wet, and in one instance the fusee or cartridge was placed under the water. In this case the efficiency of the insulation was equally well demonstrated by the explosion of the gunpowder at the moment the necessary 66 contact" was produced; and by way of showing the perfect insulation of the wire, an experiment was tried which resulted in the

explosion of the fusee from the charge of electricity retained in the coils of wire,

Him who made it and us. When the admiring child touches that gem, the dew-drop on the rose-leaf, it knows not that the little hand is on that which has lightning in it enough to cause instant death. It is scarcely the lover's poetical dream that he may be killed by the lightning of an eye-done dead by the tear that only moves his pity, on his mistress's eye-lid. In that little drop is the power of death-and by what miracle (truly all nature is miraculous) is the execution staid-the power forbidden to act? Nay, even the pity that we speak of, love itself, strange in its suddenness as we see it, how know we what of electricity be in it, instantly conveying from person to person natural but unknown sympathy?

Let us not get out of our depths,but emerge from "the submarine," to land; and for this purpose, and to complete our argument of unexpected and collateral uses, we offer an extract from the Army and Navy Regis

ter:

"NEW MODE OF DISCHARGING GUNPOWDER.-On Monday, August 18, some interesting experiments were tried at the Gutta Percha Company's Works, Warf Road, City Road, for the purposes of demonstrating the means by which this extraordinary production may be applied to the operation of discharging gunpowder. A galvanic battery was connected with upwards of 50 miles of copper wire covered with gutta percha, to the thickness of an ordinary black lead pencil. The wire, which was formed into coils, and which has been prepared for the projected submarine telegraph, was attached to a barge moored in the canal alongside the manufactory, the coils being so fixed together (although the greater portion of them were under water) as to present an uninterrupted

communication with the battery to a distance limited at first to 57 miles, but

afterwards extended to 70. A"cartridge" formed with a small hollow roof of gutta percha, charged with gunpowder, and having an intercommunicating wire attached, was then brought into contact with the electric current. The result was, that a spark was produced, which, igniting the gunpowder, caused an immediate explosion similar to that which would arise from the discharge of a small cannon. The same process was carried out in various ways, with a view of testing the efficient manner in which the gutta percha had been rendered impervious to

three seconds after contact with the

battery had been broken. This feature in the experiment was especially interesting from the fact of its removing all difficulty and doubt as to whether the gutta percha would so far protect the to preserve the current of

wires as

electricity under the most disadvantageous circumstances. Another experiment was successfully tried by passing the electric current to its destination through the human body. Mr C. J. Wollaston, civil engineer, volunteered to form part of the circuit by holding the ends of 35 miles of the wire in each hand. The wire from the battery was brought to one end of the entire length of 70 miles, and instant explosion of the cartridge took place at the other end. The experiments were altogether perfectly successful, as showing beyond all question that the properties of gutta percha and electricity combined are yet to be devoted to other purposes than that of establishing a subthe destruction of a fortification, and marine telegraph. The blasting of a rock, other operations which require the agency of gunpowder, have often been attended sides involving large outlays of money; but with considerable danger and trouble, beit may be truly said that the employment of electricity in the manner described is calculated to render such operations comparatively free from difficulty. Amongst the company present on this occasion was Major-General Sir Charles Pasley, who took a warm interest in the progratified at the result. It is impossible ceedings, and expressed himself much

to foretell the value of this discovery, operations. It forms a valuable addition particularly in engineering and mining to the benefits already conferred upon the public by the enterprise of the Gutta Percha Company."

This extract may lead the reader to conclude that there are double and opposite purposes in the secrets of nature. The chain which was intended to connect all nations in a bond of peace, has, it should seem, also (incidental to the first discovery) its apparatus for war.

When his Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury was blessing the Crystal Palace, and all within it, as emblems of a religious bond of peace, and of amity of all nations, and it pleased the admiring masses to proclaim it the Temple of Peace and of Love, there was little thought that, among the machinery and instruments it contained, those of murderous purpose would be the first required for use, which was actually the case, when permission was asked and given for the removal of revolving firearms from the American department, to be sent out to the Cape.

