likely to be forthcoming before long. | pot to a dark red heat. During this opeThe imitation of the natural gems by ration it is worked about with an iron rod, means of various silicates and oxides has in order to prevent its swelling up and already attained to a great degree of per- passing over the edge of the iron crucible. fection, and no doubt this ingenious The dark red heat is continued until the branch of industry must interfere consid- whole mass has become glassy and transerably with the trade of the dealer in real parent. At this moment it is run into precious stones. We can already purchase another crucible, in which it is heated to a capital "diamond" for about half a a white heat that is kept up for about two crown; and the imitation of the ruby and hours, being stirred rapidly with a rod the the emerald is far easier, and more suc- whole time. At the end of this period cessful, than that of the diamond. the molten mass is allowed to remain perfectly quiet for about an hour, and is then run out of the crucible, either on to a metallic slab or into a metal mortar. It is necessary to avoid too rapid a cooling. The product may thus be run out into a sheet, like plate-glass. A small sheet of such a nature was obtained by M. Sidot in one of his experiments: it measured about three inches across, by a quarter of an inch thick, and was large enough to be cut into a considerable number of beautiful artificial sapphires. Careful choice in the substances to be melted together, good and effective cutting, and careful artistic setting, have gone a long way to reproduce, artificially, the brightness, brilliancy, and color of the real stone. Chemical analysis shows the sapphire to be pure alumina, as it has shown the diamond to be pure carbon; but it does not account for its color, which is partly due to an optical effect, and depends upon a peculiar molecular arrangement. This stone possesses the singular property known as dichroism that is, it shines with two colors, blue and red. In a well-cut stone, a red cross often appears in the midst of the sapphire blue. The ruby is also pure alumina, and its vivid red color, like the blue of the sapphire, is thought by some to be due to a peculiar optical effect. In fact, no chemical analy. sis has been able to account quite satisfactorily for the red color of the ruby or the blue color of the sapphire, for pure alumina is quite white, and the sapphire, as we have seen, shows two colors. This peculiar optical effect noticed in the ruby and sapphire has, strange to say, been accidentally reproduced not long since by a French chemist, M. Sidot, who has been making some experiments on artificial stones. He has produced a kind of glass by melting phosphate of lime at a great heat, and the product possesses the blue color of the sapphire with the remarkable dichroism before alluded to. The experiment is so curious, that a few lines may be devoted to it here. The ruby and sapphire have also been closely imitated in another way by Fremy and Feil, two French chemists; and the chief interest in this process is the fact that the artificial stones possess essentially the chemical composition of the real ones. To produce these, equal weights of alumina and red lead are heated to a red heat in an earthenware crucible. A vitreous substance is formed, which consists of silicate of lead, and crystals of white corundum. To convert this corundum into the artificial ruby, it is necessary to fuse it with about two per cent. of bichromate of potassium; whilst to obtain the sapphire, a little oxide of cobalt, and a very small quantity of bichromate of potassium, must be employed. The stones so produced possess at least very nearly the hardness of the real stones, as they scratch both quartz and topaz. The French paste which imitates the diamond so closely is a peculiar kind of glass, the manufacture of which was brought to a great degree of perfection By the action of heat on what is termed some fifty years ago by Donault-Wieland "acid phosphate of lime," it is transformed of Paris. The finest quality of paste deinto " crystallized pyrophosphate;" and mands extreme care in the choice of mawhen heated to a still higher temperature, terials and in melting, etc. The basis of it passes into the vitreous or glassy state. it, in the hands of the expert manufacIt is supposed that in this condition it turer just named, was powdered rockloses some of its phosphoric acid by vola- crystal or quartz. The proportions he tilization, and passes into the state of took were, -six ounces of rock crystal; "tribasic phosphate." Such is the tech-nine ounces two drams of red lead; three nical explanation of the changes which ounces three drams of pure carbonate of The phosphate of lime glass is potash; three drams of boracic acid; and produced by taking this substance in a six grains of white