"At present it seems a maxim that no enterprise should be undertaken which incurs a chance of loss or a probability of failure: those "We held our course without alteration for principles may be well enough in commercial perhaps ten minutes. Mr. Lodge kindly kept eyes, but it is not thus that Cochrane, and Hamthe lead going, and I took care of the helmilton, and Willoughby, and Nelson, and Ex-. our high topsail, shining white as fairies' petti- mouth fought. coats in the sunset, was a capital mark; but they never succeeded in hitting us, or even throwing a shot decently near. As we approached Laghara, the last shot from Bakholm, thrown by a gun of enormous range, flew far over us, and this noisy display of puerile and unmanly rage came to an end.

Berg's despatch how narrowly they escaped a still and little to become the mouth of a clergymore destructive explosion than any which actually occurred; and it seems at all events probable that out of such a host of fiery projectiles some one ill-omened shell or rocket would have forced his way into the very vitals of their magazines.

Be this as it may, everything alive must have been driven under cover; and the fires, probably increased twofold, must have been permitted to revel ad libitum.

"As regards the other side of the question, the ships would have encountered the risk of being set on fire or sunk. But men of war were not built to be looked at, and steam-vessels are not like stone batteries, compelled through weal or woe to stand fast forever and abide the issue of the strife. A ship has in this respect immense advantages: if the fire is too hot for her she can shift her berth; if she sees a weak position she can assail it; if she sustain damage, she can retire out of action and allow a fresh ship to supply her place. Add to this, that the glare of the conflagration, while it afforded us a mark which we could not miss, must have rendered all distant objects black and invisible to the enemy. "To do all these things in the dark among the rocks, requires accurate knowledge of the ground, a judicious and simple arrangement of lights, and seamanship of a very high order. If the thing had been attempted without these essential elements, the whole enterprise would have failed; half, perhaps all, the ships would have gone ashore, and been knocked to pieces next morning. On the other hand, I venture to express my belief, that, with proper precautions and by good seamanship, a great exploit might have been performed, and imporant results would have followed."

We quoted last week a passage by Mr. Hughes in the Cambridge Essays, recommending increased severity in our application of naval force to distress the enemy's coasts and mercantile population. Such advice may to some appear sanguinary and unchristian,

THE ADVENTURES OF THE CALIPH HAROUN AL-
RASCHID. Recounted by the Author of "Mary

Powell."'

man. But the real question is, whether such means would terminate the war more quickly; in which case, the humanitarian method may really turn out the more sanguinary and cruel of the two. We are fighting with a power which will not yield till she is forced; whatever tends to force her is justifiable on grounds of mercy as well as policy, provided the means taken are not such as to debase and degrade the men employed to execute them. Where any doubt on this point remains, certainly the means should not be employed; and it must be admitted that the morals of war are not as clearly settled as they might be.

The volume concludes with some pleasantly written sketches of Stockholm, where the "Wee Pet" is laid up for her next summer's cruise. We hope Mr. Hughes may then see something that will repay him for his enterprise and pluck. prise and pluck. Meanwhile, on the result of the policy or stupidity that controls our naval proceedings, this is the record of Mr. Hughes' observations in the countries he

visited.

"Much also did we wonder what we should

find going on in England; would our countrymen
be aware that, even among our friends and kins-
men on the Continent, the decline of England's
and Government, is the topic of the day?
power, the inefficiency of England's Army, Navy,

"Would it have occurred to men's minds, that the paltry figure we have cut in the war is causing Swede and Dane and German to distrust the wooden walls, and to look to other quarters for a counterpoise to the great military power of Western Europe that the name and fame of England, which cost so much to win, is oozing away from our ships, like Bob Acres's courage from the tips of his fingers?''

consequently happens: the adventures which the reader knows already have no novelty; in those which are added he is startled or disappointed. Another cause of failure is the absence THERE is a falling-off in the interest of the Ca- of the Oriental mind and manner. The addition liph Haroun Alraschid, compared with this of historical matter to the adventures proper, so writer's previous tales; and the causes are va as to produce a kind of "life and times," has rious. Formerly, when sometimes dealing with necessitated rewriting the received adventures. known names, the heroes or heroines of the But uniformity of style is attained at the expense author of "Mary Powell" (except in the case of nature. The imitation is palpable, the Euroof Palissy the Potter) were persons of whom pean mind being continually visible. The young few or no particulars have been preserved; so Haroun and his boy friend Giafar, when introthat, while the reader felt an interest in the duced to each other by the Caliph, "promptly subject, there were no associations to be dis- embraced; and having eyed one another, they turbed by the necessary changes or interpola-clave unto one another from that time forth for tions of fiction. The Caliph Haroun Alraschid evermore": and afterwards we find them "tois the hero of Eastern romance, and as conspic-gether pouring out all their young thoughts." uous in history as Saladin himself, if the events This is not only English, but with a touch of the of his reign are more obscure. One of two things cant of sentiment. — Spectator.