Thus, good and evil are not unmixed. Either may be extracted, and leave the remainder, in appearance to us, a kind of caput mortuum.

It is far more pleasant to look to the peaceful results of inventionsto hear the spirit that is in the electric fluid say—

"I will be correspondent to command, And do my spiriting gently." Let it be the means that far-off friends at the Antipodes shall communicate, if not by voice, by that which is like it-by sound and by lettered words. Let it touch a bell at their mid-day, and it may tingle at that instant in your ears at midnight, and awake you to receive, evolved from the little machinery at your bed's head, a letter in a printed strip, conveying "thoughts that breathe, and words that burn," even as though you felt the breath that uttered them. Reader, be not sceptical. How many very practicable things have you denied, and yet found brought tangibly before your eyes, and into your hands! This simultaneous tingle of two bells-one at the Antipodes, and one within reach of your own touch, and at your own ear-may cause you to curl your lip in derision; but say, is it impossible? We have heard you say of much more improbable things, "Where there is a will there is a way." Well, here it is evident you have only a little to strengthen your will, and the length of the way will be no obstacle. You may amuse yourself with the idea, and make a comparison of it, and look at the figures on your

China plate, and imagine them moved to each other under spell of their passion, (see the tale of the willow pattern,) to the defiance of all the ordinary rules of distance. Did not the foreseeing artist intimate thereby that love and friendship have no space-limits, and hold within themselves

a power that laughs at perspective, as it does "at locksmiths?" The artist whom you contemned as ignorant was, you acknowledge, wise-wise beyond his art, if not beyond his thought. He had a second-sight of a new mode of communication, and expressed it prudently in this his hieroglyphic.

Does any marvel exceed this in apparent absurdity that you, in London or Edinburgh, shall be able to communicate instantaneously with your friend or relative at St Petersburg or Vienna; for which purpose you have but to touch a few keys denoting letters of the alphabet, and under water and over land your whole thoughts pass as soon as your fingers have delivered them to the keys-nay, the letters are forestalling your thought, and those before it? Does it not seem very absurd to say that all the foreign news may be at your breakfast-table, fresh from every capital in Europe, before the Times can be published and circulated? How will the practice of the press be affected by this novelty? "The latest intelligence " becomes a bygone tale, "flat, stale, and unprofitable." Far greater things than the poet dreamed of become daily realities. Richest in fancy, Shakspeare apologetically covers the incredible ubiquity of his Ariel with a sense of fatigue-of difficulty in his various passages · Ariel, the spirit who

"thought it much to tread The ooze of the salt deep." Our Government officers will have ready on the instant, messengers far swifter than Ariel-wondrous performers on the "slack-wires." They will put you

"A girdle round about the earth
In forty minutes."

No; that was the lagging, loitering pace of the old spirit. It will not

take forty seconds. What are thousands of miles to a second of time? Time is, as it were, annihilated: the sand in the glass must be accelerated, or the glass, held for ages, taken out of his hand, and some national exhibition ransacked for a new hour instrument. The Prospero's wand broken, and newer wonders to be had for a trifle. Fortunatus's" wishing-cap" to be bought at the corner-shop, and the famed "seven-league boots" next door-and to be had cheap, considering that you may tell all your thoughts, at ever so great a distance, by a little bell and a wire, while you are sitting in your armchair. It will be quite an easy

matter to

"Waft a sigh from Indus to the Pole." Railroads and the Submarine Telegraph more than double man's life, if we count his years by action. History itself must now begin as from a new epoch. All the doings of the world, through this rapidity given to person and to thought, must be so altered as to bear no parallel with the past. The old locomotive and communicating powers are defunct-they are as the water that has passed the mill. It must grind with that which succeeds. They are new powers that must set the wheels of governments and of all the world's machinery in motion.

