Part 8

The plan of writing with rice-water, to be rendered visible by the application of iodine, was practised with great success in the correspondence during the war in Affghanistan. The first letter of this kind was received from Jellalabad, concealed in a quill. On opening it, a small paper was unfolded, on which appeared only a single word, "iodine." The magic liquid was applied, and an important dispatch from Sir Robert Sale stood forth.

TAME HYÆNA.

When the traveller, Ignatius Pallme, was at Kordofan, he saw in the court of a house at Lobeid, a hyæna running about quite domesticated. The children of the proprietor tamed it, took the meat thrown to it for food out of its jaws, and put their hands even to its throat without receiving the slightest injury. When the family sat down to dinner in the open air, the animal approached the table, and snapped up the pieces that were thrown to it, like a dog. A full-grown hyæna and her two cubs, on another occasion, were brought to our traveller for sale; the latter were carried in arms, as you might carry a lamb, and were not even muzzled. The old one, it is true, had a rope round her snout, but she had been led a distance of twelve miles by one man without offering the least resistance. The Africans do not even reckon the hyæna among the wild beasts of their country, for they are not afraid of it.

NOVEL TRAVELLING CARRIAGE.

In 1838, a carriage was built for a gentleman at Kensington, which, for completeness, equalled Sir Samuel Morland's celebrated cooking-carriage, of the seventeenth century. It was divided into two apartments, an anti-room, and a drawing-room and bed-chamber with every comfort. The anti-room contained a table, drawers, and culinary utensils; and the drawing-room was furnished with sofas, sofa-bedstead, six chairs, table, cupboards, and a chandelier for nine lights; a stove and fuel. The length of the carriage was twenty-nine feet, and the breadth nine feet; and the length of the drawing-room twenty-feet. The whole weighed two tons and a half.

ENEMIES OF THE OSTRICH.

The ostrich would appear to be a bird of many enemies, from the following statement in Sir J. E. Alexander's narrative of his Expedition of Discovery in South Africa:

"According to native testimony, the male ostrich sits on the nest (which is merely a hollow place scooped out in the sand) during the night, the better to defend the eggs from jackals and other nocturnal plunderers. Towards morning, he _brummels_, or utters a grumbling sound, for the female to come and take his place; and she sits on the eggs during the cool of the morning and evening. In the middle of the day, the pair, leaving the eggs in charge of the sun, and 'forgetting that the foot may crush them, or the wild beast break them,' employ themselves in feeding off the tops of bushes in the plain near the nest. Looking aloft at this time of day, a white Egyptian vulture may be seen, soaring in mid-air, with a large stone between his talons. Having carefully surveyed the ground below him, he suddenly lets fall the stone, and then follows it in rapid descent. Let the hunter run to the spot, and he will find a nest of, probably, a score of eggs, (each equal in size to twenty-four hen's eggs,) some of them broken by the vulture. The jackal, too, is said to roll the eggs together to break them; and the hyæna pushes them off with his nose, to bury them at a distance."

FIRE-PROOF HOUSE ON PUTNEY HEATH.

Upon Putney Heath, by the road-side, stands an obelisk, to record the success of a discovery made in the last century, of the means of building a house which no ordinary application of ignited combustibles could be made to consume. The inventor was Mr. David Hartley, to whom the House of Commons voted 2,500_l._, to defray the expenses of the experimental building, which stood about one hundred yards from the obelisk. In 1774, King George the Third and Queen Charlotte took their breakfast in one of the rooms; while in the apartment beneath, fires were lighted on the floor, and various inflammable materials were ignited, to attest that the rooms above were fire-proof. Hartley's secret lay in the floors being double, and there being interposed between the two boards sheets of laminated iron and copper, not thicker than tinfoil or stout paper, which rendered the floor air-tight, and thereby intercepted the ascent of the heated air; so that, although the inferior boards were actually charred, the metal prevented the combustion taking place in the upper flooring.

