architecture in about 250 years; or, as Malcolm quaintly calls it, "ancient inconvenience contrasted with modern convenience." The common

character of the Elizabethan houses, we may observe, was projecting, or one story hanging over another; small casemented windows, or holes in the wall; and, in some instances, as in the cut, these crazy, old buildings assumed an anti-perpendicularity which would stagger the prim propriety of architecture in our times. In the engraving too, the three stories of the new house are but equal in height to the four stories of the old dwellings:

the rooms in the latter must have been incon

veniently low, and remind us of a passage in Sir William Davenant's picture of ancient London, wherein he says: "the roofs (ceilings) of your houses are so low, that I presume your ancestors were very mannerly, and stood bare to their wives, for I cannot discern how they could wear their high-crowned hats." Malcolm's conclusion to the letter-press accompanying his print is: "Heaven be praised, old London was burnt. Good reader, turn to the views, in order to see what it has been; observe those hovels convulsed; imagine the chambers within them, and wonder why the plague, the leprosy, and the sweating sickness raged. Turn then to the print (also) illustrative of our present dwellings, and be happy."

The Naturalist.

INSTINCT OF BEES.

In the middle of the last century there was an Englishman, named Wildman, who excited great curiosity by the possession of a secret, through the means of which he enticed bees to follow him, and to settle on his person without stinging him. (He also wrote a curious treatise on them.) A similar circumstance is related in Francis Brue's voyage to Africa in 1698; in which mention is made of a man who was constantly surrounded by a swarm of these insects, and who had thence obtained the title of "King of the bees."

J. R. S.

SEA MONSTER.-MAD WOLVES.

A RECENT letter from Burgos, inserted in the Madrid Gazette, states that near Laredo a marine monster had been cast on shore. It

had the appearance of a sea-hog, with a tail and legs in the shape of fins. It was four yards in length, extremely corpulent, and without scales. The back resembled the keel of a boat. It weighed 35 arrobas, or

875 lbs., and was sold, to make oil, for 140 rials. The same letter states that in the neighbourhood of Regnosa a number of mad wolves had made their appearance, which had bitten persons as well as cattle. In consequence of the bite of one of these animals, a youth, aged 26, had been attacked with hydrophobia, and of the same disorder a number of horned cattle had died.

POTATOES.

THE following simple method of preserving potatoes has recently been discovered by accident:-A person at Annaberg had a quantity of charcoal in his cellar, which he removed potatoes in its place, but omitted to sweep for the purpose of depositing a large heap of up the dust at the bottom. At the end of the spring, when they generally begin to toes had germinated, and that being dressed, sprout, he found that not one of these potathey had retained all their original flavour.

LONGEVITY OF THE SWAN.

A MALE Swan, concluded to have been 200 years old, died lately at Rosemount. He was brought to Dunn when the late John Erskine, Esq., was in infancy, and was then said to be 100 years old. About two years ago he was purchased by the late David Duncan, Esq. of Rosemount; and within that period his mate brought forth four young ones, which he destroyed as soon as they took the water. Mr. Molleson, Bridge-street, (in whose museum the bird is now to be seen,) thinks he might have lived much longer but for a lump or excrescence at the top of the windpipe, which, on dissecting him, he found to be composed of grass and tow. This is the same bird known and recognised, in the early years of octogenarians in this and the neighbouring parishes, by the name of " the old swan of Dunn."-Montrose Review.

LEAPING FISH.

CAPTAIN OWEN relates that "the bonita has the power of throwing itself out of the water to an almost incredible distance, when in pursuit of its prey, the flying fish; and the day previous to our arrival at Mozambique one of these fish rose close under our bow, passed over the vessel's side, and struck with such force against the poop, that had any one received the blow, in all probability it would have been fatal. Stunned by the violence of the contact, it fell motionless at the helmsman's feet; but, soon recovering, its struggles were so furious that it became necessary to inflict several blows with an axe before it could be approached with safety. The greatest elevation it attained above the surface of the water was eighteen feet, and the length of the leap, had no opposition occurred, would have exceeded 180."