(To be continued.)
To Farmers.—In the winter of 1818-19, a gentleman in this city made the following experiment. He placed a turkey in an enclosure about four or five feet long, two feet wide, and three or four feet high. He excluded as much light as he could without preventing a circulation of air, and fed the turkey with soft brick broken into pieces, with charcoal also broken, and with six grains of corn per day. Fresh water was daily supplied. The box or coop in which the turkey was placed, he always locked up with his own hands, and is perfectly confident that nobody interfered with the experiment.
At the end of one month he invited a number of his neighbours among others two physicians. The turkey, now very large and heavy, was killed and opened by the physicians, and was found to be filled up full with fat. The gizzard and entrails were dissected, and nothing was found but a residuum of charcoal and brick. To conclude the examination satisfactorily, the turkey was eaten, and found to be very good.
Last winter he again repeated the experiment with the same success.
The circumstance by which he was induced to make the experiment is a very curious one. One of his neighbours informed him, that being driven from the city by the fever of 1793, his family recollected that some fowls that had lived in a kind of loft over his workshop, had been forgotten in the hurry of their removal, and would certainly be starved. They were absent six or eight weeks, and on the retiring of the pestilence returned. To their great astonishment, the fowls were not only alive, but very fat, although there was nothing but charcoal and shavings that they could have eaten, and some water that had been left in the trough of a grindstone had supplied them with drink.
[Nat. Recorder.
Introduction of Glass Making in France.
(From Parke's Chymical Essays.)