arsenic. The product moist, acid state, and heating it in an iron thus manufactured was extremely beauti occur. ful, but rather expensive, compared with the prices now charged for artificial jewels. It has never been surpassed in brilliancy. But of late years the greater purity of the potash and lead oxide used, and the improvements in the furnaces and methods of heating them, have all tended to reduce the price of the "diamonds" thus manufactured. From The Spectator. "QUIET WEATHER." silent life enough, where small things have to be made the most of if one would be content; and yet one gets to be very fond of its peace, which is hardly monotony, of watching the foliage change from green to gold, sadden to its winter gown of russet ; to note how, as the year declines, the sky covers up its bright summer days and wraps itself in masses of fleecing cloud; how the emerald of the sea grows like beaten steel; and where a band of purple once sank into a rosy mist, there is now only a thin grey line against a pallid sky. The whole population are fishermen and their allies; and all day the able-bodied sit upon a great bank of timber, by the I WANT to describe the aspect of life in the calm, grey weather we have been ex-side of the lifeboat-shed, and smoke, rubperiencing lately, as it appeared to me in an out-of-the-way part of England, twenty miles from a railway station on the Atlantic shore. The slates of the cottages here have little of the cold purple tint, but are varied in faint green and bluish silver; and where the gables slope against the grey sea, the sunshine laughs and dances upon them almost as it does on the waves them selves. In front of the jagged rocks which border our little cove, the great seine-boats lie, massive and dark, dwarfing all the smaller fishing-craft into insignifi cance, waiting for the pilchards, who seem loth to appear. In front of the coastguard's cottage, cutting sea and sky and rock, and dividing the little landscape into all kinds of irregular triangles, rises the inevitable white mast and yard of the retired sailor, carrying, in this instance, a weathercock of native design, representing a pilchard whose tail points obstinately seaward, irrespective of any change in the weather. To the right of the inn window rise whitewashed stone cottages, and to the left sink the same; beneath, the road dips by a red geranium and a water-butt to the hidden beach. On the low wall in front of the window, rooted securely in some crack of its coping-stones, flowers a brilliant marigold the one bright spot in the pic ture. Such a queer, quaint little grey hamlet, where year passes after year, bringing no alterations save a few more wrinkles to the aged, and a little less laughter to the young, the blustering weather of winter and spring, the coming of the pilchards, the flash of the world seen every now and then in the eyes of a wandering artist, the sermons on alternate Sundays at two "neighbor villages," such are the matters which form the talk and interest of these folks' lives. A still, bing shoulders together in an uncouth fashion, much as one has seen birds upon a perch. They all know each other, and are good friends after a silent, unexpansive fashion. The property in the fishing. boats is to a certain extent common, and brings them closer together, and, like most Cornishmen, the habit of their lives is serious and a little sad. And they are instinct, too, with a profound natural courtesy towards the stranger, very different from the general distrust and suspicion which we find in the midland and northern counties. Rough they are, certainly-stupid, perhaps, according to our Cockney standard of intelligence- but it was such men as these that Kingsley, who had passed his life amongst them, described as "finer men, body and soul, than the landsmen;" and of all our seamen and fishers there are no more stalwart, simple souls to be found in England than those who border the "land of strangers." The influence of the place is mesmeric; and as day after day passes, and autumn paces slowly by its road of golden leaves and withered bracken into winter, it grows hourly more difficult to believe in the existence of other life than this. The sea, the sky, the fishermen lounging, the pilchards that never come, the picture upon one's easel, the walk after the day's work over moor and downland, the homecoming to the best of inns, with its bright fire and brighter faces of welcome, the dinner with a friend, the smoke and toddy in the evening, and then the night with the wind sighing down the valley, these repeat themselves day by day. Gradually one comes to know something about the people- how poor Sullivan's wife is dying of consumption, and Stewart's boy must be taken to Falmouth to be confirmed, and other matters less serious. And occa sionally the men come and talk as we 66 paint, and