one for 14,207; and in 1852, it had risen to one for 9340. In 1838 and 1839, England had one suicide for every 15,900 inhabitants; France, one for every 12,489. Between London and Paris, for the same years, the difference is yet more remarkable, the figures being, for London, one in 8250; and for Paris, one in 2221. This is surely a sufficiently distinct contradiction to the generally received opinion! The north of France is the most prolific in suicides; nearly half of the whole number belongs to the north, which has increased its own ratio by one-third. The north has one in 6483; the east, one in 13,855; the south, one in 20,457. The department of the Seine, which includes Paris, has risen with frightful rapidity; but Paris and Marseille, and all large centres, are the foci of suicides to a very striking extent. Russia stands the lowest of European states in the scale-her suicides being only one in 49,182; while Prussia has one in 14.404; Austria, one in 20,900; New York, one in 7797; Boston, one in 12,500; Baltimore, one in 13,650; and Philadelphia, one in 11,873. Climate has not much to do with the matter. In latitude from 42° to 54°, the proportion is one in 38,882; from 54° to 64°, one in 56,577. Yet the last figures include Moscow and St Petersburg, and represent a much more rigorous, damp, uncertain, and joyless climate than the first. Certainly, the low condition of civilisation between these latitudes influences the statistics to the full as much as any other assigned or assignable cause; but that mere temperature and climate have little to do with the question, is proved by the average number of suicides occurring in the different months of the year in France; which are highest in the sunniest, brightest, and most enjoyable seasons. We cannot refrain from giving the table entire; it opens a view so very different from the one popularly received. The list is the average of seventeen years' computation. For January, the mean number of these seventeen years gives 3761; for February, 3529; for March, 4423; for April, 4872; May, 5436; June, 5722; July, 5517; August, 4652; September, 3959; October, 3845; November, 3282; December, 3227. With this list in his hand, what will the Frenchman say now to the irrefutable influence of our fogs and miasma? In age, the rate increases gradually from under sixteen up to forty, when it slowly decreases to eighty and upwards. The mass occurs in middle age; but there has been recently a noticeable increase of suicides by children-which are now sevenfold what they were thirty years ago for children under sixteen years of age, twelve times as many for youths from sixteen to twenty. 'One youth,' says Esquirol, 'leaves a writing before killing himself, in which he bitterly blames his parents for the education they have given him; another blasphemes God and society; a third kills himself "because he has not enough air to breathe with ease;" two young men of letters, at the age of twenty-one each, suffocate themselves with charcoal, because a theatrical piece which they had composed together has not succeeded; a child of thirteen hangs himself, and leaves a document beginning: "I bequeath my soul to Rousseau, and my body to the earth;" one of twelve hangs himself for rage at being only the twelfth in a school exercise, where he expected a better place; and another, of thirteen, hangs himself in a cell where he was unjustly confined.' What a painful mass of illregulated passion, and misdirected life, lies in those few sad lines! In sex, the general proportion is 1 woman to 3.35 men in towns, and 1 to 4 35 in the country; and the most fatal times of life to the female sex are from fourteen to twenty, and from forty to fifty. Women-servants are more in relative proportion than men-servants; the absolute numbers being almost the same; but taking into account the proportion of the two sexes in domestic service, that particular ratio is singularly elevated. There are very few suicides among the unfortunates, though these largely people both the prisons and the madhouses. At the Salpêtrière Asylum, out of 264 women confined there in one year, 33 were of this class; while in a period of seventeen years, only 53 had committed suicide. There are also very few among life-convicts-only 6* in twenty-one years out of the large population of the bagnes; but several among short-time prisoners and the simply accused.' On the whole, sad as it is to confess, and anomalous as it seems at first sight, suicide increases with education and civilisation. The savage rarely, if ever, takes his own life; the sensitive, highly organised, and highly educated man of literature and science ends his days by the pistol or the cord. The means employed for suicide are generally hanging in youth, firearms and poison in maturity, hanging in old age. Women rarely use firearms: they prefer hanging, drowning, poison, and-in Franceasphyxiation by charcoal. But it is strange to read the statistical tables, and to see how every year the same proportion is maintained between the methodshow many, out of a given number, are sure to use hanging, how many drowning, how many poison, firearms, and so on-all calculated with as much certainty as the height of the tides or algebraic quantities. The causes assigned by M. Lisle are singular: mental alienation stands first in number; physical suffering next; then domestic