[19]In Belgium, where many of the pauper lunatics are located in religious houses and are attended upon by the frères and sœurs of these establishments, it is not uncommon to find the patients at certain times of the day totally deserted and left to their own devices—the attendants being engaged in their religious duties!
[20]It may be as well to state that the Poor-Law Commissioners also worked out the problem with very similar conclusions in 1851, and that the investigations made by the Swedish Government into the condition of the insane in Norway in 1835 further corroborate the statement that insanity prevails to a greater extent in rural than in urban districts.
[21]If the spectator, while leaning over the rail of the wharf and watching “Oyster Street,” as the costermongers call the line of oyster-boats moored side by side, has ever been at a loss to understand why it is that in the very height of the market, when the decks are crowded with purchasers, the sailors are seen hanging about the boats, or seated upon the bulwarks, taking their morning pipes, whilst the duty of measuring and carrying the oysters is being performed by the “Fellowships” belonging to the corporation of London, he will now know the reason. Steam will, however, surely abolish many of these city abuses, and rail-borne oysters will lend their powerful aid to rail-borne coal in abolishing regulations which are not in accordance with the emancipated spirit of the age.
[22]Since this was written, the new market in Copenhagen Fields has been opened, and a totally different state of things now obtained.
[23]This return contains some small proportion of game, the quantity of which is not stated.
[24]There is, we confess, some little discrepancy between this estimate of the country-killed meat at Newgate, and the known quantity brought in by railway, as most assuredly 161,200 oxen, 509,600 sheep, and 62,400 calves and pigs, far outweigh the 36,487 tons of meat brought by the different lines, even “sinking” the offal. But so assured is Mr. Giblett, and the Smithfield Commissioners with him, that he is under the mark, that we give credit to his estimate, and take it for granted that much country-killed meat must come to market by other conveyance than the railway.
[25]Since the above was written, these fine buildings have been taken possession of by Sir William Armstrong, where, under the veil of secrecy, his extraordinary ordnance is now constructed to the entire exclusion of the old style of cannon.
[26]The French manufacturer who executed the order addressed a letter to one of the Emperor’s chamberlains, from which we take the following extract:—“It is, I believe, the first time that England, who was hitherto regarded as able to supply the most unforeseen wants of her army, should find herself obliged to have recourse to French industry. I had it too much at heart to sustain the reputation of my country in the eyes of our rivals to leave anything undone towards the execution of an order which was intrusted to me, and I have had the satisfaction of receiving from the English Government the most flattering compliments. With a view to perpetuate the memory of that operation, which is almost an event in industry, I have ordered a medal to be engraved by M. Louis Merley, who gained the great prize at Rome, and who is one of the artists of whom France is proud. I desire earnestly to obtain the favour of presenting this medal to his Majesty the Emperor, as also the model of the rifles fabricated for England; and I pray your Excellency to be good enough to solicit for me an audience of his Majesty.” The audience was granted, and the medal and the model of the fire-arm presented in due form.
[27]The merchants are provided annually with a sample of Waltham Abbey powder to guide them in their manufacture.
[28]We may more truly liken the system to the warming apparatus of a hot-house. The hot waters of the Gulf, conducted across the Atlantic, are the forcing power which stimulates the vegetation of Cornwall, whence the London market is supplied with its early vegetables.
[29]The effect of this Act, which passed in 1839, was most marked. In the three years previous, the average annual loss of timber ships was 56½, and the loss of life 300. In the three years subsequent to its coming into operation the loss of ships fell to 23½, and the loss of life to 106.
[30]Whilst the civil workman is called in to do the work of the soldier at home, strangely enough we send out the soldier to do the work of the emigrant abroad. A force of Royal Engineers some time since left these shores for the purpose of discharging this office in British Columbia.
[31]Mr. Jeffreys informs us that he saw during the mutiny a recruiting sergeant’s placard in which there was an engraving of a British trooper cutting down a Sepoy and taking from him a bag of treasure.
[32]This idea of a sanitary officer for armies in the field originated with Mr. J. Ranald Martin, who has long advocated the measure in his correspondence with the medical journals, and with the East India Government. To this gentleman we also owe the suggestion of a health officer in civil life.
