We live in the house at Hampstead, and often speak of the strange woman who dwelt there before us, and to whom we owe the comforts of our life.
‘Her heart was kinder and her conscience more acute than she would avow,’ May declares. ‘When she learned your history from me, Dick, she determined to atone to you for what your parents had suffered, and at the same time punish the Bowden family for their unscrupulous fortune-hunting. I have no doubt she found a grim pleasure in knowing, as she must have done, that her will was in your hands, ready to descend like a thunderbolt on the heirs-expectant; and I think it was this knowledge that made her so earnest in her insistence that you should not open the envelope which contained it.’
‘I think,’ adds Gerald, who, though he has lately taken a wife and a house of his own, is still emphatically one of us—‘I think the old lady must have got a great deal of satisfaction out of the anticipation of her brother-in-law’s disappointment. How she would have enjoyed being present at that interview in Godding’s office! Well, let who will grumble, we three have no cause to grieve over the contents of that wandering document—the Will of Mrs Anne Bowden.’
THE MONTH:
SCIENCE AND ARTS.
Near the village of Burgbrohl, on the Rhine, there is a cavity in the ground which has for a long time yielded a copious supply of carbonic acid gas. Apparatus has recently been erected close to this borehole by which the gas can be compressed to the liquid state, and one hundred and ten gallons of gas are so compressed into a pint and three-quarters of liquid every minute. Iron bottles holding about eight times that quantity are used for purposes of storage and transport.
It is reported that the Cowles Electric Smelting and Aluminium Company, whose works are at Cleveland, Ohio, have declared their ability to produce the valuable white metal known as aluminium at the price of half-a-crown a pound. If this report be true, we may look for a revolution in many branches of trade, for the metal is not alone useful as it is, but is almost more important by reason of the valuable alloys it forms with copper, &c. The Company reduce it from the ore by means of a modification of the electric furnace invented some years ago by the late Sir W. Siemens. It is probable that aluminium bronze will replace steel for many purposes where great tensile strength is required. The expense saved by substituting for steel, which has to be welded and built up coil by coil, a metal for heavy ordnance which can be simply cast and run into moulds, would be enormous.
The discovery of petroleum wells on the west coast of the Red Sea is both interesting and full of promise for a country such as Egypt, whose finances have for so long been in a deplorable condition. The yield of oil is at present but insignificant when compared with the enormous quantities which gush forth at Baku, and with the amount tapped from the American wells. But there is every indication that the yield will increase to a great deal more than two tons a day, the present output. There is little doubt that petroleum will form the fuel of the future for our steamships; and a station so near the great international highway of Suez where that fuel can be readily obtained, cannot fail to become a place of great importance. Already the oil is being used by certain ships instead of coal.
Once again has truth outrun fiction, for the camera in the hands of MM. Henry of Paris has accomplished a feat which no romance-writer would have dared to imagine. Most persons know by sight that beautiful group of stars called the Pleiades, and most people know, too, that this group attracted the attention of star-gazers in very early times. It is mentioned in the book of Job, and profane authors have also weaved many a pretty legend concerning this group of distant suns. In November last, the Messrs Henry photographed the Pleiades; and the picture showed the presence of a nebula of spiral form which no human eye had before seen. Another photograph taken in America showed the same appearance, though the largest telescopes in the Paris Observatory gave no evidence to corroborate the photographic appearances. But at the observatory of Pultova, where a gigantic instrument, possessing an object-glass thirty inches in diameter, has lately been erected, the nebula has been detected by the eye of M. Struve.
Professor Gerlach has devised a means whereby the embryo growth in a bird’s egg may be watched. The end of the egg has a round hole cut in it; and by means of a kind of putty made of gum-arabic and wool, a pane of glass is inserted in the opening. This pane consists of a small watchglass, which is further secured in its place by cementing the outside of the joint with a suitable varnish. The egg so treated is put into an incubator in the horizontal position, and it can be removed and turned up for examination when required.
A new kind of refrigerator has been devised, and is on sale in New York. The principle on which it acts is old enough, but the application of that principle is simple and interesting. An iron pipe two feet long and three and a half inches in diameter is filled with liquefied ammonia. To a stopcock at one end of this pipe is fitted a smaller pipe, which ultimately forms a coil within a cylinder about ten inches high and as many in diameter. This cylinder is made of wood and lined with hair-felt. The action of the apparatus is as follows: When the stopcock is turned on, the liquid ammonia rushes out in the form of gas, and absorbs so much heat that the temperature of surrounding bodies is immediately lowered. Any vessel placed within the coil inside the box can actually be lowered in temperature to sixty degrees of frost in a few minutes.