has "paled the ineffectual fires" of many whose lives were devoted, and not infructuously, to the advancement of science.

It is a source of bitter reflection on the capriciousness of fame, to peruse the biography of these early struggles in a career now so smooth, and though posthumous fame affords a sufficiently hollow compensation for a life of toil and utter privation, the giver, if not the receiver, of such honors is benefited by the tribute.

All this is exemplified in the history of Bernard Palissy, a name but little honored in his own country and but little known in others, though it be that of the father of several highly important discoveries, beside being a valuable link in the powerful chain of philosophy.

Palissy belonged to the great epoch of the revival of the arts, yet, though an artist, lived a beggar and died a captive. While Francis I. was despatching messengers to Italy to engage the services of Benvenuto Cellini, of Andrea del Sarto, and of Leonardo da Vinci, a man of genius was starving in his own town of Saintes, to whom the fosterhood of his patronage would have afforded means of bringing to perfection certain arts of his invention, which have since afforded, and still afford, to France one of her most important branches of commerce. But Palissy was a native artist; Palissy was undistinguished by the stamp, then essential, of an Italian origin, or education.

To foreigners were assigned the creation and the embellishment of the new palaces; and to Palissy, obscurity, contumely and neglect. Born in some village, the name of which is unknown, in the diocese of Agen, about the year 1500, he followed the humble calling of land-surveyor, to which, as he advanced in years, he added that of painting on glass. At that period the art of porcelain making was unknown. The discovery of Herculaneum and Pompeii have enabled us to determine the progress made by the ancients in Keramics, and in the beginning of the sixteenth century the only manufactury of crockery which could pretend to the name of porcelain, was at Faënza in Italy; whither it is said to have been transported from China by the Venetian merchants. From this factory was derived the name of faience, a term familiar both in this country and throughout Europe. It happened that, in a visit to Agen, Palissy, the painter on glass, saw a specimen of faënza, or Oriental porcelain, which inspired him with the hope of discov

ering some sort of white enamel-known now as "tin enamel”— by which a glossy encrustation on the surface of earthenware might be successfully produced, and from that moment he devoted fifteen years of his life to the pursuit of this single object. It appears a simple method to have proceeded at once to Faënza and become a workman in the famous pottery at that place. But means for so long a journey were wanting, and he accordingly gave to the enterprise all that was in his power, every moment of his days and every faculty of his mind.

As a painter on glass, the art of mixing and fixing colors was well-known to him; but the difficulty of transferring pottery-ware and covering them with a transparent silicious varnish seems to have baffled his most persistent endeavors. Scarcely able to provide for the maintenance of his wife and family, he had the greatest difficulty in procuring colors and pottery, to effect his experiments. Half his time was lost in grinding and pounding materials, and in the vain attempt to construct the requisite ovens; at length he contrived to interest the owner of a pottery, who undertook to bake for him his experimental pieces; but, partly from ignorance and partly from ill-will, the attempt was inexpertly made; and, ruined in fortune, health and spirits, at the close of twelve years of incessant labor, Palissy was compelled by the wants of his family to abandon his pursuit and resume his more thriving calling as an engineer. Having obtained from his district a commission to drain certain salt-marshes, he executed his task with credit and profit, and thus having obtained the means of continuing his attempts, he returned with greater diligence than ever to his enamelling, and sent the new samples of his skill to be baked in the furnace of a glasshouse. And now, for the first time, the composition he had invented, proved fusible. Out of three hundred specimens of various experiments submitted at the same time to the action of the furnace, a single one presented, on cooling, a hard, white vitreous and brilliant surface. The joy of poor Palissy may be easily conceived.

"I was, however, at that time of my life, so simple," says he, in his narrative of experiments, "that the moment I had hit upon the real enamel, I set about making the pottery-ware to which it was to be applied; and after losing eight months in the task, I had next to construct a furnace similar to those of the glasshouses in

which it was to be baked. No one can conceive the trouble it cost me, for I had to do all by the single labor of my hands-to sift the mortar, and even draw the water with which it was to be mixed-I had not so much as the help of a single man in fetching the bricks; my own back bore all. My first baking prospered pretty well, but when it came to the second, after the enamel had been spread over the pottery I was unable to produce the heat necessary for the fusion. Six days and nights did I remain feeding and watching the furnace, half distracted and almost stupefied by the intense heat and my own bitter disappointment. At last it occurred to me that the composition contained an insufficient proportion of the substance which had produced the fusion in the former instance; and I accordingly set about pounding and grinding, though still obliged to keep up the fire of the oven, so that I had treble labor on my hands. The former pieces being now spoiled, I was forced to go out and purchase new pots to be covered by the fresh composition; and on my return had the misery of discovering that my stock of wood was exhausted! What was to to be done? I rushed into my garden and tore up the trellises; and these being insufficient, was obliged to sacrifice the dressers, stools, tables and boarding of my house! All these were successively thrust into the furnace, in the hope of melting the enamel !"