[33]Code of letter signals in the needle telegraph commonly used in England. Two needles are generally employed, in order to facilitate the transmission of signals:—
Letadenote a deflection of theleft-hand needle to the left,a´ to the right;ba deflection of theright-hand needle to the left,b´ to the right. Then here is the code:
Thus F is indicated by two successive deflections of the left-hand needle to the right; R by a simultaneous deflection of both needles to the left. Where both needles are required they may be and are deflected simultaneously; where one only is used its deflections must of necessity be successive. The sign + means “I do not understand;” the letter E “I do understand.”
[34]It may interest our readers to reproduce the first published notice we can find of Professor Wheatstone’s experiments relating to the electric telegraph, and which appeared anterior to his connection with Mr. Cooke:—“During the month of June last year (1836), in a course of lectures delivered at King’s College, London, Professor Wheatstone repeated his experiments on the velocity of electricity which were published in thePhilosophical Transactionsfor 1834, but with an insulated circuit of copper wire, the length of which was now increased to nearly four miles; the thickness of the wire was 1-16th of an inch. When machine electricity was employed, an electrometer placed on any point of the circuit diverged, and, wherever the continuity of the circuit was broken, bright sparks were visible. With a voltaic battery, or with a magneto-electric machine, water was decomposed, the needle of the galvanometer was deflected, &c., in the middle of the circuit. But, which has a more direct reference to the subject of our esteemed correspondent’s communication from Munich, Professor Wheatstone gave a sketch of the means by which he proposes to convert his apparatus into an electrical telegraph, which, by the aid of a few finger stops, will instantaneously, and distinctly, convey communications between the most distant points. These experiments are, we understand, still in progress, and the apparatus, as it is at present constructed, is capable of conveying thirty simple signals, which, combined in various manners, will be fully sufficient for the purposes of telegraphic communication.”—From theMagazine of Popular Science(Parker, Strand) for March 1, 1837.
[35]
[36]In justice to the Company, which is very properly jealous of the particulars of its messages transpiring, we beg to state that we acquired the above fact from a person totally disconnected with the Electric Telegraph Office.
[37]Mr. Reuter now performs this duty both for home and foreign news.
[38]The use of the metal or earth-plate will be understood from the following statement of Steinheil:—“Owing to the low conducting power of water or the ground, compared with metals, it is necessary that at the two places where the metal conductor is in connection with the soil, the former should present very large surfaces of contact. Assuming that water conducts two million times worse than copper, a surface of water proportional to this must be brought into contact with the water. If the section of a copper wire is 0·5 of a square line, it will require a copper plate of 61 square feet surface in order to conduct the galvanic current through the ground, as the wire in question would conduct it.”
[39]It may be as well to state that nearly all the continental telegraphs have formed themselves into a confederacy, called the Austro-Germanic Union, which includes the lines of Austria, Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria, Hanover, Würtemberg, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the Grand Duchy of Baden. The Union regulates the tariff and all questions relative to the working of the allied lines.
[40]See “Tariff of the Rates charged for general Dispatches on the Pittsburgh and Louisville Telegraph, Jones’s Electric Telegraph, New York,” p. 105.
[41]The West of England Fire-Office, which retains the command of its own engines.
[42]
[43]Repeated reference to this valuable work has more than confirmed the opinion we originally expressed of it. There are few books of greater utility than what is in fact a “History of London, Past and Present.”
[44]The roof of the pile of buildings composing Somerset-House is also continuous, thereby greatly increasing the risk of the entire building, if one portion of it were to catch.
[45]In Nottingham, where they have gypsum in the neighbourhood, as they have in Paris, they form their floors and partitions in the same solid manner, and the consequence is, that a building is rarely burned down in that town.