Another experiment took place on the 110th anniversary of the great fire of London, when a patriotic lord mayor and the corporation of London witnessed the indestructible property of the structure. Yet, the invention was never carried into further practice. The house was, many years after, converted into a tasteful villa, although the obelisk records the success of the experiment.

THE LAST OF THE ALCHEMISTS.

The last true believer in alchemy was, according to Mr. Brande, one Peter Woulfe, who occupied chambers in Barnard's Inn, Holborn, while in London, and usually spent the summer in Paris. He died in 1805. About the year 1801, another solitary adept lived, or rather starved, in London, in the person of an editor of an evening newspaper, who expected to compound the alkahest, if he could keep his materials digested in a lamp-furnace for the space of seven years. The lamp burnt brightly during six years eleven months, and some odd days besides; and then, unluckily, it went out. Why it went out, the adept could never guess; but he was certain that if the name could only have burnt to the end of the septenary cycle, his experiment must have succeeded.

In 1828, Sir Richard Phillips visited "an alchemist," named Kellerman, at the village of Lilley, midway between Luton and Hitchen; he was believed by some of his neighbours to have succeeded in discovering the Philosopher's Stone, and also the universal solvent. He had been a man of fashion, and an adventurer on the turf; but had for many years shut himself up at Lilley, and been inaccessible and invisible to the world; his house being barricaded, and the walls of his grounds protected by hurdles, with spring-guns, so planted as to resist intrusion in every direction. Sir Richard, however, obtained an interview with this strange being, and the account of his visit is very graphic:--

"The front-door was opened, and Mr. Kellerman presented himself. I lament that I have not the pencil of Hogarth, for a more original figure never was seen. He was about six feet high, and of athletic make. On his head was a white nightcap, and his dress consisted of a long great-coat, once green, and a sort of jockey waistcoat, with three tiers of pockets. His manner was extremely polite and graceful; but my attention was chiefly absorbed by his singular physiognomy. His complexion was deeply sallow, and his eyes large, black, and rolling. He conducted me into a very large parlour, with a window looking backward, and having locked the door and put the key into his pocket, he desired me to be seated in one of two large armchairs, covered with sheepskins. The room was a realization of the well-known picture of Teniers's Alchemist. The floor was strewed with retorts, crucibles, alembics, jars, and bottles of various shapes, intermingled with old books, the whole covered with dust and cobwebs. Different shelves were filled in the same manner; and on one side stood the Alchemist's bed. In a corner, somewhat shaded from the light, I beheld two heads, white, with dark wigs on them; I entertained no doubt, therefore, that, among other fancies, he was engaged in re making the brazen speaking head of Roger Bacon and Albertus."

"He then gave me a history of his studies, mentioned some men in London whom I happened to know, and who, he alleged, had assured him that they had made gold. That having, in consequence, examined the works of the ancient alchemists, and discovered the key which they had studiously concealed from the multitude, he had pursued their system under the influence of new lights; and, after suffering numerous disappointments, owing to the ambiguity with which they describe their processes, he had at length happily succeeded; had made gold, and could make as much more as he pleased, even to the extent of paying off the national debt in the coin of the realm."

"I yielded to the declaration, expressed my satisfaction at so extraordinary a discovery, and asked him to show me some of the precious metal which he had made."

"'Not so,' said he, 'I will show it to no one. I made Lord Liverpool the offer that, if he would introduce me to the King, I would show it to his Majesty; but Lord Liverpool insolently declined, on the ground that there was no precedent; and I am therefore determined that the secret shall die with me. It is true that, in order to avenge myself of such contempt, I made a communication to the French ambassador, Prince Polignac, and offered to go to France, and transfer to the French government the entire advantages of the discovery; but, after deluding me, and shuffling for some time, I found it necessary to treat him with the same contempt as the others. Every court in Europe,' he added, 'knows that I have made the discovery, and they are all in a confederacy against me; lest, by giving it to any one, I should make that country master of all the rest--the world, Sir,' he exclaimed with great emotion, 'is in my hands, and my power.'"