The reader will probably recall to mind the account given by Benvenuto Cellini, in his Memoirs, of having contributed all his pewter dishes and household utensils to the metal prepared for his famous Statue of Perseus, which proved slow and also difficult of fusion. But the Italian protégé of princes makes a vaunt of his sacrifice, whereas the meek Palissy couches his statement in the terms of a confession.

"Scorched by the heat of the furnace," says he, "and reduced to a skeleton by the transpiration arising from this prodigious heat, I had now a new vexation in store for me. My family having indiscreetly circulated the report of my taking up and burning the flooring of my house, I was considered insane by my neighbors, and my precarious credit entirely destroyed.

"If I had then died, I should have left behind me the name of a madman, who had ruined his family by a frantic speculation. But though sick and dispirited, I cheered myself with the certainty

that the discovery of which I had been so long in pursuit was effected; and that henceforward I had only to persevere in my labors. The difficulty of maintaining my family for five or six. months longer, till a satisfactory result could be obtained, was the first consideration; but in order to hasten the period, I hired a potter to assist me in my work, furnishing him with models and materials.

"A cruel drawback it was, that I was unable to maintain this man in my dismantled home, for I was forced to run up a bill for his board at a neighboring tavern. Nay, when at the end of six months, he had made me the various articles of crockery according to my designs, so that nothing remained to be done but to cover them with my enamel and submit them to the furnace, being forced to dismiss my workman, I had no means of paying him his wages, except by giving him my clothes, which I accordingly did, and my person was now as thoroughly dismantled as my house!"

All the rest of his labors poor Palissy had to encounter alone, though his hands were so cut and bruised with his work that he was obliged, he says, to eat his pottage as well as he could with his hands wrapped in linen rags. The hand-mill in which he ground his materials required the power of two strong men to work it, yet he was wholly without assistance. Nor were his disappointments yet at an end. After having, with infinite pains and considerable

cost, constructed a new oven, it turned out that the mortar he had used was full of flint-probably the refuse of his materials—and when the furnace was heated these flints flew, and attached themselves to the pottery, so that it was completely spoiled.

"On passing the hand over my vases," he says, "little fragments of flint were perceptible, which cut like a razor. I instantly determined to break them up, rather than sell them in a deteriorated state for what they would fetch, which might have injured the reputation of my discovery. But no sooner had I done so than I was beset by the maledictions of my starving family and the mockery of my neighbors, who treated me as a madman, for not having realized a few crowns by my damaged goods."

Nevertheless, the man of genius toiled on! Satisfied of the strength that was in him, and of the importance of his discovery, he went to work again with an injured credit and constitution, an object of hatred to some and contempt to others. From the

exhausting nature of his labors, his arms and legs had become like sticks; so that, according to his own brief description, there was nothing to keep up his garters, and his stockings came upon his heels as he walked, till he was the picture of wretchedness and woe. Between the action of the tremendous heat of the furnace and the influence of the rain and frost on his poorly constructed works, his workshop was frequently unroofed, so that he was compelled to borrow material for its repair. But this was not always to be accomplished; and he tells us that he often remained watching his oven through winter nights, exposed to wind and weather, with the owls hooting on one side and the dogs howling on the other.

"Wet to the skin with the beating in of the heavy rains, and groping about in the dark for want of a candle, I have often retired to rest at midnight, or even at day-break," he says, "looking like some drunken wretch who had been rolling in a gutter. But the worst I had to suffer was from the accusations of my neighbors, who had assisted me, and who now regarded me as a robber; and the reproaches of my family, who treated me as a selfish lunatic."

This is but a faint outline of the miseries and fatigues endured by Bernard Palissy in bringing to perfection an art which has proved so highly beneficial to his own and to other countries. The furnaces and ovens of his invention, be it remembered, are still in use at Sèvres, and have been closely copied by the porcelain workers of other countries. The moulds in which the vases are baked to secure them from accident, were devised by Palissy after his unlucky loss from the flying flints; and his recipes for the mixing of colors are still patent.

The porcelain of Palissy soon acquired a prodigious reputation, and but few museums or collections of objects of vertu in our day but contain specimens of his works under the name of Raphael ware, or china of the middle ages. The embossed dishes exhibiting reptiles and animals, in great perfection, were the invention of Palissy; and several of his dishes and vases present copies of celebrated pictures executed in relief. Table services, to replace the wooden and pewter vessels then in use, were the chief objects to which he devoted his art; and with so much taste and skill that many of the original designs exhibit the genius of a first-rate sculptor.

The fame of his discovery extended rapidly through France, and