troubles, debt, poverty, habitual intoxication-a cause which, we fear, holds a higher rank than the sixth in England-misconduct, disgust at life, love-disappointment. These come in their order, and have by far the largest influence of any ascribed. But other causes are given. Thus, eight suicides are ascribed to 'rivalry in trade; seventy-seven, to 'disgust at a certain social position;' twenty-six (all men), to sorrow at exile;' the same number, of whom nineteen are men, to 'jealousy between brothers and sisters;' eighty, to idleness, four only of these being women; seventy-seven, to sorrow at leaving a certain place or master; with others as subtle and as strange. But the two most prominent causes are mental alienation and disease. In the chapter on mental hallucinations are quoted the following striking instances of involuntary suicide: A man, thinking to open the door of his apartment, opens the window, and flings himself into the street, believing that he is descending the staircase. Another thinks himself on the ground-floor, and jumps out of his window on the fifth story. A third, attempting a rudeness to a woman who escapes him, flings himself into the hall from the third story, leaping over the banisters of the well staircase, in order to intercept the woman rushing down the stairs. A fourth hears a heavenly voice whisper to him: My son, come seat thyself by my side,' and straightway throws himself out of his window, breaking his leg; when raised, he expresses the greatest astonishment at his fall, and above all, at his fracture. A youth, haunted by a mysterious dread of punishment for certain imaginary crimes, resolves to starve himself to death. Taken to the hospital, and there treated as a sick man-which, in fact, he soon becomes-fed by mechanical means, and carefully watched, he recovers sufficiently to be allowed to travel. But he scarcely arrives at Marseille when his sufferings return, and, in spite of all that is done for his relief, he dies of starvation, self-imposed, at the end of a few days. A boot-maker of Venice, Mattéo Lovat, after having horribly mutilated, crucified himself, 'in obedience to the will of God, which had been revealed to him.' Taken to the madhouse of San Servolo, he starved himself to death. Not that religious mania or suicides are so frequent in France as with us; our comparative list of causes would shew very different results in other particulars, but more especially in this. On the 11th of December 1847, a poorly dressed man was taken out of the river, near the bridge of St Cloud. In his pocket was the following letter: 'Hunger and want of a home force me to commit suicide. For the last four years and a half I have lodged at the Rue Guérin-Boisseau, 32, with my wife and my little daughter, who is nearly nine years old. Being behindhand in my rent, they have refused me my key.Philippe Toussaint.' This poor fellow was a public scribe, noted in his neighbourhood for his honesty, industry, punctuality, and resignation to his hard lot. A few years ago, a poor boy in the hospital of Bicêtre, confined among the lunatics, had been arrested at the moment when about to throw himself into the Seine. Though perfectly sane, he was in such extreme of poverty as to be grateful and glad for an asylum, even in a madhouse and under strict restraint. Left an orphan at a very early age, he was given into the care of a friend of his father, who so ill-treated him, that, unable to support his cruelties, he ran away to Paris. In a few days, he was penniless; and being without resources, was taken up as a vagabond, and condemned to six months' imprisonment. Overwhelmed with grief and shame, he fell dangerously ill, his illness being so long and severe that, when the time of his release came, he had earned only six francs. (French prisoners are allowed to amass a reserve fund, to be given them on their release.) As this sum only lasted a few days, P was again brought before the police magistrates for vagabondage; but this time, the magistrate, pitying his sad fate, gave him only one month of imprisonment. There at La Force, he met with the temptations usually besetting the young and uncorrupted from the old and hardened jail-birds; but though unfortunate, he was honest, and refused to be tempted into evil ways. As there was no separation, either by night or day, and no discipline of any kind in French prisons a few years ago-little enough of either even now!-the unhappy lad had an awful probation to go through. The scorn, and the scoff, and the butt of the whole reckless set all day, he was not left in peace even at night; so that a month or two longer of that pandemonium must either have killed or broken him. When released, seeing himself again without resources, help, or prospects, having nothing but crime or the prison again between him and starvation, he resolved on suicide, as the only way out of his miseries. Again he was arrested, just in time to prevent that self-murder; and this time was locked up as a madman, on the plea that suicide must include mental alienation. himself as he would have treated an ordinary patient. His friend, too, prescribed for him; but the black cow with her threatening horns still remained by his side. Unable to bear the distress of her presence any longer, he committed suicide, to the utter amazement of all who knew only his quiet, useful, intellectual, and