month's search will not reveal a bottle which will fit, and the stopper, possibly valuable, must be sent to the manufacturer, to be detained a month or two and refitted at a cost six or eight times that of the original mould. The thirst for change not felt by the buyers is felt by the sellers, whose gains depend not upon the excellence of their goods but upon incessant alterations in their form, and the sellers are in some departments absolute. The only remedies for the purchaser are dogged obstinacy and self-will. Let every man or woman who is furnishing decide for himself or herself what he wants, arrange his rooms as he pleases, take no counsel except from artists and books and his own sense of convenience, snub every seller who ventures to mutter "They are not used now," and, above all, give time to the search for the precise thing he wants. In a few cases in London he will be beaten by the master evil of the place, the leasehold tenures, which forbid nearly every kind of solid improvement; but in the country his house, and in town his furniture, can be arranged his own way. With time and a little money anything can be accomplished, even the furnishing of a modern house so that it shall be a pleasant habitation, shall not require renewal more than once in a lifetime, and shall not bear the most distant resemblance to an upholsterer's showroom.

bookcases, in particular, are architectural to act on these rules, or display originality, labours, and he forgets that a sofa is not or try in any way to do as they like. They meant for sitting, but for lounging; but cannot afford it. Mr. Eastlake is never there is surely a medium between his pro- tired of repeating that nothing is cheap posals, suggested by sense of recoil, and that cannot be obtained in thousands, and the gimcrack rubbish now scattered about it is true that if one buys this year a satisdrawing-rooms. Then there is that patent factory set of china or glass or an excellent absurdity, a bright grate. Ladies hate piece of furniture, it will two years hence bright grates, because they are never be nearly or quite impossible to replace it bright; housemaids because they have to except at excessive cost. The pattern will brighten them; men because they interfere have been disused, as any woman may with the ready lighting of fires; yet all ascertain by the very simple test of trying three submit to a fashion as irreconcilable to renew a broken smelling-bottle. Ꭺ with taste as with convenience. A fireplace should be either dead-black, as iron would be after contact with coal, the ornament being heavy bas-reliefs; or it should not be of iron at all, but of fire-proof tiling, with a round vase for the coals in the centre, -a vase of bars, the cheapest, simplest, and hottest form of grate, which can be lighted when it is wanted, and not only when it is convenient to the servants that it should be cleaned. Under the influence of the same feeling, the fire-irons are brightened till they are conspicuous objects, and the coal-scuttle is made a kind of ornament, whereas fire-irons should be of black iron and dead brass, as invisible and useful as possible; and the coal-box should be a box, as Mr. Eastlake says, to keep a dirty though useful substance out of sight. We are inclined to think a coal-scuttle a surplusage, that the coal should be kept in a pit in the hearth, filled every morning before the fire is lighted; but if this is difficult, it is, at all events, easy to make the coal-scuttle unobtrusive and of such a shape that, while its contents cannot fall upon the floor, it shall, when filled, be as easy to carry as the old brass bucket, which, pace Mr. Eastlake, is among the worst articles of furniture ever devised by man. Rugs, if Turkey carpets were exclusively used, would be speedily pronounced an abomination, especially in small rooms, where they destroy the appearance of breadth; or restored to their original meaning as mats, to prevent wear in any place where the feet are constantly shifted. Short, broad mats of skin, bearskin preferably, because it will not keep dirt and suits any colour, would answer every end. In fact, the true theory for arranging and furnishing a room of any kind is the same as the true theory for everything else,-bookbinding, for example, to insist first of all that the end sought shall be attained, and seek for ornament chiefly through the perfection of the work.

But we shall be told it is useless for housekeepers of moderate means to attempt

From The Pall Mall Gazette.

AT THE CRATER OF VESUVIUS. OFTEN as Vesuvius has been described, there is one set of impressions which are perhaps the most generally interesting of all, but which, from the nature of the case, cannot so frequently be recorded. I refer to the impressions of one who has stood upon the lip of the crater and looked down while an eruption is actually in progress. It is not always that a view of such a scene can be obtained. It was at a time when crash was following crash in a manner that

was quite sufficiently terrible, and when all the suffocating steams and vapours were being driven to one side of the mountain by a strong wind, that we were able to go up from the windward side, stand upon the lip of the crater, look down into the roaring abyss, and see what the eruption of a volcano looks like on the spot.

