who had an extensive flint weapon factory in Yorkshire some dozen years ago, and who so successfully gulled the students that some of his specimens got engraved as genuine in archæological publications? Or did he make his fortune and retire? But these two items are bagatelles compared with the artificial specimen trade that is done without the world's knowledge. Lately there was an advertisement in a London paper to the effect that stone and bronze implements from Denmark, Sweden, the South Sea Islands, America, and elsewhere, were always on hand in a certain warehouse. Was the warehouse the manufactory? English ingenuity is often invoked to aid dishonesty in far-off lands. The traveller in Egypt sees a sepulchral figure in glazed porcelain dug from the ground, and eagerly buys it, only to find when he gets home that it was made in England and sent out to be buried, that he, or someone else, and it might be sold together. This is a favourite trick with Belgian guides on Waterloo. The plough tears up a sword hilt that is competed for by the visitors, and bought dearly because of its obvious genuineness. Bless the innocent buyer's heart, it was made at Nismes a month before. Did you ever know earthworks to go on in London without a find of weapons, or pottery, or coins, or something kindred? The next time you see such works in progress ask an excavator if he has got any curiosities: ten to one he will show some: if not, he will tell you some will surely turn up by to-morrow. Go the next day, and if the articles produced do not exactly accord with your knowledge of England's ancient history, be not surprised. The lake-dwellings of Switzerland, the gravel beds of Suffolk, Amiens, and Abbeville have been Tom Tiddler's grounds in their time, and will be again.

MAN is a marvel, physically no less than mentally. Put the vital principle out of sight, and look upon him only as a piece of mechanism, and what a beautiful combination of powers and appliances his little frame exhibits. Every part of a well-devised engine has its counterpart in the human body; and now that mechanical subjects come to be analysed mathematically, all the forces of a man's body submit to exact calculation. Lately an American physician has been computing the "horse-power" of human hearts-the pumping engines, for such they are, that we all carry in our bosoms. There is nothing in the figuring that a mere tyro in arithmetic cannot master, though the data to work upon are not accessible to ordinary folk. Blood has very nearly the same specific gravity as water: its pressure at the mouth of the aorta, as measured by gauges, is about equal to a column of water six feet high. The average discharge at each pulsation may be estimated at an ounce and a half, and the number of pulsations at seventy-five per minute, making an aggregate of seven pounds discharged per minute. As the engineer would say, then, seven pounds of water are raised six feet high each minute, or what is the same thing, forty-two pounds are raised one foot high in the same time. The power of your heart, then, is forty-two foot-pounds per minute. A horse-power is thirty-three thousand foot-pounds per minute: therefore

your heart does something more than one eight-hundredth part of the work of a horse. This may not seem much, but reckon what it amounts to in a lifetime: calculate what the united heart-pumpings of a city represents. London hearts altogether do the work of some four thousand horses. According to the best estimates of the population of the whole world, the heart-work done over the globe comes out equal to the engine-work that would be required to propel a fleet of over one hundred Great Easterns. An engineer would tell you that to generate steam for this, you would have to burn four thousand six hundred tons of coal per hour. This refers to men alone: could we include animals, we should get a prodigious idea of the energy of the world's heart-beatings.

ONE day a shoe-black, unnoticed and unknown; the next, an artist, admired and sought for. Such was the lot of one Charles Knubel, orphan son of a German musician settled in New York-a waif on the human sea, an outcast in the world; with a genius for music, that had been fostered by the parent, and developed into a talent. But talent without patronage is seed without soil. This boy at fourteen years old was thrown upon the world, without a solitary chance to hang an effort on. To live honestly he took to boot-blacking, and his brush led him to fame by a lucky accident. A few weeks since there was a sort of Industrial Exhibition in New York-the Fair of the American Institute it was called; and Knubel stationed himself near one of its entrances to catch muddyfooted customers. There came a patron, an urbane man, who turned out to be the Secretary of the Exhibition Managing Board. After his pedals had been operated upon, he asked the boy if he would like to see the show, and told him that if he would present himself next day with a clean face he should be admitted. On the morrow, with shining countenance, the lad called at the secretary's office and duly received the promised pass. By-and-by the official, strolling through the musical department, found a crowd of people listening to a masterly performance on the pianoforte. He elbowed his way to the instrument, there to find the claviers twittering beneath the hands that had polished his boots the day before. Fortune followed up the good work she had begun. The makers upon whose instrument the boy had done such good execution took him into their service. He was clad in new attire; and every day during the rest of the Exhibition period he was to be heard performing upon the piano and electric organ. If ever Knubel becomes a famous name, this little story may be recollected.

CURING should be as important as killing in the arts of war: extracting your enemy's bullets from your own flesh is the next duty after putting your bullets into his flesh. Now, bullet probing is a tiresome and painful operation; one that ought to be reduced to the perfection of simple certainty. So humane philosophers have thought; and they have done

their best to give their thinkings tangibility. But we are bounded by our means; and while there were none known whereby a lump of buried lead could be told from a fragment of shattered bone, probing was slow work. However, the next time-far be it-that wholesale bullet extraction has to be performed, it is to be expected that the army surgeons' labours will be lightened by the help that electricity will afford; for two inventors have independently proposed methods of searching for and drawing out metallic missiles from the wounds they have inflicted. Both men told their ideas to the French Institute at one and the same meeting during the past month. M. Trouvé was one; he who made the electrical jewels that delighted fashionable Paris for a few months two years ago. His new bullet probe is a double-pointed needle, each point being connected by a wire with a little electric battery and a bell, which rings whenever the two needle points are united electrically; that is to say, whenever they both touch a piece of metal. With this divining rod, bullet searching is a simple business. The suspected part of the body is probed with it, and the instant the points touch lead the bell announces the fact. The bullet found, the worst half of the extractor's task is over. This plan was suggested by an Englishman, I fancy, some two years ago, but not put to trial till M. Trouvé made an instrument. The other proposal is of more limited application. M. Melsens is its author, and he promises to draw fragments of iron or steel from a flesh wound by the help of powerful magnets. He can do nothing with lead, though, because it does not follow the loadstone. Trouvé's is the best idea. There is quaintness in the notion of a bullet telegraphing its whereabouts.