noble life. A like case was that of a lawyer, a man of singular perception and justness of observation; eminently a lawyer, with all the logical acumen and critical sharpness of his class. He was haunted by an immense black cat which never left him; after a time, the cat changed into a sheriff's officer, in full official costume, who always preceded him, especially up stairs when going to any ball or fête, making as though about to announce him to the company. This went on for some years, when came a period of total cessation. The poor lawyer was in the seventh heaven; he believed that he had conquered his enemy; when one day opening his eyes, he saw a loathsome hideous skeleton standing where the sheriff's officer had been. From this last and worst visitation there was no escape, and the poor wretch died, incapable of supporting such a weight of misery in his life. Suicide is fatally hereditary. Gall knew a family of which the grandmother, sister, and mother all killed themselves; and the son and daughter of the last followed in the same terrible track. Another family of seven brothers, all well off and in good positions, committed suicide one after the other in the space of forty years. Two brothers, twins, both in the army, and both happy and prosperous, committed suicide within a few days of each other; and two of their sisters were only prevented by force from doing the same thing. A rich merchant, passionate and tyrannical, had six children, whom he sent away from home, well provided for, as soon as their education was completed. The youngest son, when twenty-six years old, threw himself from the roof of the house; the second brother died of obstinate abstinence the year following; the year following that, another brother had a fit of madness, in which, however, he was prevented from accomplishing the suicide he attempted; a fourth brother, a physician, who foresaw and felt powerless against his fate, killed himself; two or three years after, a sister became mad, and attempted suicide; and some years after that, the last brother, who was at the head of a large business, and who had been kept from the same horrible fate only by his wife's cares and tenderness, finished, like the rest, by self-murder. Thus, of the whole family, only two escaped suicide, and those two were confessedly mad, and therefore protected against themselves. But what is called 'hereditary tendency' is often a mere matter of imitation, or of fancied hereditary necessity; indeed, imitation is the cause of more crimes, suicides, and even madness, than any other one faculty of human nature. The following is an instance: A physician of high standing, good fortune, apparently good health, and domestic happiness, one day was found self-murdered in his own room. All his preA lady, aged thirty-five, was taken to the hospital parations had been made with the utmost calmness in a state of melancholy mania. She was married, and deliberation; he had himself written out his will and the mother of children; but she was afflicted with a short time before, had regulated his affairs, and the constant feeling of a necessity to commit suicide; provided for his only son, to whom he was tenderly this feeling having been induced by the fact, that attached. There was no sign of mania or of unreflecting her father and uncle had both done the same, and haste in his act; it was a quiet, deliberate, self-pos- that she was therefore doomed by hereditary predissessed, and self-conscious deed, which no one could call position.' With this feeling, she wrote a letter to her madness or imbecility; but for which no one could mother announcing her intention, and then rushed into assign a reason, till an intimate friend of his, a physician the river hard by. She was immediately rescued, and whom he had consulted, told how he had been tor- from that night became melancholy and monomanmented by an ocular hallucination, which never left iacal, with the incessant impulse to self-destruction. him, and which destroyed his happiness and peace of At last her mother decided on the revelation of her mind. Wherever he went-in the street, in the draw-lifelong secret; her daughter was not the child of her ing-room, by the bedside of his patients, before the altar-wherever he might be, he always saw a huge black cow threatening him with her horns. He was quite aware of the nature of the deception, and treated husband, but of a man in whose family was not the shadow of suicidal tendency. The lady had an interview with her real father, and from that hour recovered both her sanity and her health, never again to be tormented with the desire of self-destruction, on the plea of a false hereditary predisposition. So much for imitation and fancy. A priest, opening a letter, swallowed the wafer, without thinking of what he was doing. Take care,' said a friend, laughing; 'you have sealed up your inside!' The poor man took the jest seriously, went home, and killed himself by starvation; believing that he had positively sealed up his intestines, and that it was superfluous, and would be painful to eat. We conclude this paper by a summary of results which it will be well worth the reader's while to remember: 1. That suicides are on the increase generally, but specially in France; 2. That the suicides in France greatly outnumber those of any other country in the world; 3. That they are not always