resting their broad backs employer of the fishermen. He is someagainst the wall, point out to each other thing like Carlyle in appearance, owing the various objects of the picture, rubbing the likeness, perhaps, chiefly to his long slow hands over their bristly chins mean- greatcoat and broad-brimmed hat, and he while. There is a sort of tacit agreement walks stiffly and slowly beneath his weight that they are not to establish themselves of seventy-six years. Thirty-five of them behind us while we are at work; but some- he has spent here on that little shelf of times the temptation is too strong to be rock (it is literally a shelf, for it ends resisted, and one becomes aware of a abruptly in a perpendicular fall of cliff into shadow on the canvas, and a gruff voice deep water), doing practically nothing but saying, "Not that I want to interrupt you, live. Despite his life, with only these sir." One old fellow of the patriarchal fishermen for companions, traces of a very village, past doing anything but hobble different society are still clearly visible, about the beach very slowly, with the help touches of geniality and social grace peep of a couple of sticks, has been exempted out in his dry old manner; and one is not from the above restriction, and spends a surprised to find in the little cottage on good portion of his morning breathing the rocky ledge, a portfolio of drawings, heavily into my ear, and giving me details and etchings and good pictures upon the of his career, which presents fewer salient walls. All of these, however, and all the points during its duration of eighty-four furniture of his intellectual and social life, years than could be well believed. date nearly half a century back; there the man ceased, and what has lived since is merely his outside. Still a pale phantasm of a gentleman and a scholar, he walks in and out the rough folks here, amongst them, but not of them; and comes and hovers round the easel of a wanderer like myself, wanting, not so much to look at the work, as to hear the old language of books and pictures which he used to speak long ago. After much pressing, he came in one night to chat with us, but was pitiably ill at ease. It seemed to force upon him too keenly the contrast of his present life with that which he had previously known. What it was that scored his face and broke his spirit, and sent him down to live in this unknown fishing hamlet far from the ways of men, who shall say? But he intensifies the stillness of the place; and as his tall figure is seen coming down the path of a morning, even the sunlight seems to fall more quietly upon his rusty coat, and the noise of the water to be almost hushed. Yes, he has always lived here, and he minds the building of this very place [a fish-cellar, full of miscellaneous sea-lumber, nets, and crab-pots, “anchors of rusty fluke, and boats up-drawn "]ah, more than fifty years ago." So, with a final wheeze, he departs, to return the next day with the same story; and in the room overhead the one virago of the place recommences scolding and beating her children. "Find it pretty noisy down here, sir?" said a couple of the fishwives, whom I found standing before my easel yesterday, "Her've a long tongue, and a longer arm her have." Its the old story of two families, a dead wife leaving young children, and then a new mistress for the house, and the new family, and temper and health alike giving way under the double strain, and the result that terrible chaos of blows, reproaches, and tears which makes a hell of so many poor men's homes. The boards that roof the cellar are thin, and the voices loud; and having sat under them for three weeks one is tempted to moralize. But this is the only seamy side to the village life. Even poor Sullivan's wife, for whom we sent for the priest a few days ago, is dying peacefully; and her little girl stands, with an anxious wistful face, at the open door of the cottage, whilst her big father passes in and out, tender as a woman in his care. "She's alive, sir, and that's all." Down in the steep little path which winds at the back of the village up to a ledge of rock, against which the great waves hurl themselves forever vainly, comes the one personage of the place, Mr. ―, proprietor of the seine-boats and And so the days go on, with life lying behind and before, and twenty miles off the train waiting to carry all who will back to the great city. Morning after morning out of the same silvery sky shines the wistful sun, and the great grey plain of the sea stretches softly away to the horizon. Still the pilchard weathercock points to the long-expected shoal: still the fishermen lounge, and growl, and smoke; still our pictures grow slowly day by day, amid the comments, flattering and otherwise, of the villagers; still we take long walks over the moorland, or to where the Lizard lights can