* * * * *

"I now inquired whether he had been alarmed by the ignorance of the people in the country, so as to shut himself up in this unusual manner?"

"'No,' he replied, 'not on their account wholly. They are ignorant and insolent enough; but it was to protect myself against the governments of Europe, who are determined to get possession of my secret by force. I have been,' he exclaimed, 'twice fired at through that window, and three times attempted to be poisoned. They believed I had written a book containing my secrets, and to get possession of this book has been their object. To baffle them, I burnt all that I had ever written; and I have so guarded the windows with spring-guns, and have such a collection of combustibles in the range of bottles which stand at your elbow, that I could destroy a whole regiment of soldiers if sent against me.' He then related that, as a further protection, he lived entirely in that room, and permitted no one to come into the house; while he had locked up every room except that with patent padlocks, and sealed the keyholes."

In a conversation of two or three hours with the narrator, Kellerman enlarged upon the merits of the ancient alchemists, and on the blunders and impertinent assumptions of modern chemists. He quoted Roger and Lord Bacon, Paracelsus, Boyle, Boerhaave, Woolfe, and others, to justify his pursuits. As to the term philosopher's stone, he alleged that it was a mere figure to deceive the vulgar. He appeared to give full credit to the silly story of Dee's assistant, Kelly, finding some of the powder of projection in the tomb of Roger Bacon, at Glastonbury, by means of which, as he said, Kelly for a length of time supported himself in princely splendour. Kellerman added, that he had discovered the blacker than black of Appolonius Tyanus: it was itself "the powder of projection for producing gold."

It further appeared he had lived in the premises at Lilley for twenty-three years, during fourteen of which he had pursued his alchemical studies with unremitting ardour; keeping eight assistants for the purpose of superintending his crucibles, two at a time, relieving each other every six hours: that he had exposed some preparations to intense heat for many months at a time, but that all except one crucible had burst--and that, Kellerman said, contained the true "blacker than black." One of his assistants, however, protested that no gold had ever been found, and that no mercury had ever been fixed, for he was quite sure Kellerman could not have concealed it from his assistants; while, on the contrary, they witnessed his severe disappointment at the result of his most elaborate experiments.

By the way, in the introduction to _Zanoni_, Sir E. Bulwer Lytton has given a clever sketch of an eccentric antiquarian bookseller, in the neighbourhood of Covent Garden, who is said to have assembled "the most notable collection ever amassed by an enthusiast, of the works of alchemist, cabalist, and astrologer." The "vindictive glare and uneasy vigilance," and the frowning and groaning of the anti-bookseller (for it absolutely went to his heart when a customer entered his shop), are all very characteristic and life-like in this sketch. When free from such annoyance, he might be seen gloating over his musty, unsaleable treasures, on which he had, it was said, spent a fortune.

CELEBRATED DIAMONDS.

We read marvellous records, (in modern books, too,) of the high prices realized for diamonds; but according to Dr. Ure, "it does not appear that any sum exceeding one hundred and fifty thousand pounds has ever been given for a diamond." This statement, made in the year 1820, has since received signal confirmation. On July 20, 1837, the Nassuck diamond was sold by auction in London, and realised only 7,200l., though it was estimated by the East India Company to be worth 30,000l. This diamond was among the spoils which were captured by the combined armies, under the command of the Marquis of Hastings, in the British conquest of India, and formed part of the "Deccan booty." This magnificent gem is as large as a good-sized walnut, weighs 357-1/2 grains, is of dazzling whiteness, and is as pure as a drop of dew. After the above sale, it was purchased by the Marquis of Westminster, who more than once wore it on the hilt of his court sword; it was presented by his lordship to the Marchioness of Westminster, on her birth-day, along with the Arcot diamond ear-rings, once belonging to Queen Charlotte, and disposed of at the above sale for 11,000l.