From Fraser's Magazine.
NEW METALS.

metal on the other hand; it has nothing of the earthy in it. Resonant, and bright, and flexible, and strong; whence come these newIt is not wonderful that the labors of the ly gotten powers? They do not reside in miner and of the metallurgist have at all the ore, but seem impressed upon its transtimes been linked with superstitious associa- figured substance by the will of the operator: tions in the minds of men. The one pursu-now as "soft-iron," pure and malleable, ing his search in the depths of the earth, in tough, infusible, bending without fracture, darkness and uncertainty, only ministers to fibrous, and capable of being welded bit to the demands of the other for a perpetual sup- bit, like sealing wax, at a sufficient temperaply of those strange stony masses out of ture: now as " cast-iron," less pure in its which the living metal is drawn; and before chemical nature from containing carbon (the chemistry had explained every change which chemist's charcoal) as a constituent, brittle, the ore underwent, from its first appearance sharp in its outline, crystalline in its strucon the dressing-floor to its fabrication in the ture, readily melted and cast in moulds, hand of the artisan, where, in all the range breaking but never bending, - how opposite of art, were transformations to be found so are its characters, yet we may see it again, complete, mysterious, and astonishing as in the form of steel, assuming nearly all these these? Let any one stand before a blast- characters, or surrendering any one of them furnace, let him wonder at the amount of once more at a moment's notice. For now mingled ore and limestone and coal that are it shall exhibit in the most exalted degree, poured into it by the wagon-load in a con- brittleness or toughness, a brittleness unstant stream sixty feet above his head, and bending or an elasticity unrivalled, a hardlet him watch the perpetual overflow of slag, ness adamantine or a softness which yields a veritable lava, which slowly emerges from like brass to the engraver, according as the the bottom of the furnace at his side, and cunning workman shall impose the one or let him await the moment when the rough the other" temper on its docile substance. moulds are ready, and the channel cleared, And so iron becomes the ready servant that and the arm of the foreman is bared to give is to work out the vast demands of comthe final blow that is to pierce the wall of merce: it is now the mainspring of our timeclay that supports the molten metal within; pieces, and the exquisitely delicate regulator then let him stand by as the luminous of their every vibration; it is no less the flood of iron pours down, true to the channel sinew and the bone of the iron horse, and the cut for it, yet as it were resenting the re-rein that guides him; the skeleton of the straint, and momentarily flinging from its surface a myriad stars of fire, until it flows tranquilly into each trough impressed in the sand for its reception, and lies in a series of furrows to cool into its well-known form of "pig "iron. And this process has been re-cess. A furnace is constructed to throw all peated each day without one day's intermis- its heat by reverberation on a mass of lead, sion, for it may be thirty years, from that and as the metal melts, a current of air is one furnace; and the flames have risen for made to play on its surface. Soon that surthat period from its mouth, rendering the face becomes covered with a molten floating midnight air of some wild mountain land of liquid, which flows off from it continually, Wales lurid for many a mile, or may have and will flow so long as any lead remains. helped to show to the nightly traveller the The last portions of the lead however are horrors of that" black country" above Bir-preserved for the silver they contain; the mingham, from which every earnest visitor rest has all disappeared. This floating dross will come away with such dark foreboding into which the air has converted the lead, and such troubled thoughts on the great so- hardens as it cools, and forms then a beaucial problems which it must suggest. How tiful yellow-orange, unmetallic, highly-crys wonderful a process is this by which the con- talline, soft, solid substance-litharge. It stant stream of iron into the commerce of is the "oxide of lead." It is the air that the world is maintained in its perpetual flow! here, reversing the dictum of Anaximenes, Compare the lump of heavy clay, or the is the destroyer. Its oxygen has combined mass of red or brown dull earthy rock, or of with the melted metal. It needs not to melt bright iron-gray stone which form the vari-iron to produce an analogous effect. If the ous varieties of iron ore, with the metal that emerges from them; pound, sift, do what you will, with the ore, scrutinize it with the microscope, it is still a stone, no particle of metal can you find there. Examine the

bridge with its untiring span, and of the ship whose keel can never strain; at once the impeller and the impelled of the automaton machinery by which commerce moves.