[46]The following are the stations of the fire-escapes:—
Western District.—1. Edgeware Road, near Cambridge Terrace; 2. Baker Street, corner of King Street; 3. Great Portland Street, by the chapel; 4. New Road, corner of Albany Street; 5. New Road, Euston Square, in front of St. Pancras Church; 6. Camden Town, in front of “The Southampton Arms;” 7. Battle-bridge, King’s Cross; 8. Guildford Street, Foundling Hospital; 9. Bedford Row, south end; 10. Hart Street, Bloomsbury, by St. George’s Church; 11. Tottenham Court Road, by the chapel; 12. Oxford Street, corner of Dean Street, Soho; 13. Oxford Street, corner of Marylebone Lane; 14. Oxford Street west, corner of Connaught Place; 15. South Audley Street, by the chapel; 16. Brompton, near Knightsbridge Green; 17. Eaton Square, by St. Peter’s Church; 18. Westminster, No. 1, Broad Sanctuary; 19. Westminster, No. 2, Horseferry Road; 20. West Strand, Trafalgar Square, by St. Martin’s Church; 21. Strand, by St. Clement’s Church.
Eastern District.—22. New Bridge Street, by the Obelisk; 23. Holborn Hill, corner of Hatton Garden; 24. Aldersgate Street, opposite Carthusian Street; 25. Clerkenwell, St. John Street, opposite Corporation Row; 26. Islington, No. 1, on the Green; 27. Islington, No. 2, Compton Terrace, Highbury End; 28. Old Street, St. Luke’s, corner of Bath Street; 29. Shoreditch, in front of the church; 30. Bishopsgate Street, near Widegate Street; 31. Whitechapel, High Street, in front of the church; 32. Aldgate, corner of Leadenhall Street and Fenchurch Street; 33. The Royal Exchange, by the Wellington Statue; 34. Cheapside, by the Western Obelisk; 35. Southwark, in front of St. George’s Church; 36. Newington, Obelisk, facing “The Elephant and Castle;” 37. Kennington Cross; 38. Lambeth, by the Female Orphan Asylum; 39. Blackfriars Road, corner of Great Charlotte Street; 40. Finsbury Circus, corner of West Street; 41. St. Mary-at-Hill, corner of Rood Lane; 42. Conduit Street, corner of Great George Street.
[47]Mr. Walker, the superintendent of the A Division, we believe, selected the works in these libraries. The love of books evinced by this gentleman sufficiently proves that literary tastes are not incompatible with the energetic performance of police duties.
[48]The partiality for the cook ascribed to the policeman is, we are assured, a slander upon the force. The commissariat at home is too good to justify any suspicion of this ignoble sort of cupboard love.
[49]We have extracted this anecdote from the very interesting work published by Captain Chesterton, entitled “Revelations of Prison Life.”
[50]Since the above was written, the attention of Government has been drawn to the condition of our mines, and a commission of inquiry will speedily, we hear, be appointed.
[51]W. T. Cox, Esq., inBritish Medical Journal.
[52]A just appreciation of the value of life is, perhaps, of more importance to Friendly Societies than to Insurance Offices, inasmuch, as the range of sickness in the working classes is much more extensive than in the upper and middle walks of life. Mr. Hardwick, in his manual on enrolled Friendly Societies, has pointed out the fact that the vast majority of these societies are based upon calculations which must in the end terminate in their bankruptcy: and among the causes which tend to this disastrous result he mentions the total disregard evinced in these clubs to a proper estimate of the states of health in different occupations and localities. It must be clear that the potter, whose average amount of illness between the ages of 20 and 70 is more than 333 weeks, obtains a very unfair advantage over clerks or schoolmasters who may happen to be in the same club with him, and whose average of sickness during the same period is only 48 weeks. The dyer, again, who, under the present system of management of Friendly Societies, may be admitted to a club on the same terms as a wheelwright, claims for 293 weeks of sickness against the wheelwright’s 64. The healthy country artisan is thus made to pay for the unhealthy town mechanic. If we take the case, again, of the miner or the Sheffield grinder, and huddle him, without inquiry, into the same Friendly Society as the agricultural labourer, it must be clear that the latter must pay for the more than average sickness of his fellows. Until the relative value of life and of sickness among the working classes is thoroughly understood and acted upon, as regards the payments of members, it is clear that the healthy trades must be sacrificed to the unhealthy ones.
[53]An ingenious Frenchman, of the name of Bernot, has just invented a file-cutting machine which will, we trust, come generally into use, and do away with the paralysis arising from the present handicraft. It is said that the workmanship of the machine is more even than the hand-work: the files cut in the morning by the artisan being superior to those cut in the afternoon, in consequence of his muscles becoming tired.