attributable to mental affections, nor yet to physical sufferings, though suicides from these causes constitute a special branch of medical science; 4. That they are in ratio with the increase of civilisation and the diffusion of a certain kind of education that kind which taxes the intellect too heavily while leaving the physical nature uncared for; 5. That they spring from moral and social causes chiefly-of course always excepting special disease-and are therefore to be dealt with and destroyed by a healthier system of public education and sounder views of social life. The extreme development of the nervous system, to the loss of muscular power and physical harmony generally, has tended to the increase of suicides; the over-cultivation, too, of the intellectual faculties in the young has been another fertile source of the same evil. The best and truest checks, therefore, to be given to this sad practice are the returning to a more natural and more healthful system in the nursery, the schoolroom, and the forum, so that children and youths may no longer die from over-excited intellects, nor men cut short their days from social weariness or artificially induced disease. City authorities were compelled to prohibit the practice. Rumours of approaching ascents were always in circulation. Intrepid air-voyagers' were constantly about to ascend, first at Kensington, then at Greenwich, and afterwards from Whitehall Gardens; but somehow or other, either the gas or the courage of the artist was sure to ooze out at the last moment, and the event never came off. He Among those who were greatly interested in the experiments at Paris was Vincent Lunardi, a young Italian attached to the Neapolitan embassy. had dabbled a little in aërostatics with Zambeccari, and had conceived an ardent ambition to be the first navigator of the English atmosphere.' His scientific acquirements do not appear to have been very extensive, and his variations from the track of the French discoverers were few and questionable. It was said by his enemies, that he was 'more of the showman than the savant,' and it is probable that notoriety rather than science was the object of his courtship; but at any rate, we cannot refuse him the credit of being the pioneer in an enterprise requiring skill and courage in no small degree. Sir Joseph Banks, the president of the Royal Society, and Dr Fordyce, the eminent chemist, were among those who interested themselves in his work, and to them he was indebted in a great measure for its successful issue. Early in July, Lunardi informed the public that he was constructing a balloon in which he intended to ascend from the gardens of Chelsea Hospital. The gallery, oars, and wings,' said the advertisement, are already made, and to be seen at the Lyceum in Exeter Change, Strand, where the balloon is now making, and will be finished in about a fortnight.' At the same time, in order to defray his expenses, which had been heavy, he issued tickets of admission to the ascent at a guinea and half-aguinea each. Before the end of the month, however, he had the mortification of seeing a rival candidate enter the field. A Frenchman, named Moret, had also completed a balloon, and fixed the trial for the 12th of THE FIRST AËRIAL VOYAGE IN ENGLAND. drew together a vast concourse of people, who patiently August, the day before Lunardi's. His announcements DURING the whole of the year 1784, the good people of watched the preparations from one till four o'clock; London were greatly agitated upon the novel subject and when every effort was seen to fail, and the balloon of balloons. Reports of Montgolfier's doings across the at last sunk into the fire which ought to have expanded channel had raised the curiosity of our wonder-loving it, the mob, conceiving the whole affair an imposture, grandfathers to the highest pitch; and amid all the broke into the enclosure, tore up the apparatus, and din of the great Westminster election, and the rest of destroyed a great amount of property in the neighthe political turmoil of that eventful year, we find the bourhood. Lunardi chuckled finely over this cataspopular mind constantly recurring to the topic with trophe; but his triumph was short, for the governor of an excitement which is scarcely intelligible to a gener- Chelsea Hospital, fearing a repetition of the riot on the ation familiar with the mightier glories of steam and morrow, immediately wrote to countermand his perthe telegraph. The new-born science of aërostation mission for the use of the gardens; and so his ascent had not then achieved its barren honours, and become had to be indefinitely postponed. It was in vain that the costly pastime of our day. No invention, perhaps, he solicited private proprietors: the risk of a failure in the history of man had opened to the imagination-and in that case, the certainty of the mob-prevented so many brilliant promises. The papers were filled all negotiation. At length, after many wearisome with curious speculations upon the uses to which delays, he obtained leave from the Artillery Company the newly applied principle might be put. Bishop Wilkins's favourite theory of a voyage to the moon was seriously revived by more than one enthusiast. Others, less sanguine, were content to congratulate themselves upon the great discoveries in astronomy which must necessarily result from a nearer view of the