be seen streaming out into the waning sunset. After all, one cannot photograph an atmosphere, and it is a 66 photograph only which I am trying to give | the east." Fifteen years went by; the you. A crude, literal picture of an envi- hill was pretty well covered. Now," ronment of humble life of toils and duties said the good man, "I am growing old, which there are and after me you will perhaps not be able to get your doctoring gratis. Let the vil lage undertake to keep up this apricot orchard that has cost you nothing. The none to praise, And very few to love, but which is, after the rivalries and jeal-oil will not only pay a doctor and buy as ousies of London, almost like "the peace of God, which passeth all understanding." From All The Year Round. much medicine as you can want, but it will also do a good deal towards supporting your old men and your orphans." Wax-trees and tallow-trees are invaluable to the Buddhists, who, of course, must burn no animal fat on their altars. There are half-a-dozen trees and plants which make better paper than the bamboo A CHINESE kitchen garden contains what we call rice-paper, for instance, almost all our vegetables, and many more comes from the paper-mulberry. A Chibesides. If they do not care to grow pota- nese nettle and a giant hibiscus make toes, except where there are Europeans to excellent rope; and the ramia has its eat them, they grow the batata, which is leaves covered with threads just in the sold boiled at every street corner. Of the right state for spinning. When Virgil water-lily, sacred to Buddha, they eat the said, "The Seres comb from leaves a sugary seeds; and also a sort of sago slender fleece," one used to fancy he was made from its root. "Water chestnuts," speaking of silk, confounding in fact the too (eaten by the old lake-dwellers in worm with the food it eats; but the latest Switzerland), are largely grown. Every idea is that some notion of the ramia and canal is full of floating islands of them; its produce had travelled as far as the and the gathering must look like that Greek naturalists on whom Virgil relied. picture in this year's Grosvenor of Athel- If any of your friends are homœopaths ney in Flood, where young and old are you will have heard plenty about rhus; going about after the apples in boats. one of the many kinds, the Rhus vernix, Instead of boats put tubs, each pushed makes, along with the elaeo-cocoa (added with a bamboo pole by a yellow man or because its juice is fatal to insects), the woman, and paint two or three upsets, for famous lacquer. Great at dyeing, the John Chinaman is full of fun, and those Chinese have managed to find out vegetawho have seen a water-chestnut harvest- ble mordants. Hair-dyeing they manage ing say that everybody is on the broad in a peculiar way; they drink their dye. grin, and accepts a ducking with the same A six months' course of some vegetable good humor with which he gives one. decoction is said to be infallible; and was They cultivate fungi, too, burying the regularly used, we are told, by the Chrisrotten stump of a tree which bears harm-tians to darken the hair of their European less ones, and so ensuring a crop. One priests, that so they might escape deteckind, the lin-chi, is one of the emblems tion. Nearly all their dyes are vegetable, of immortality. It gets as dry as those honey combed fungi which they eat in mid-France, and "keeps good" for years. The bonzes use it as the foundation of their ambrosia, and picture their gods with lin-chi in their hands. The "five fruits "" are peach (sign of love, because it blossoms in winter), apricot, plum, chestnut, and jujube. The wild apricot is valuable for the oil extracted from its kernels. This first came into use, say the Chinese botany books, in our fourteenth century. A good and wise physician lived in a district so poor that he scarcely ever got a fee; so, having found out the use of apricot oil, he said, "If you can't pay you must do this: Let every patient plant a wild apricot on that bare hill to the imperial yellow being got from the root of the curcuma; saffron and gardenia flowers, and mignonette, and all the other yellow dyes being held unworthy of this great object. 