That is, in truth, the only way of getting an idea of what a repository of horrors a volcano is. Without such a visit Vesuvius is often a little disappointing. It is nothing but a fine mountain, just like any other, says Mendelssohn. You may be a little disappointed as you see Vesuvius from below. But you have only to mount to the summit when an eruption of any magnitude is in progress to find yourself in the presence of appalling phenomena both of sight and sound. Choose the last few hours of daylight for your ascent; and then, as the darkness closes round and the world below becomes hidden from your view, you stand at the crater in presence of a scene for which no language can be very extravagant. For experienced mountaineers the effort required for the ascent is nothing remarkable; but for ordinary people it is laborious enough.

levels, you have the deep brick red of stones that have been under the action of fire, the brightest vermilion, and every imaginable shade of orange and yellow that sulphur deposits are capable of taking. The ground is hot too; so hot, indeed, that you cannot keep your foot on the same spot for many seconds together. Between the chinks of the stones you can see that a few inches below the surface it is actually red hot. You thrust in the end of your stick for a moment and you pull it out charred. Over all the farther half of the crater there hangs a dense cloud of smoke and vapour; all around you there is an atmosphere of sulphur which sets you coughing; from numberless small holes about your feet there issue with a hiss suphurous jets of steam which nearly choke you as you pass over them; and then as you look down into the actual abyss you are face to face with the most appalling phenomena, both of sight and sound, which, perhaps, the whole of Europe has to offer. Among the crowd of strange sensations that are experienced at such a time the phenomena of sound are perhaps the most wonderful of all. What meets the ear is, if anything, even more terrific than what meets the eye. You arrive at the edge of the crater, and Even to sight the eruption is not just what there you behold a scene full of awe and the imagination paints it beforehand. It majesty. The suddenness with which you does not consist, as the pictures necessarily come upon it is quite startling. Going up lead one to suppose, of a continuous shower you neither see nor hear anything. One at all. Still less does it consist of a conmoment you are clambering up the side of tinuous shower of black ashes shot out from the cone amid profound silence; the next a fire blazing on the top of the mountain; moment, as your head rises above the cra- it is rather a series of explosions. But the ter lip, you encounter a roar and a blaze roar and glare of the great abyss are continwhich make you shrink back a little. uous. You look into the pit, and though This surprise is occasioned, I suppose, by you see no actual flame, yet its sides are the formation of the crater. It is a huge in a state of constant incandescence; from bowl which comes up to quite a sharp lip, the mouth of it there roars up incessantly about half a mile in diameter and some a dense cloud of steam; and in the depths hundred yards in depth. Towards the bot- of it below you hear the noise of preparatom of this bowl, on the opposite side to tion for the outburst that is next to come. where we stood, was a great hole, from Then you hear a sharper crackle, and then which all the projectiles of the eruption without further warning follows a loud exwere shot; the surface of the bowl being plosion, which shoots into the air a torrent composed of lumps of lava, stones, and of white-hot missiles of every shape and cinders, all of them smeared with sulphur, size. So enormous are the forces at work precisely like those upon which we were that not only small pieces of stone and standing. As you mount the cone there is sulphur, such as you might carry away as between you and the gulf an enormous mementoes of your visit, but huge blocks wall, which dulls everything alike for of mineral, each enough to load a railway eye and ear. Even while on the steeps of ballast wagon, and all in a state of perthe cone itself you might be unaware that fectly white heat, are tossed up as though the mountain was disturbed. But a single they were so many cricket balls. The exstep seems almost enough to transfer you plosion lasts, perhaps, no longer than a from the most deathlike stillness to the minute: and then there is a cessation of grandest exhibition of force it is possible some seconds with the noise only of interto conceive. Instead of the monotonous nal preparation once more, after which the dull black of congealed lava on the lower explosion is repeated. That was nothing

