The automatic action of the machine or machines is very beautiful. For numbering each ticket, a peculiarly constructed wheel is used, which changes its particular digit every time a new blank is presented to it; and thus the consecutive numbers are produced on a series of tickets with unerring accuracy. A tell-tale index and a tell-tale bell, both automatically worked, give information as to the number of tickets printed, and the readiness of the machine to take in more food; but it is a matter of practical detail whether and when these tell-tales shall be deemed necessary. To give the reader an idea of how nicely this mechanism is adjusted, it refuses to work unless all the tickets are exactly of equal size, nicely squared, and in perfect order. It strikes one as being almost like a thing of life to see the machine detect a ticket from which a piece has purposely been torn off one end; its language is virtually, 'Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther,' for it prints as far as the defective ticket, and there stops.
As neither human fingers nor automatic machines are absolutely infallible, errors in numbering may occur in spite of all precautions. These are detected in a singular way. All the tickets in one series are made to pass through a machine with a velocity which the eye can scarcely follow. When stopped, the numbers are tested by two little index plates or wheels; if the same number is denoted on both indexes, all is well; but if any error has crept in, the index notifications differ, and afford means for determining at what part of the series the mishap has occurred.
A sheet of cardboard is certainly not a ponderous substance; but it is surprising how weighty the packages become when large quantities have to be dealt with. The tickets are tied up into small compact rows (string and tying being peculiar), and then packed into cubical masses in tin-lined boxes or cases—so firmly and closely pressed as to be as dense as a mass of wood. About fifty thousand tickets weigh one and a quarter hundredweight. The factory turns out two and a half millions of printed tickets (railway, steamboat, refreshment, &c.) per week, and ten millions of smoothly prepared but unprinted tickets; these numbers, multiplied by the fifty-two weeks in a year, give a total annual production of something like six hundred and fifty millions, weighing upwards of sixteen thousand hundredweight! If these tickets be taken at two inches in length, and if they were laid flat end to end, they would reach—— But we will leave our junior readers to exercise their arithmetical skill in solving this problem: merely hinting that it would require many voyages from England to America, and back again, to cover a distance equal to the length of this cardboard ribbon. From such small beginnings do great results ensue.
[FISHING EXTRAORDINARY.]
There are extraordinary ways of fishing practised by people of uncivilised countries, which are not the result of ignorance, but of that ingenuity which is always rendered fruitful by dire necessity and the instincts of self-support. The Chinese, amongst their many original ideas, have some curious ones on the subject, and doubtless fish now as they did a thousand years ago; and though on the coasts they may have adopted the generally accepted system of working nets, on the waters in the interior of the country they adhere to the methods peculiar to their own nation—methods quaint and curious. The lakes and rivers of China, and especially of the north, are so abundantly stocked with fish, that in some places the men called fish-catchers make their living by actually seizing and drawing them out with their hands. The man goes into the water, and proceeds half walking half swimming, raising his arms above his head, and letting them drop, striking the surface with his hands. Meanwhile his feet are moving on the muddy bottom. Presently he stoops with a rapid dive and brings up a fish in his hand. The striking of the surface was intended to frighten the fish, which when alarmed, sink to the bottom; then the naked feet feel them among the mud, and once felt, the practised hand secures them in a moment. Catching fish in this manner is of course a trade in itself, and the plentiful supply it implies is somewhat explained by the fact that even the little ponds of Northern China swarm with scaly life.
On the great Ning-po river the same principle is used on a more extended scale with boats and nets. The boats are ready for the flow of the tide to take them in crowds up the river, and when they halt, the nets are thrown out, and the oars and sculls beat the water with a loud plashing noise. After resting in the same place for ten minutes or a quarter of an hour, they move on again to another station, and there repeat the beating and splashing. The noise on the surface is meant for an alarm, as in the case of the fish-catcher; and it is said that this mode of fishing soon loads the nets.
Another curious method employed by the Chinese is generally practised at night, and depends upon a peculiar power which a white screen, stretched under the water, seems to possess over the fishes, decoying them to it and making them leap. A man, sitting at the stern of a long narrow boat, steers her with a paddle to the middle of a river, and there stops. Along the right-hand side of his boat a narrow sheet of white canvas is stretched; when he leans to that side it dips under the surface, and if it be a moonlit night, gleams through the water. Along the other side of the boat a net is fastened so as to form a barrier two or three feet high. The boatman keeps perfectly still. If another boat passes by, he will not speak; he is only impatient at the slight breaking of the silence. While he keeps thus without a sound or stir, the fish, attracted by the white canvas, approach and leap, and would go over the narrow boat and be free in their native waters on the other side, but for the screen of netting, which stops them, and throws them down before the man's feet.
Every one must have heard of the fishing cormorant, which is actually trained in China to catch fish. A man takes out ten or twelve of these web-footed birds in a boat, and as soon as the boat stops, at his word they plunge into the water and begin at once searching for and diving after fish. They are most diligent workers, for if one of them is seen swimming about idly, the Chinaman in the boat strikes the water near the bird with the end of a long bamboo; and, not touched, but recalled to a sense of duty, the cormorant at once turns to business again. As soon as a fish is caught, a word from the man brings the bird swimming towards him. He draws it into the boat, and it drops its prey from its bill. There is always a straw or string tied round the neck, to prevent the fish from being swallowed, and this string requires the nicest adjustment, lest it may choke the bird—a result which would certainly follow if it slipped lower down on the neck. The sagacity and workman-like method of the birds are shewn when they get into difficulties. If the fish caught is too large for one beak to secure, another cormorant comes up to the struggle, and the two with united efforts bring their prize to the boat. On the rivers and canals near Ning-po, Shanghae, and Foo-chow-foo, the employment of these birds is by no means an uncommon sight; but they are never to be seen fishing in the summer months, their work being in the winter, beginning always about October and ending in May. The birds have of course to be subjected to a system of training, which is carried on in the cormorant breeding and fishing establishments, one of which is at a distance of thirty or forty miles from Shanghae.
Some tribes of Indians catch fish by drugging them. They make the soft branches of the Indian milk-bush or the euphorbia into pulp, and throw it into the water of the ponds. When the fish taste it, they lose the power of swimming, and are easily taken floating helplessly in the water. They also mix with dough a powder made from the Cocculus Indicus, the effect of which is that when thrown into the water it intoxicates the fish, and they swim in circles on the surface, where they can be caught in a hand-net. Lime is sometimes used in the same way; but the disadvantage of that system is that it causes such wholesale slaughter that there is danger of small ponds being rapidly cleared.