planets; while the more practical anticipated a time when aërial navigation would supersede the commerce of the seas, and drive the flying wagons from the Great North Road. Ballooning became quite a fashionable mania. Little balloons of painted silk, in all kinds of gay and quaint devices, floated about in boudoirs; and questions concerning the varieties of 'inflammable airs' and the elasticity of vapours formed subjects of drawing-room discussion. Experiments with fire-balloons upon Montgolfier's principle were so common, and caused so many fires, that the to ascend from their ground in Moorfields; but he was compelled to find sureties for any damage that might happen to the property; and even with these precautions, so great was the prejudice against him, that the permission was only carried in the council by the casting-vote of Sir Watkin Lewis, the colonel. The day was fixed for the 15th of September; but at the last moment another difficulty arose. The unprincipled proprietor of the Lyceum, who had made a good thing of the exhibition, was unwilling to lose his chief attraction; and taking advantage of Lunardi's ignorance of English law, positively refused to allow the balloon to be removed till he was secured a share in the present, and all future advantages to be derived from it. Such monstrous extortion was of course resisted. Sir Sampson Wright, the presiding magistrate at Bow Street, ordered it to be forcibly wrested from his possession; and after a desperate struggle between the police and the employés of the Lyceum, it was safely lodged in the artillery-ground the day before the ascent. Next morning, all London was on the move towards Moorfields. By twelve o'clock, the large square, or rather parallelogram, which formed the fashionable promenade of old London, and is now occupied by Finsbury Circus and the adjacent streets, was one mass of human beings. Every roof and window from which a view could be obtained, was thronged with eager gazers. Along the front, and towering high above the whole scene, were the gloomy buildings of the old Bedlam, the wretched inmates of which were allowed to be spectators, and exchange coarse ribaldry with the mob beneath. The fact of this vicinage, and the resemblance between Lunardi and lunatic, had been the themes of innumerable puns and witticisms for days past; and the populace, appreciating the joke, with rough humour, were continually roaring out to him to go inside.' The enclosure is occupied by the Artillery Company, under arms, and the subscribers who have paid for admission; but the prevailing fears have prevented many from attending. In the centre of the ground, warded on every side by strong barriers, is the balloon, which differs in many respects from the Great Nassaus' and 'Royal Alberts' of our time. It is about 32 feet in height, and 102 in circumference, and is composed of alternate strips of blue and red silk, strongly incased in net-work. The gallery, or car, is a thick wooden box, suspended from the balloon by forty-five ropes, and decorated on either side with two large leathern wings-a pet invention of Lunardi's-which he imagines will enable him to steer his course through the new regions he is about to visit. Almost all the men of mark in politics or literature then in town were grouped around it, including among others the Prince of Wales, Fox, Sheridan, Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Sir Joseph Banks. Rogers the poet was also there; and his recently published Tabletalk records an incident of the scene. Fox, growing impatient at the delay, put his hand to his watch and found another hand upon it, which he immediately seized. 'My friend,' said he to the owner of the strange hand, 'you have chosen an occupation which will some day be your ruin.' 'Oh, Mr Fox,' was the reply, pray forgive me, and let me go; I have a wife and six children starving at home.' Fox, always tender-hearted, slipped a guinea into his hand, and then released it. At the conclusion of the show, Fox was proceeding to look what time it was. "Good God!' said he, 'my watch is gone.' 'Yes,' said his brother, General Fox, 'I know it is. I saw your friend take it.' 'Saw him take it, and made no attempt to stop him!' was the indignant response. Really,' said General Fox, 'you and he appeared to be on such good terms, that I did not choose to interfere.' It is now half-past one, and Dr Fordyce is still engaged in filling the balloon with 'inflammable air,' through a complicated arrangement of leathern nooses. The gas itself is hydrogen, manufactured from an infusion of zinc in vitriolic acid, the properties of common coal-gas being then unknown. Lunardi and Mr Biggin, the gentleman who is to accompany him, are busily engaged in completing their preparations; and the visitors around them, with true English love of betting, are giving and taking the odds about the probability of their return alive. The hour fixed for the ascent is passed; and the mob outside, pent up in narrow quarters since an early hour in the morning, are beginning to get clamorous. Dr Fordyce thinks the balloon is not sufficiently inflated to take up its freight, for at present it is only pear-shaped; but with the horrid populace in prospect, it is not considered advisable to wait any longer. Lunardi and his friend jump into the car; there is an anxious pause, and after a moment's vibration, the