to the almost stupefying din that was going of the mountain. I saw no indication that on before us- moments when the daylight this ever took place. While you are on was over, and the world below could no the mountain, the streams of lava which longer be distinguished when we had have issued forth and cooled at the several nothing but the clear starlight overhead, previous eruptions are quite distinguishand were truly alone with the mountain; able from each other by their differences of when the varied colouring of the ground had structure and colour. We saw many such ; disappeared in the darkness, and nothing but I saw no indication of any one of them could be seen but the gleam of the burning having come over the lip of the crater. In earth through the chinks at our feet; while every single instance the source of the lava the white-hot, glaring ribbon of molten stream seemed to have been lower down lava glided languidly down the mountain the mountain. Certainly this was the case at our side, and before us was the flashing with the very fine one which burst out just of the inner fire upon the cloud of vapour before our visit. As we stood upon the overhanging the abyss. Take all these to- lip of the crater it was below us throughout gether, and the scene is indeed rather dif- its whole length, The lava was issuing ferent from what you picture to yourself from a great fissure which it had made for as you calmly read in your newspaper that itself some distance down in the side of the Vesuvius is once again in a state of erup-cone. The guides hurried us away from

tion.

I spoke just now of the stream of lava which glides down the mountain. In the first place, two peculiarities were observa

From The Daily News.

THE TUNNEL THROUGH MONT CENIS.

the neighbourhood of its source, because, they said, it was quite possible another orifice might open at any moment, and then it would be all over with the present specble in it. One was the marvellous slow- tators. The experience of these men ness of its motion. In the early part of its clearly led them to regard this as the nordescent the incline over which it had to mal mode of the emission of lava. In the pass was precipitous; yet so slowly did case actually before us it was being poured this mass of liquid fire move within its forth evenly and continuously in a molten bed that its current was only just percepti-state from the fissure; it descended for a ble. It seemed to be only just in motion. short distance, in a broad stream, to a Perhaps in some degree connected with point where a bifurcation took place, and the same cohesion which this languor of then the burning mineral went down to the movement indicated, was the other pecu- base of the mountain in two streams of perliarity of the lava stream- the tenacity of haps twenty feet each in width, looking in its surface. In appearance, as we stood the darkness like two broad ribbons of fire above it, it was in a perfectly liquid state; stretching down into the plain. it looked as though you might ruffle its surface with the point of your stick. Great, accordingly, was our surprise at finding that even with the very greatest force available on the spot we could not make the slightest impression upon it. The largest masses of mineral that we could lift, we dashed down from above upon the burning stream; but they simply bounded across its face, like a ball upon a floor, without producing the faintest apparent indentation. Moreover, it is commonly supposed that lava is always projected from the crater, and the language commonly used in description encourages the idea. A stream of lava was seen to issue from the crater" is the sort of phraseology with which one is most familiar in accounts of eruptions that took place in bygone days. I am not sure that this is ever strictly accurate; but with the crater in anything like its present form it hardly seems probable. It would take a vast quantity of molten lava to fill that great bowl of half a mile diameter, which I suppose it would have to do before any of it would run over down the sides

MEN flash their messages across mighty continents and beneath the bosom of the wide Atlantic; they weigh the distant planets, and analyze the sun and stars; they span Niagara with a railway bridge, and pierce the Alps with a railway tunnel; yet the poet of the age in which all these things are done or doing sings, "We men are a puny race." And, certainly, the great works which belong to man as a race can no more be held to evidence the importance of the individual man than the vast coral reefs and atolls of the Pacific can be held to evidence the working power of the individual coral polyp. But if man, standing alone, is weak, man working according to the law assigned to his race from the beginning- that is, in fellowship with his kind is, indeed, a being of power.