There is in the Spectator a paper of the true Addisonian wit, descriptive of an Antediluvian courtship, in which the young couple, having gone through the usual process in the early art of love, complete their happiness in the some hundredth year of their ages. Theorists have entertained the notion that this long life was bestowed upon man in the world's first era, that knowledge might be more readily transmitted, there being few generations to the Flood. To the lovers of life it would be a sad thing to be led to the conclusion, that, transmission being quickened, life will be shortened; or that, as in the winding-up of a drama, events are crowding into the last act of our earth's duration. It may relieve their apprehensions to read of the advance the medical

science is making simultaneously with all other sciences, so that they may look to a state in which a man may live as long as he likes, and at the same time do ten times the work: a man's day will perhaps be a year, counting by his doings. Morose poets and philosophers have lamented over us as ephemeral; if so, we are at least like the Antediluvian butterflies, and our day long. And now, with all our sanitary inventions, it stands a fair chance of a tolerable lengthening.

We have observed that it has been said that the world is not fifteen years of age; and, indeed, it looks like enough. Hitherto Nature has treated us as a kind mother does her children-given us toys and playthings, to be broken and discarded as we get older. We are throwing them by, we are becoming of age, and Nature opens her secrets to us, and we are just setting up for ourselves as it were, commencing the business of life, like grown men in good earnest; and every day we find out more secrets, and all worth knowing.

We will not lay down the pen without expressing our congratulations to the inventors of the Submarine Telegraph, the Messrs Brett, and wishing them the fullest success. They themselves as yet know not the extent of the reach of their own invention, or they might well wonder at their own wonders, like

"Katerfelto, with his hair on end! " We wish them long life to see the results-and that they will not, through mistrust of so great a discovery, imitate Copernicus, who, says Fontenelle, "distrusting the success of his opinions, was for a long time loth to publish them, and, when they brought him the first sheet of his work, died, foreseeing that he never should be able to reconcile all its contradictions, and therefore wisely slipped out of the way." Messrs Brett will think it wiser to live, and be in the way and at their post, (no post obit,) ready to answer all queries and contradictions, through the convincing, the very satisfactory means, of their "Submarine Telegraph."

THERE is at present so vehement a flourish of trumpets, and so prodigious a roll of the drum, whenever we are called upon to throw up our hats, and cry, "Huzza" to the March of Enlightenment,” that, out of that very spirit of contradiction natural to all rational animals, one is tempted to stop one's ears, and say, "Gently, gently; LIGHT is noiseless; how comes Enlightenment' to make such a clatter? Meanwhile, if it be not impertinent, pray, where is Enlightenment marching to?" Ask that question of any six of the loudest bawlers in the procession, and I'll wager tenpence to California that you get six very unsatisfactory answers. One respectable gentleman, who, to our great astonishment, insists upon calling himself "a slave," but has a remarkably free way of expressing his opinions, will reply-" Enlightenment is marching towards the nine points of the Charter." Another, with his hair à la jeune France, who has taken a fancy to his friend's wife, and is rather embarrassed with his own, asserts that Enlightenment is proceeding towards the Rights of Women, the reign of Social Love, and the annihilation of Tyrannical Prejudice. A third, who has the air of a man well to do in the middle class, more modest in his hopes, because he neither wishes to have his head broken by his errand-boy, nor his wife carried off to an Agapemoné by his apprentice, does not take Enlightenment a step farther than a siege on Debrett, and a cannonade on the Budget. Illiberal man! the march that he swells will soon trample him under foot. No one fares so ill in a crowd as the man who is wedged in the middle. A fourth, looking wild and dreamy, as if he had come out of the cave of Trophonius, and who is a mesmeriser and a mystic, thinks Enlightenment is in full career towards the good old days of alchemists and ne

cromancers. A fifth, whom one might take for a Quaker, asserts that the march of Enlightenment is a crusade for universal philanthropy, vegetable diet, and the perpetuation of peace, by means of speeches, which certainly do produce a very contrary effect from the Philippics of Demosthenes! The sixth-(good fellow, without a rag on his back)-does not care a straw where the march goes. He can't be worse off than he is; and it is quite immaterial to him whether he goes to the dogstar above, or the bottomless pit below. I say nothing, however, against the march, while we take it altogether. Whatever happens, one is in good company; and though I am somewhat indolent by nature, and would rather stay at home with Locke and Burke, (dull dogs though they were,) than have my thoughts set off helter-skelter with those cursed trumpets and drums, blown and duba-dubbed by fellows that I vow to heaven I would not trust with a fivepound note-still, if I must march, I must; and so deuce take the hindmost. But when it comes to individual marchers upon their own account

privateers and condottieri of Enlightenment-who have filled their pockets with lucifer-matches, and have a sublime contempt for their neighbours' barns and hay-ricks, I don't see why I should throw myself into the seventh heaven of admiration and ecstasy.

