‘Put her down!’ said the curate, much ashamed of his pupil—‘put her down to the foot of the class!’
‘Lave her alone,’ quoth the priest; ‘the lass may be right after all. What do you or I know about it?’
THE MONTH:
SCIENCE AND ARTS.
Nearly seven millions sterling have been already expended upon the Panama Canal works, and according to all accounts, there is plenty to show for the money. The channel is being dredged out by enormous machines, which scoop out the softer earth and operate upon the debris of harder rocks, after the latter have been blasted. Colon, the Atlantic terminus of the canal, has, from the miserable and dirty little village which it presented some years ago, sprung into a prosperous town. The dry season has unfortunately been an unhealthy one, and there has been an epidemic of marsh-fever; but altogether we may take the general report of the Canal works as a satisfactory one. There is little doubt that the great work of uniting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans will be accomplished within very few years.
News has been received by the Geographical Society that their intrepid explorer, Mr Joseph Thomson, whose departure some months ago on an expedition to the region east and north-east of Lake Victoria Nyanza we briefly chronicled at the time, has safely returned to Zanzibar. Little is at present known as to what he has done, further than that he has successfully carried out his programme with the most satisfactory feature that the work has been done without any loss of life except from disease. We may look forward with great interest to Mr Thomson’s account of this his third successful expedition, the more so, as this time he has journeyed in a region of Africa untraversed by any previous explorer, and about which, therefore, the knowledge possessed by our best geographers is open to improvement.
From a paper recently read before the Institution of Civil Engineers, by Mr G. H. Stayton, upon the Wood-pavements of London, we glean the following interesting particulars: The metropolis comprises nearly two thousand miles of streets, of which only fifty-three miles are at present laid with wood. Most of the wood used is in the form of rectangular blocks of yellow deal, principally Swedish. Neither elm nor oak will stand changes of temperature sufficiently well to fit them for this purpose; but pitch-pine answers well, and so does larch; though the supply of the latter limits its use. Creosoting the blocks has no value as a preservative, and the wood is now used plain, the joints being filled in with cement. The average cost of laying wood-pavement is about ten shillings and sixpence per square yard, and the expenses of maintenance compare very favourably with Macadam and other systems of pavement. ‘There is nothing new under the sun,’ even in the matter of wood-pavements, for we find, on reference to a Mechanic’s Magazine dated 1858, that wood-blocks, placed grain uppermost, as in all modern systems, are distinctly advocated as having many advantages over granite roads, diminution of cost and durability being among those stated.
It has become customary to speak of the present epoch as the ‘Iron Age,’ in order to distinguish it from those two long periods of human interest known respectively as the Stone Age and the Bronze Age. But future historians may well be tempted to substitute the word steel for iron, for it is an undoubted fact that improved processes of manufacture, and the resulting easy and cheap production, are causing steel to be widely substituted for its parent metal. In railways, steel rails are now almost entirely replacing iron ones, and that modification of the metal known as ‘mild steel’ is finding great favour just now among shipbuilders. The Board of Trade have lately had representations made to them that the superiority of steel over iron for shipbuilding purposes should be officially recognised; and that this request is well grounded, the following instances will go far to prove. A steamer wrecked on the coast of the Isle of Wight remained for ten days in stormy weather perched on a ledge of rocks without breaking up. ‘If,’ says the engineer’s Report, ‘she had been built of iron instead of steel, there is not a doubt that she would have gone to pieces. The agent of another vessel wrecked at New Zealand last year reports to the owner that the vessel was eventually released from her rocky bed; ‘but, with a large number of passengers, would have been lost, had it not been for the beautiful quality of the material of which she is built, known as mild steel.’
But there is one branch of the metal trade which shows a continually increasing activity, and which need not fear any rivalry from steel, and that is the tinplate trade. Many thousands of tons of this tinned iron—that is, thin sheets of iron coated with tin—are annually exported from this country, our best customers being the United States. We may presume that a large quantity of this metal comes back to us in the form of tins containing preserved meats, fish, and fruit. In Philadelphia, there are a number of factories for utilising these tins after they have been used. They are collected from the ash-heaps, the hotels and boarding-houses. The solder is melted and sold, to be used again; the tops and bottoms of the tins are turned into window sash-weights; the cylindrical portions are rolled out flat, and are made into covers for travelling trunks, and are used for many other purposes. The industry is said to be a very profitable one, for the expense of gathering the tins is covered by the sale of the solder, and the capital required is small. Such ingenious applications of waste materials most certainly deserve to succeed.
What is known as ‘flashed glass’ consists of common white glass blown with a layer of coloured glass superposed on its surface, which surface can afterwards be eaten away in parts by the application of fluoric acid, so that any ornament or lettering can be executed upon it. The same principle in an extended form has lately been applied by Messrs Webb of Stourbridge to the production of most beautiful vases in what has been aptly called cameo glass. The vase is first blown in glass of three different descriptions, fused together, forming eventually three distinct layers of material—the innermost of a semi-opaque colour, the next white, and the outside of a tint to harmonise with the first or innermost. Now comes the artist’s work. The design being drawn upon the surface, the outer colour is removed so as to leave but a tint, deep or light as may be wanted in certain parts; next, the white is cut into so as to show up where required the ground colour behind. In this way the most intricate design is produced with the most artistic results. The operator employs not only fluoric acid, but makes use of the steel point, and also the ordinary emery wheel commonly used for engraving and cutting glass. Two of these vases are, as we write, on view at Mr Goode’s, South Audley Street, London.
The first cable tramway laid in Europe has been opened on the steepest bit of road near London—namely, Highgate Hill, and is pronounced on all hands a complete success. It is to be hoped that the system will become as common in this country as it is in America, where not only steep gradients are thus dealt with, but level roads, such as our horse tramcars already traverse. The boon to horses would be immeasurable. At the present time, on British tramways more than twenty thousand horses are at work. The labour is so hard, that about one quarter of this number have annually to be replaced. This annual loss absorbs forty-three per cent. of the gross earnings, a consideration which will appeal more eloquently to the feelings of many than will the sufferings of the poor horses.