The Great Mogul's diamond, about the size of half a hen's egg, and the Pitt diamond, are well known. Among the crown jewels of Russia is a magnificent diamond, weighing 195 carats: it is the size of a small pigeon's egg, and was formerly the eye of a Brahminical idol, whence it was purloined by a French soldier; it passed through several hands, and was ultimately purchased by the Empress Catherine, for 90,000l. in ready money, and an annuity of 4,000l.

One of the largest diamonds in the world was found in the river Abaite, about 92 miles N. W. of the diamond district of Serro do Frio, in Brazil: it is of nearly an ounce in weight, and has been _estimated_ by Roma de l'Isle at the enormous sum of 300 millions. It is uncut; but the king of Portugal, to whom it belonged, had a hole bored through it, in order to wear it suspended about his neck on gala days. No sovereign possessed so fine a collection of diamonds as this prince.

In 1846, the Brazilian journals announced that a negro had found, in the diamond district of Bahia, a rough diamond weighing nearly an ounce. The approximative value was stated at 45,000l., but it was sold by the finder for 35l.

The most celebrated diamond of our times we, however, suspect to be that called "The Mountain of Light," (_Koh-i-noor_,) which belonged to Runjeet Sing, and now belongs to Queen Victoria. It was once valued at £3,000,000, is very brilliant, and without a flaw of any kind. Runjeet's string of pearls was, it is thought, if possible, even handsomer than the diamond; they were about three hundred in number, literally the size of small marbles, all picked pearls, and round, and perfect both in shape and colour. Two hours before he died, he sent for all his jewels, and gave the above diamond, said to be the largest in the world, to a Hindoo temple; his celebrated string of pearls to another; and his favourite fine horses, with all their jewelled trappings, worth 300,000l., to a third. "The Nizam's Diamond" is another wonderful gem: it was first seen in the hands of a native child in India, who was playing with it, ignorant of its value; and a considerable sum being offered for it, led to the discovery of its being a real diamond. In its rough state, it weighs 277 carats; and as the rough stones are usually taken to give but half of their weight when cut or polished, it would allow 138 carats.

DR. DEE, THE NECROMANCER.

Dr. John Dee was a man who made a conspicuous figure in the 16th century. He was born in London in 1527: he was an eminent scholar and an indefatigable mathematician; when at Cambridge, he was mostly occupied eighteen hours out of the twenty-four in study. While here he superintended the exhibition of a Greek play of Aristophanes, among the machinery of which he introduced an artificial scarabæus, or beetle, which flew up to the palace of Jupiter with a man on his back, and a basket of provisions. The astonished spectators ascribed this feat to the arts of the magician; and Dee, annoyed by these suspicions, found it convenient to withdraw to the Continent.

Dee's principal study in early life lay in astrology; and accordingly, upon the accession of Elizabeth, Robert Dudley, her chief favourite, was sent to consult the doctor as to the aspect of the stars, that they might fix on an auspicious day for celebrating her coronation. Some years after, we find him again on the Continent; and in 1571, being taken ill at Louvaine, the queen sent over two physicians to attend him. Elizabeth afterwards visited him at his house at Mortlake, to view his collection of mathematical instruments and curiosities; and about this time employed him to defend her title to countries discovered in different parts of the globe. He says of himself, that he received the most advantageous offers from Charles V., Ferdinand, Maximilian II., and Rodolph, emperor of Germany; and from the czar of Muscovy an offer of 2000_l._ per annum, on condition that he would reside in his dominions. Had Dee gone no further than this, all would have been well; but he was ruined by his enthusiasm; he dreamed perpetually of the philosopher's stone, and was haunted with the belief of intercourse with spirits.

One day in November, 1582, he tells us that as he was at prayer, there appeared to him the angel Uriel at the west window of his museum, who gave him a translucent stone, or crystal, of a convex form, that presented apparitions, and even emitted sounds; so that the observer could hold conversations, ask questions, and receive answers from the figures he saw in this _mirror_.