If those who are eternally rhapsodising on the celestial blessings that are to follow Enlightenment, Universal Knowledge, and so forth, would just take their eyes out of their pockets, and look about them, I would respectfully inquire if they have never met any very knowing and enlightened gentleman, whose acquaintance is by no means desirable. If not, they are monstrous lucky. Every man must judge by his own experience; and the

worst rogues I have ever encountered were amazingly well-informed, clever fellows! From dunderheads and dunces we can protect ourselves; but from your sharp-witted gentleman, all enlightenment, and no prejudice, we have but to cry, "Heaven defend us!" It is true, that the rogue (let him be ever so enlightened) usually comes to no good himself, (though not before he has done harm enough to his neighbours.) But that only shows that the world wants something else in those it rewards, besides intelligence per se and in the abstract; and is much too old a world to allow any Jack Horner to pick out its plumbs for his own personal gratification. Hence a man of very moderate intelligence, who believes in God, suffers his heart to beat with human sympathies, and keeps his eyes off your strong-box, will perhaps gain a vast deal more power than knowledge ever gives to a rogue.

Wherefore, though I anticipate an outcry against me on the part of the blockheads, who, strange to say, are the most credulous idolaters of enlightenment, and, if knowledge were power, would rot on a dunghill; yet, nevertheless, I think all really enlightened men will agree with me, that when one falls in with detached sharpshooters from the general march of enlightenment, it is no reason that we should make ourselves a target, because enlightenment has furnished them with a gun. It has, doubtless, been already remarked by the judicious reader, that of the numerous characters introduced into this work, the larger portion belong to that species which we call the INTELLECTUAL -that through them are analysed and developed human intellect, in various forms and directions. So that this History, rightly considered, is a kind of humble familiar Epic, or, if you prefer it, a long Serio-Comedy, upon the Varieties of English Life in this our Century, set in movement by the intelligences most prevalent. And where more ordinary and less refined types of the species round and complete the survey of our passing generation, they will often suggest, by contrast, the deficiencies which mere intellectual culture leaves in the human being. Certainly, I have no spite against intellect and en

lightenment. Heaven forbid I should be such a Goth. I am only the advocate for common sense and fair play. I don't think an able man necessarily an angel; but I think if his heart match his head, and both proceed in the Great March under a divine Oriflamme, he goes as near to the angel as humanity will permit: if not, if he has but a penn'orth of heart to a pound of brains, I say, " Bon jour, mon ange! I see not the starry upward wings, but the grovelling cloven-hoof." I'd rather be offuscated by the Squire of Hazeldean, than enlightened by Randal Leslie. Every man to his taste. But intellect itself (not in the philosophical, but the ordinary sense of the term) is rarely, if ever, one completed harmonious agency; it is not one faculty, but a compound of many, some of which are often at war with each other, and mar the concord of the whole. Few of us but have some predominant faculty, in itself a strength; but which, (usurping unseasonably dominion over the rest,) shares the lot of all tyranny, however brilliant, and leaves the empire weak against disaffection within, and invasion from without. Hence intellect may be perverted in a man of evil disposition, and sometimes merely wasted in a man of excellent impulses, for want of the necessary discipline, or of a strong ruling motive. I doubt if there be one person in the world, who has obtained a high reputation for talent, who has not met somebody much cleverer than himself, which said somebody has never obtained any reputation at all! Men, like Audley Egerton, are constantly seen in the great positions of life; while men, like Harley l'Estrange, who could have beaten them hollow in anything equally striven for by both, float away down the stream, and, unless some sudden stimulant arouse the dreamy energies, vanish out of sight into silent graves. If Hamlet and Polonius were living now, Polonius would have a much better chance of being Chancellor of the Exchequer, though Hamlet would unquestionably be a much more intellectual character. What would become of Hamlet? Heaven knows! Dr Arnold said, from his experience of a school, that the difference between one man and another was not mere