66 And now, to prove what has been said about their great skill in landscape gar dening, let us say a word about the Pekin Summer Palace Park. Mr. Swinnoe and Sir Hope Grant both paint it in glowing colors — such a pleasure garden as Kublai Khan planned round his wondrous dome, by Alp, the sacred river." "Twelve miles of pebbled paths leading through groves of magnificent round lakes into pictur esque summer-houses; as you wandered along herds of deer would amble away from before you, tossing their antlered heads. Here a solitary building would rise fairy-like from a lake, reflected in the blue water on which it seemed to float. There a sloping path would carry you into the heart of a mysterious cavern leading out on to a grotto in the bosom of another lake. The variety of the picturesque was endless, and charming in the extreme. The resources of the designer appear to have been unending." And what the emperor had in its full glory round his summer palace every Chinaman who has made a little money tries to have on a small scale round his house. It is the gardens which, in the absence of many of our modes of sanitation, keep the dense populations of Chinese cities tolerably healthy, for trees are great absorbers of bad and diffusers of good gases. We have a great deal still to learn from them in the way of gardening, and it is no use crying down our climate the climate of north China is a very harsh, ungenial one, far worse for both men and plants than ours. It is not the climate that is in fault, but the gardeners; ours do not put the heart and patience into their work that John Chinaman does into his. 66 the motto of the regiment has been Nulli Secundus, which is borne in gold letters upon its colors beneath the star and garter of the Royal House. There also appear upon its colors the names of "Lincelles," Egypt" (with the Sphinx), "Talavera," Barrosa," "Peninsula," "Waterloo," "Alma," " Inkerman," and "Sevastopol." In the year 1850 this regi. ment held its jubilee banquet to commemorate the two hundredth anniversary of its birth. London Society. FUEL ON RUSSIAN RAILWAYS. — An official HOW THE COLDSTREAMS GOT THEIR MOTTO.- The Coldstreams were raised in the year 1650, in the little town near Berwick-onTweed from whence the regiment takes its name. Their first colonel was the renowned George Monk (afterwards Duke of Albemarle), a general in the Parliamentary army and an admiral of the fleet. It is owing to this latter fact that a small Union Jack is permitted to be borne on the queen's color of the regiment, a proud distinction enjoyed by no other corps in the service. In the year 1660 brave Monk and his gallant Coldstreamers materially assisted in the happy restoration of the English monarchy, and to perform this patriotic and eminently loyal act they marched from Ber-report upon the fuel used on Russian railways wick-on-Tweed to London, meeting with a warm and enthusiastic greeting from the inhabitants of the towns and villages through which they passed. After the Restoration was accomplished the troops were paraded on Tower Hill for the purpose of taking the oath of allegiance to the king, and among those present were the three noble regiments that form the subject of this brief history. Having grounded their arms in token of submission to the new regime, they were at once commanded to take them up again as the First, Second, and Third Regiments of Foot Guards. The First and Third Regiments obeyed, but the Coldstreamers stood firm, and their muskets remained upon the ground. Why does your regiment hesitate?" inquired the king of General Monk. "May it please your Majesty," said the stern old soldier, "my Coldstreamers are your Majesty's devoted soldiers, but after the important service they have rendered your Highness they decline to take up arms as second to any other regiment in your Majesty's service!" "They are right," said the king, "and they shall be 'second to none.' Let them take up their arms as my Coldstream regiment of Foot Guards." Monk rode back to his regiment and communicated to it the king's decision. It had a magical effect. The arms were instantly raised amid frantic cries of "Long live the king!" Since this event has been prepared by General Possiet, the minister of ways and communications. It ap. pears from this report, which is concerned with the year 1881, that of the forty-nine railway companies existing in the empire only four were using wood exclusively for their locomotives. The lines were all short ones, running through forest tracts abundantly supplied with wood and far away from coal supplies. The bulk of the lines used coal, and during the year the aggregate consumption of all the railways was 563,029 cubic Russian fathoms of wood and upwards of 1,230,000 tons of coal. The quantity of English coal used was only 150,450 tons, most of which was burnt on the Baltic and the south-western lines. The report notices a general tendency towards a larger consumption of Russian and a diminished one of foreign coal. The increase in the use of Russian coal is given at seventy thousand tons, or eight per cent. within the year. Only thirty thousand tons of German coal were burnt, and these were used on lines near the German border. Since the report was drawn up there has been a considerable enlargement in the supply to the railways of the Donetz and Moscow coal, and the use of petroleum as an engine fuel has become almost general on the lines near the Caucasus. The Russian import duties on foreign coal were increased not long ago. |