With this speculum, black-stone, or show-stone, Dee used to "call his spirits," and Kelly, his associate, "did all his feats upon." Kelly, who acted as seer, reported what spirits he saw, and what they said; whilst Dee, who sat at a table, recorded the spiritual intelligence. A folio volume of their notes was published by Casaubon; and many more, containing the most unintelligible jargon, remain in MS. in the British Museum, together with the consecrated cakes of wax, marked with mathematical figures and hieroglyphics, used in their mummeries.

At length, Dee fell into disrepute; his chemical apparatus, and other stock in trade, were destroyed by the mob, who made an attack upon his house; but the mirror is stated to have been saved. It subsequently passed into the collection of the Mordaunts, Earls of Peterborough, in whose catalogue it is called _the black stone, into which Dr. Dee used to call his spirits_. From the Mordaunts it passed to Lady Elizabeth Germaine, and from her to John, Duke of Argyle, whose son, Lord Frederick Campbell, presented it to Horace Walpole; and on the breaking up of the collection at Strawberry Hill in 1842, this precious relic was sold: it was described in the catalogue as "a singularly interesting and curious relic of the superstition of our ancestors on the celebrated speculum of Kennel coal, highly polished, in a leathern case."

Bulwer, in his romance of _Zanoni_, introduces a mirror of this kind; and every tale of superstition has its magic glass. It is worth while to compare Dee's speculum with the celebrated ink mirror described in Lane's work on the _Modern Egyptians_; it may, at least, illustrate the curious inquiry upon coincident superstitions.

VOYAGE OF MANUFACTURE.

The produce of our factories has preceded even our most enterprising travellers. Captain Clapperton saw at the court of the Sultan Bello, in the interior of Africa, pewter dishes with the London stamp, and had at the royal table a piece of meat served up on a white wash-hand basin of English manufacture. The cotton of India is conveyed by British ships round half our planet, to be woven by British skill in the factories of Lancashire. It is again set in motion by British capital, and transported to the very plains whereon it grew; and is repurchased by the lords of the soil which gave it birth, at a cheaper price than that at which their coarser machinery enables them to manufacture it themselves. At Calicut, (in the East Indies,) whence the cotton cloth called calico derives its name, the price of labour is a fraction of that in England, yet the market is supplied from British looms.

SIR DAVID BREWSTER'S KALEIDOSCOPE.

The idea of this instrument, constructed for the purpose of creating and exhibiting a variety of beautiful and perfectly symmetrical forms, first occurred to Sir David Brewster in 1814, when he was engaged in experiments on the polarization of light, by successive reflections between plates of glass. The reflectors were, in some instances, inclined to each other; and he had occasion to remark the circular arrangement of the images of a candle round a centre, or the multiplication of the sectors formed by the extremities of the glass plates. In repeating, at a subsequent period, the experiments of M. Biot on the action of fluids upon light, Sir David Brewster placed the fluids in a trough, formed by two plates of glass, cemented together at an angle; and the eye being necessarily placed at one end, some of the cement, which had been pressed through between the plates, appeared to be arranged into a regular figure. The remarkable symmetry which it presented led to Dr. Brewster's investigation of the cause of this phenomenon; and in so doing, he discovered the leading principles of the kaleidoscope.

By the advice of his friends, Dr. Brewster took out a patent for his invention; in the specification of which he describes the kaleidoscope in two different forms. The instrument, however, having been shown to several opticians in London, became known before he could avail himself of his patent; and, being simple in principle, it was at once largely manufactured. It is calculated that not less than 200,000 kaleidoscopes were sold in three months in London and Paris; though, out of this number, Dr. Brewster says, not, perhaps, one thousand were constructed upon scientific principles, or were capable of giving anything like a correct idea of the power of his kaleidoscope.

LORD ROSSE'S LEVIATHAN TELESCOPE.