cumbrous machine reclines heavily to mother-earth. A murmur of dissatisfaction runs through the assembly, and each man begins to feel himself duped. Already the sensitive aëronaut hears his ascent pronounced an imposition, and himself branded as a swindler. All is confusion and uproar, for the hoarse roar of the living sea without threatens havoc, and the courtiers are entreating the prince to leave the ground. "The displeasure hanging over us,' says Lunardi, 'would have been fatal, if in one moment Mr Biggin had not had the heroism to relinquish, and I the resolution to go alone.' A smaller car is hastily substituted, and, half-dead with his many anxieties, he rushes into it. There is a warm farewell from his personal friends, for every one looks upon his return as very problematical. The prince and all the company with one accord take off their hats; the ropes are cut, and with the boom of the signal-gun, the first English balloon rises buoyantly into the air amid the frantic acclamations of nearly 200,000 spectators, who only a moment before had been indulging in the loudest shouts of menace. Insensible,' said the Morning Post of the next day, must that heart be which did not feel itself anxious and interested at that moment for the fate of him who intrepidly stepped into his seat, and, Phaetonlike, seized the reins which were to guide the chariot of the sun.' At the distance of about twenty yards, it descended towards the ground; but, continues the reporter in the same style, 'roused by ambition and spirit of philosophical researches, Mr Lunardi rebuked its fear, and gave swiftness to its airy flight.' In the account of his trip, which Lunardi published soon after, he enters at length into his sensations. 'I saw,' he says, all London beneath me like an enormous bee-hive, but the industry of it was suspended. All the moving mass seemed to have no object but myself; and the transition from the suspicion and contempt of the preceding hour, to the affectionate transport, admiration, and glory of the present, was not without its effect on my mind.' a He tells us that the critics are wrong in holding terror to be an ingredient in every sublime sensation, for he was never freer from apprehension in his life, and speaks in ecstasies of the motion, compared with which the broom-sticks of the witches, Ariosto's flying-horse, and even Milton's sunbeam conveying the angel to the earth, have all an idea of effort, difficulty, and restraint.' At half-past three he descended in a cornfield near South Mimms in Hertfordshire, where he landed a cat that he had brought with him, and again reascended. He contrived to bring himself down by working with his oars, and had therefore expended none of his gas. After an hour's further journey, during which he wrote and threw down several letters to his friends, he finally lowered himself over meadow in the parish of Stondon, near Ware. Some labourers were at work underneath him, and Lunardi begged their assistance to secure the balloon, but they all appeared horror-struck, and refused to move. One excused himself because he was too short; another said he did not like the look of it; and a third honestly declared he would have nothing to do with one who came on the 'devil's horse.' Upon his nearer approach, they fairly took to their heels; and the disembarkation would have been attended with great danger, had it not been for the spirit of a young girl who grasped a rope which Lunardi threw her, and held it till General Smith and other gentlemen who had followed him from London on horseback came up. The new-comers aided in securing the machine, and bore off Lunardi in triumph to the Bull Inn at Ware, and afterwards to Bayford Bury, the seat of Mr Baker, the member for Hertford. Such was the prosperous ending of the first aërial excursion in England. Lunardi, of course, became the lion of the town. The journals were filled with odes in praise of his daring; the king sent for him to court, and the lord-mayor feasted him in the City. In the curious little brochure published on the occasion, he recounts with great gravity many incidents connected with his journey. While he hovered over London, George III. was holding a cabinet council. On being told the balloon was passing, his majesty said: 'We may resume our deliberations at pleasure, but we may never see poor Lunardi again.' The conference immediately broke up, and the king and Mr Pitt took to their telescopes. One young lady mistook one of the oars which he accidentally dropped from the balloon for the aëronaut himself, and was so affected with the circumstance, that she took to her bed and died soon after. A judge to whom he mentioned this circumstance at the Mansion-house dinner, told him not to be concerned at the loss he had occasioned, for he had undoubtedly saved the life of a notorious house-breaker, whose jury were so amazed at the novel sight over the Old Bailey, that they incontinently returned a verdict of acquittal. THE MONTH: Telegraph.' It is probable that a time-ball will be erected at Devonport, the possibility of dropping such a ball by a flash from Greenwich having already been demonstrated. The Astronomer Royal still, as last year, refers to certain mysterious changes of level and direction of one of the instruments, one occurring with changes of temperature, the other at the equinoxes, and he still imagines