[LEAD AND ITS USES.]
The uses of lead are numerous: it is employed in making the fine kinds of glass, enabling them to bear the sudden changes of heat and cold better; also to give glass a proper degree of weight, and render it more easy to be cut without breaking. Lead gives to glass a greater power of refracting the rays of light, and confers upon it a higher polish.
A mixture of lead with tin forms pewter, and the same metals in different proportions make that useful article to plumbers and others, soft solder.
Lead, in the condition of sheets, has long been employed for the preservation of the bodies of great personages, and is in common use for coffins.
You have often seen the thin sheet-lead with which boxes of tea, imported from China, are lined. The manufacture of this by the Chinese is very simple. The lead plates are not rolled, as from their extreme thinness might be supposed; nor even hammered, as the appearance of the surface might indicate; but actually cast at once in the state in which we see them. Two men are employed; one of them is seated on the floor, with a large flat stone before him, and with a movable flat stone stand at his side. His fellow-workman stands beside him with a crucible filled with melted lead; and having poured a sufficient quantity on the slab, the other lifts the movable stone, and placing it suddenly on the fluid lead, presses it out into a flat and thin plate, which he instantly removes from the stone. A second quantity of lead is poured on in a similar manner, and a like plate formed, the process being carried on with singular rapidity. The rough edges of the plates are then cut off, and they are afterward soldered together for use.
Large quantities of lead are used for the manufacture of shot and bullets. The smaller kinds of shot are made by pouring the metal from a considerable height, in consequence of which it separates into globular masses of different sizes, which cool during their descent, and in the water into which they fall.
[CHARADE.]
My first is truly the first
Among persons of every degree;
My second composes my whole,
And without it my whole can not be.
Yet unless from my second my whole
Is separate wholly and free,
My whole can never exist.
Now read you this riddle to me.