POETS have written pretty things about the needle that directs the mariner in safety o'er the trackless sea, and so forth. But between poetry and reality there are wide differences. The fact is, that nowadays many a ship goes to sea with a compass to steer by that is worse than useless if it be trustworthy one day, it may be a false guide the next. As everybody knows, a large proportion of our mercantile fleet consists of iron vessels, and a compass in an iron ship is subject to ever-changing deviations, complicated and unpredictable. No longer, as in the case of a wooden ship, directed by the earth's magnetic force alone, the needle becomes subjected to directive influences from earth and ship at the same time. The consequences are errors in the instrument, which change with the direction of the ship's head, alter with her geographical position, and are affected as she heels before the wind. There are methods of correction which have been mastered by scientific men at great pains to themselves. But these require outlay for additional compasses, and for adjustments; while, for maintaining efficiency under varying circumstances, knowledge of the principles of magnetism is essential to those who have charge of iron ships. The second matter has the highest importance. Seeing that lives in vast numbers and property of immense value are at the mercy of the little needle, is it not paramount that shipmasters should

be held unfit for their work unless they can watch for causes of error in the needle's indications, and apply the remedies? What say you, then, to the fact that "the authorities" have persistently turned deaf ears to the urgent and repeated appeals from various quarters for a system of training and examination for masters and mates in the principles and practice of compass correction? The Board of Trade argues that the Government cannot take upon themselves responsibilities which belong to shipowners and insurers, and urges that the proper supply and adjustment of compasses is a matter so material to the safety and success of maritime undertakings, that motives of self-interest are likely to effect much more than legislative interference. But they who are behind the scenes, and familiar with the consequences of the cupidity of owners and the rashness of competing insurers, will tell a different tale. The Board of Trade once consulted Lloyds', and the committee replied that it appeared that the subject was encompassed with difficulties, and that it was not in their power to take any active steps in the matter! England has taught the whole world the science of iron-ship compass correction, and in her teaching she has a theme for proud expressions. How long before she insists upon the practice of her preaching?

BERLIN, the "city of the plain," is offered a luxury in the way of housewarming that may be proffered to other cities if the Prussian capital accepts it. The term house-warming is to be taken in its literal sense, as meaning room-heating, not jollification. What gas has done for lighting the great towns of the civilised world, we all know what it can do towards heating them, is what the Berliners are about to try. There is nothing new in the idea of burning gas in stoves for cookery and warming; it is so employed in hundreds of instances. Yet, considering its cleanliness and convenience, one might expect it to be used almost universally. Cost, however, prevents. A thousand cubic feet of gas can not compete with its money's worth of coal in generating heat. But there is a reason why it cannot, in that at present gas is made solely for lighting, and its chemical constitution is so maintained that it shall give the maximum of illumination with the minimum of heat. The order of things may be reversed the light-giving element may be kept under, and the heatyielding component freely introduced. Obviously the result will be a gas useless in the gaselier but invaluable in the stove. Berlin has at a distance extensive mines of lignite-a form of coal-which gives vapour of this abnormal quality, and works are planned for generating daily some two and a half millions of cubic feet of it; a quantity which it is estimated would provide domestic fuel for about half the houses of Berlin. The company formed to carry out the works promise to supply the gas in the city at sixpence a thousand cubic feet; and it is asserted that nine thousand cubic feet (value 4s. 6d.) will possess as much heating power as a ton of pit coal. Can anything like this be done by English gas companies? Can they make us a heating gas that will compete with coal? It is not

likely that they can get more heat from a ton of black diamonds than burning in the grate would yield. But in our grates we sacrifice eighty or ninety per cent. of the heat the coal emits to arrangements for getting rid of the smoke and ashes. Give us a stove that can be fixed in the centre of a room, to radiate its heat freely all around, without sending any up chimneys, or uselessly imparting it to hearths and grate surroundings, and we can do with a quarter the caloric we now generate. Such a stove must burn gas to be clean and convenient. If heating gas could be made and sold cheaply, a new system of economical house-warming might thus be inaugurated; only there would be a mountain of popular prejudice to

remove.

THE illustrated press has a notable accession of strength in The Illustrated Midland News and The Graphic. The former marks a new era in provincial journalism. It is the first illustrated newspaper printed and published in the country. Birmingham, the metropolis of the Midlands, is the head-quarters of the new publication. The Graphic is, in every respect, a London publication, with an ambition that is European. It professes open rivalry to the The Illustrated London News. On the first week of the new paper's publication, the London News published the largest, and perhaps the best illustrated paper of the century. At Christmas The Graphic made amends for its first issues, in a Christmas Number that outdistances its rivals. We are curious about the results of these two ventures. They are important to the nation as Art educators. We hope to see them flourish and prosper. The provincial paper already appears to have made its mark, commercially.