Let us consider another metallurgic pro

bar of refined iron be but left in neglect to the rude influences of the weather, to air and moisture, it will soon be seen that the metal, with all its stern qualities, is, like man himself, dependent on certain conditions and

the

circumstances, which must be ever supplied | sions, aspirations, rebuffs, successes, on to and preserved around it, or the bright shall its final triumph-to these, that will ever be tarnish, the strong fret away into weakness, an interesting history which tells of the and the lustrous and the elastic, the stern progress of the first grand idea of chemical to labor and the patient to endure, shall philosophy, the idea of the individuality, so suffer corrosion, and become a dull insipid to say, of the elements; of the elemental earth, a mere heap of rust. Yet from this character of the metals; of the non-elemenearth, this oxide of iron, no less than from tal, the compound character, of the comthe dross of lead, the metal may be again binations of these with the vital element, recovered. The earth or calx is in either in- oxygen, of the air. To them the erroneous stance formed by a union of the metal with dream of Stahl, "the phlogistic theory,' the oxygen of the air, and any substance will carry with it an unceasing interest, with a stronger tendency to combine with albeit that the balance of Lavoisier banished that oxygen will free the metal of it, and the that theory from the laboratory, and showed iron or the lead may be restored to their its fundamental error by proving that the metallic form of existence. Carbon, that is calx, or earth, weighed more than the metal coal or charcoal, effects this, and the opera- which it yielded-weighed more by a precise tion is similar in result whether it be per- amount, which was the exact weight of formed in the blast-furnace whose weekly oxygen gas that the metal had taken from product is above a hundred tons of iron, or the air and fixed in solid combination with in the reverberatory furnace wherein lead is itself to form this earthy oxide. He taught reduced to the form in which we use it. that the metal might be won from this its earthy calx or oxide, but only by some stronger affinity than the metal's own for the oxygen the earth contained. Carbon has this stronger affinity, and hence the flow of molten iron from the vast furnace in which its oxide meets in fiery contest with the coal that feeds its flames, meets it only to surrender to that coal its oxygen, and to set the iron free to enter on its life of constant labor and trial in the service of man.

It was this singular conversion of a metal into an earthy calx, and this inversion of the phenomenon by the reconversion of the earth into the metal, that incited the alchemist to perpetual experiments, from the days of Geber to those of Beccher. Was there in fact anything contradictory or absurd in the belief that the crucibles of Albert the Great, of Raymond Lulle, or of Arnold, had yielded gold when gold had been absent as an ingredient from the conditions of the This doctrine, then, of the compound experiment? Did not a mere calx, when nature of the metal-yielding earths or oxides, mixed with charcoal, yield lead? Did not and of the elemental character of the metals the very metal of silver, Luna herself, and of the oxygen they contained, was the emerge from ores in which no silver could be grand doctrine of Lavoisier, and resolved the seen? nay, did not even the Saturnine ores difficulty of which the alchemists, and at last -did not the stones which yielded lead, after them the phlogistic chemists, had sought yield, too, their small quota of this queenly in vain for the solution through so many silver? If Luna could thus emerge from the centuries. But chemistry knew of other region of Saturn-if the ores of copper earths besides these that yielded metals when when mingled with calamine produced not copper, the Venus of the metal-firmament, but brass,-if bronze sprang from the conjunction of Venus and Jupiter, and the copper and the tin lost each their characters in the bronze they formed, why should not the addition of some subtle redder mercury give to tin the properties of gold, or teach the alchemist to transmute the dross of Saturn or the charms of Venus into the glories of Sol, the golden metal-king?

heated with charcoal-earths to all intents like these, notwithstanding that they had resisted all efforts to extract metals from them.

Of these other earths there were several besides magnesia, lime, and the earth of clay alumina; and nearly akin to them, though more easily dissolved in water, and therefore lacking one of the prominent characteristics of an earth, comparative insolubility, were the alkalies, potash and soda. It needed But the alchemist passed from the earth, therefore after Lavoisier's time no great proleaving to an age of less inflated hopes and fundity in the chemist who should assert of a sounder philosophy-an age that had that it was a fair object of search, and that learned something by the failures of the past there was a fair ground for hope that some -this metallurgic problem for its heritage. means should be found, some more potent To those who have loved to linger over the affinity than even that of carbon should be gradual dawnings of human knowledge in discovered, by the agency of which these past time, who have felt a delight in tracing earths too should yield up bright metals the growth of some single idea in the mind under the torturing inquisition of crucible of man through all its doubts, misapprehen- and furnace. Lavoisier himself had proDCVIII. LIVING AGE. VOL. XII. 10