some movement of the earth itself to be the cause of these remarkable phenomena. There is to be a better education for officers in the army. No more getting commissions by favour; no more scandals about silly ensigns; but real practical ability, and thorough knowledge of military science, are to be the rule. Above all, we want competent officers in India. As regards art-education, the South Kensington Museum is open, and whosoever will may now inspect its valuable contents at pleasure. It is about three-quarters of an hour distant from Trafalgar Square, so that working-men could hardly The success of his first attempt induced Lunardi to resort to it without giving up half a day. But the make several other trials in various parts of the king-view of the buildings and the grounds, well repays dom. The year following, he went to Edinburgh, where the time and labour. Comprised in that museum, he made two ascents from the gardens of Heriot's are the Department of Science and Art from MarlHospital, the last of which considerably cooled his borough House; an educational department, exhibiting passion for aeronautics, as the winds being unpro- all the appliances of teaching, and a good library, pitious, he fell into the sea near the Isle of May, and well arranged; the collections made by the commisafter a bath of many hours, was picked up by some sioners of patents, all sorts of models and machinery; fishermen, half-dead with cold and hunger. a trade collection; an Economical Museum; and the Sheepshanks collection of pictures, 234 in number. The effect of the whole is admirable, so good is the general arrangement. It will look yet richer when the articles lent to the Manchester Exhibition shall and on Monday and Thursday evenings, the museum be returned. On Monday, Tuesday, and Saturday, is open to the public; on the other three days of the week-students' days-there is a charge of sixpence for admission; and the catalogue costs only a penny. A comfortable kind of inauguration took place; Dr Lyon Playfair, president of the Chemical Society, gave his soirée in the museum, to the fellows of the Society, and a troop of savans besides, and for once, everybody had room enough.-May we not complete this paragraph on education by a specially noteworthy fact: eight bills have been brought into the House of Lords as a beginning in the long-talked-of and much-wanted work of codifying our laws. Should it please our legislators to pass them, the fifty volumes of statutes will be reduced to two or three. The Architectural Museum lately kept at Canon Row, Westminster, is also removed to South Kensington.-The Horticultural Society, after a lapse of two years, have again given one of their attractive flowershows at Chiswick.-Thirty-two thousand persons visited the Zoological Gardens during three days of Whitsuntide; more than ever before.-The visitors 1854, the number was 459,262. Visits to the readinglast year to the British Museum numbered 361,714; in room were less numerous than in former years.-The local committee of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at Montreal, have sent invitations to certain savans in this country to attend their meeting in August, accompanied by an offer of a free passage there and back. We hear that an eminent geologist and some of his friends have accepted the ONE of the chief scientific incidents of the past month was the 'Greenwich visitation,' as it is called-that is, the annual inspection of the Greenwich Observatory by the Board of Visitors, most of whom go down, a comfortable party, in the Admiralty barge, and dine together after their official business is over. The Astronomer Royal in his Report on what has been done since the visit in 1856, tells them that the work of the observatory is progressing satisfactorily that the new dome for a new class of equatorial observations will be completed this summer-that suspending the quicksilver trough of the reflex zenith tube by straps of vulcanised caoutchouc has been perfectly successful; the tremors are absolutely destroyed, and the star has been observed at all hours of the night and day.' And as regards the transmission of time by telegraph, he says: 'Five clocks are in sympathetic movement in the observatory-one at the Hospital Schools, and one in the North Kent Station at London Bridge. That for signals has received this slight alteration, that the pull of the Time-ball Detent now alters the connections of four triplets of springs. Of these, one controls the communications with the Electric Telegraph Company's office at Lothbury, by which hourly signals are sent on various railways; the time-balls at the Strand, Cornhill, and Liverpool are dropped; and the Post-office clock in Lombard Street is regulated. A second affects the communications with the South-eastern Railway station, by which hourly signals are sent on various lines in Kent, and the time-ball at Deal is dropped, and returns its signal to acquaint us with its successful drop. The third and fourth are reserved for the prospective wants of the royal dockyards; they communicate with the Admiralty wire of the British invitation. being made, whereby to discover and determine what A new magnetic survey of the British Islands is changes have taken place in the phenomena of terrestrial magnetism since the former survey by General Sabine in 1827. Mr Welsh, of the Kew Observatory, |