It has been demonstrated that Moonlight has the power, per se, of awakening the Sensitive Plant, and consequently that it possesses an influence of some kind on Vegetation. It is true that the influence is very feeble, compared with that of the sun; but the action is established, and the question remains, what is the practical value of the fact? “It will immediately,” says Professor Lindley, “occur to the reader that possibly the screens which are drawn down over hothouses at night, to prevent loss of heat by radiation, may produce some unappreciated injury by cutting off the rays of the moon, which Nature intended to fall upon plants as much as the rays of the sun.”
Even artificial light is not wholly powerless. Decandolle succeeded in making crocuses expand by lamplight; and Dr. Winn, of Truro, has suggested that the oxyhydrogen lamp may be made subservient to horticulture in the dark days of winter.
An extraordinary effect of Moonlight upon the human subject occured in 1863. A boy, thirteen years of age, residing near Peckham Rye, was expelled his home by his mother for disobedience. He ran away to a corn-field close by, and on lying down in the open air, fell asleep. He slept throughout the night, which was a moonlight one. Some labourers on their way to work, next morning, seeing the boy apparently asleep, aroused him; the lad opened his eyes, but declared he could not see. He was conveyed home, and medical advice was obtained: the surgeon affirmed that the total loss of sight resulted from sleeping in the moonlight.
Contemporary Inventions and Discoveries.
Mr. Piesse, the well-known operative chemist, has thus popularly grouped some of the leading novelties of our age:
The inventions and discoveries of my time may truly be included among some of the greatest and most wonderful which the world has seen. I have not yet passed forty summers, but perfectly recollect being one of the gaping crowd that first witnessed lighting the streets with gas. Near to the Marble Arch, at the top of Oxford-street, London, stands an iron post, on which is inscribed “Here stood Tyburn Gate, 1829.” Now I well remember this Oxford-street turnpike, and the oil-lamps ‘dimly burning,’ which enabled the University coach and the eight-horse waggons to nearside the off-side gatepost; at that time all Oxford-street and the shops therein protested against ‘the light of other days,’ and became illumined with Murdoch’s gas: thus the oil-lamps passed away for ever. Tunneling Primrose Hill for the first railway into London was a fund of enjoyment to me; there I learned my first practical lesson in mineralogy—to distinguish iron pyrites from real gold nuggets, which it at times resembles. One morning the newspapers teemed with an account of the late Duke of Wellington witnessing the first electric telegram from Drayton, twelve miles from London. People flocked to Paddington, and paid a shilling to do the same; of course I was among them! It appears to me but the other day when every housewife kept her linen rags to make tinder. The bunch of matches, like a large fan, the flint and steel were in every house. What a change has the lucifer produced? After hearing Professor Brande one night deliver a popular lecture at the Royal Institution, the Secretary read a letter received that day from Paris, announcing the discoveries of Daguerre. The assertion that the picture of a camera could be fixed by the mere agency of light startled belief, yet from that hour photography took its rise. Strange discoveries now crowd upon the memory. The oxyhydrogen flame that burns the diamond and volatilizes platinum; then came the Drummond lime-light that is visible as a star sixty miles away; now followed Dobereiner’s lamp that ignites itself when you lift a latch. Electroplating becomes one of the arts of the country. A new force of nature, actinism, was recognised. Wonderfully active principles of plants—quinine, morphia, and strychnine, are discovered. The food of plants and the balance of organic nature are developed at Giessen. New metals are discovered and are practically eliminated for the use of manufacturers; and so we thus come to the present, when I now write with an aluminium pen made from tiles laid in a wall when Constantine was crowned at York.[18]
The Bayonet.
Mr. Akermann, in an elaborate series of “Notes on the Origin and History of the Bayonet,” has been unable to verify the statement that this weapon derives its name from Bayonne, the reputed place of its invention. Voltaire alludes to it in the eighth book of the Henriade. The results of the inquiry may be thus briefly recited:—That “bayonette” was the name of a knife, which may probably have been so designated either from its having been the peculiar weapon of a crossbow-man, or from the individual who first adopted it; that its first recorded use as a weapon of war occurs in the Memoirs of Puysegur, and may be referred to the year 1647; that it is first mentioned in England by Sir J. Turner, 1670-71; that it was introduced into the English army in the first half of the year 1672; that before the peace of Nimwegen Puysegur had seen troops on the Continent armed with bayonets, furnished with rings, which would go over the muzzles of the muskets; that in 1686 the device of the socket-bayonet was tested before the French king, and failed; that in 1689 Mackay, by the adoption of the ringed bayonet, successfully opposed the Highlanders at the battle of Killicrankie; lastly, that the bayonet with the socket was in general use in the year 1703.
William Cobbett, who had been a soldier, and carried the bayonet, used to call it “King George’s Toasting-fork.”