claimed this before, and almost in Lavoisier's |

"With rod reversed,

time it was imagined by some sanguine And backward mutterings of dissevering power," experimentalists in Hungary that the antici- the master of this new necromancy freed pation had been realized. But that realiza- from several of these earths beautiful mettion was not yet ripe for accomplishment, als, till then truly and time had to bring in other ideas and other men to contribute to the development "In stony fetters fixed and motionless." of it. Galvani and Volta (the greatest name But some of the earths refused the solicitaperhaps in the history of physics) had intro- tions of even Davy's voltaic magic. Among duced a new force to the experimentalist. these was one of a very remarkable kind, By its agency the compound nature of water named by the chemists alumina, from its already proved by the illustrious men occurrence as one of the ingredients in alum. whose names now figure in the "water con- In the sapphire and ruby this extraordinary troversy "-received a new significance in body yields only to the diamond in hardness, the decomposition which the voltaic pile while it far surpasses it as a gem in the effected in it, under the hands of Nicholson beauty if not in the variety of its colorand Carlisle, in the year 1800. They found suite. As the lux-sapphire it rivals the diathe oxygen given off at the positive, the mond itself in colorless purity and exquishydrogen at the negative, pole; the water ite lustre. As the ruby, it demands a being gradually separated by the voltaic higher price than it, when above a few carats agency into its component elements, oxygen in weight; as the sapphire, there is no stone and hydrogen. Davy, who soon afterwards with which it can be confounded, when of appeared on the scene, saw at a glance the the true azure blue; while as Oriental-topaz, vast results to be developed by this divellent Oriental-emerald,-aquamarine,-peridot,-ame action of the battery upon chemical com- thyst, it surpasses in beauty of color and pounds. There is no one who cannot feel a lustre, and far surpasses in value, the several sympathizing pleasure as he imagines the gems from which it thus condescends to boryoung Davy with the wires of his enormous row its names. In all of these the alumina battery brought into contact through the is pure, and crystallized in perfect transpamedium of the alkali potash, until that rency, the colors being due to minutest moment undecomposed, and sees him watch- traces of other metallic oxides, such as iron, ing a beautiful phenomenon. Little globules chrome, or manganese. Then again, in its of a brilliant metal continually are present- less brilliant forms, as corundum and as ing themselves at the negative wire, and emery powder, its uses are almost the same lingering for a moment to show him their as those of the indomitable diamond dust: true metallic character, then cease to shine, while in its softer moods, combined with and become again converted into the potash water, it helps to form the plastic element of out of which they sprung, too powerfully clay; and at one moment is seen assuming assailed by the oxidizing air, of which the shapes and wearing tints, as vase and bowl, corrosive action is too strong for a metal of that give it more than the value of sapphire such eager affinities to exist in its presence. or ruby; at another, ministering in every Davy soon contrived means of fostering his shape to satisfy the wants of man. new-born metal, and exhibiting it to the world under the name of potassium; and soda soon yielded its sodium to the pole of his gigantic voltaic pile. Both of them are metals which to be preserved must be retained out of contact with the air; metals, the latter white as silver and as lustrous, the former with something of the tint of tin or platinum; both lighter than water and therefore floating on it, but also instantaneously decomposing it to absorb its oxygen, and disappear in it themselves as potash or as soda.

To decompose magnesia, lime (calx), baryta, into oxygen and the metals "magnesium," "calcium," and "barium," respectively, was but a work of the few hours requisite to plan the experiment. And thus an antagonistic force had been found whereby to invert, as it were, the combining force of chemical affinity, so that now

From the nature of this earth it was difficult to bring it within the sphere of action of the battery. But Davy recognized in his new metal, potassium, a substance whose avidity for oxygen might be utilized for the decomposition of the refractory earth which he could not subdue by his voltaic wires. And so he heated alumina white hot, and passed his new metal in the form of a metallic gas over it, and obtained thereby small globules of a metal which had its source in the alumina employed. This new member of the metal family, aluminium, he did not, however, succeed in effectually isolating, and he could not therefore announce its properties. Later it was produced by Wobler by an analogous but better process, but then not in sufficient quantity, nor in advantageous form for investigating its physical characters. He obtained it as a powder, and in this finely divided form it is very difficult to ascertain