Perhaps no work ever undertaken by men strikes one as more daring than the at

tempt to pierce the Alps with a tunnel. | difficulties with which the engineers of this Nature seems to have upreared these mighty gigantic work have had to contend. A barriers as if with the design of showing large part of the rock consists of a crystalman how weak he is in her presence. Even lized calcareous schist, much broken and the armies of Hannibal and Napoleon contorted; and through this rock run in seemed all but powerless in the face of these every direction large masses of pure quartz. vast natural fastnesses. Compelled to creep It will be conceived how difficult the work slowly and cautiously along the difficult and has been of piercing through so diversified narrow ways which alone were open to a substance as this. The perforating machthem, decimated by the chilling blasts which iñes are calculated to work best when the swept the face of the rugged mountain-resistance is uniform; and it has often haprange, and dreading at every moment the pitiless swoop of the avalanche, the French and Carthaginian troops exhibited little of the pomp and dignity which we are apt to associate with the operations of warlike armies. Had the denizen of some other planet been able to watch their progress, he might, indeed, have said, "These men are a puny race." In this only, that they succeeded, did the troops of Hannibal and Napoleon assert the dignity of the human race. Grand as was the aspect of nature, and mean as was that of man during the progress of the contest, it was nature that was conquered man that overcame. And now man has entered on a new conflict with nature in the gloomy fastnesses of the Alps. The barrier which he had scaled of old he has now undertaken to pierce. And the work-bold and daring as it seemed - is three parts finished.

pened that the unequal resistance offered to the perforaters has resulted in injury to the chisels. But before the work of perforating began, enormous difficulties had to be contended with. It will be understood that, in a tunnel of such vast length, it was absolutely necessary that the perforating processes carried on from the two ends should be directed with the most perfect accuracy. It has often happened in short tunnels that a want of perfect coincidence has existed between the two halves of the work, and the tunnellers from one end have sometimes altogether failed to meet those from the other. But in a short tunnel this want of coincidence is not very important, because the two interior ends of the tunnellings cannot in any case be far removed from each other. But in the case of the Mont Cenis tunnel any inaccuracy in the direction of the two tunnellings would have been fatal to the success The Mont Cenis tunnel was sanctioned of the work, since when the two should by the Sardinian Government in 1857, and meet it might be found that they were laterarrangements were made for fixing the per- ally separated by two or three hundred forating machinery in the years 1858 and yards. Hence it was necessary before the 1859. But the work was not actually com- work began to survey the intermediate menced until November, 1860. The tun- country, so as to ascertain with the most nel, which will be fully seven and a half perfect accuracy the bearings of one end of miles in length, was to be completed in the tunnel from the other. "It was necestwenty-five years. The entrance to the sary," says the narrative of these initial latunnel on the side of France is near the lit-bours, "to prepare accurate plans and sectle village of Fourneau, and lies 3,946 feet tions for the determination of the levels, to above the level of the sea. The entrance fix the axis of the tunnel, and to set it out' on the side of Italy is in à deep valley at on the mountain top; to erect observatories Bardonèche, and lies 4,380 feet above the and guiding signals solid, substantial, and sea-level. Thus there is a difference of true." When we remember the nature of level of 434 feet. But the tunnel will ac- the passes over the Cenis, we can conceive tually rise 445 feet above the level of the the difficulty of setting out a line of this French end, attaining this height at a dis- sort over the Alpine range. The necessity tance of about four miles from that extrem- of continually climbing over rocks, ravines, ity; in the remaining three and three-quar- and precipices in passing from station to ter miles there will be a fall of only ten station involved difficulties which, great as feet, so that this part of the line will be they were, were as nothing when compared practically level. with the difficulties resulting from the bitter weather experienced on those rugged mountain-heights. The tempests which sweep the Alpine passes- the ever-recurring storms of rain, sleet, and driving snow, are trying to the ordinary traveller. It will be understood, therefore, how terribly they must have interfered with the delicate pro

The rocks through which the excavations have been made have been for the most part very difficult to work. Those who imagine that the great mass of our mountainranges consists of such granite as is made use of in our buildings, and is uniform in texture and hardness, greatly underrate the

cesses involved in surveying. It often hap- | heit showing, on analysis, no traces of the pened that for days together no work of any metal. A brief statement of some of the sort could be done owing to the impossibility experiments made on wines will illustrate of using levels and theodolites when exposed to the stormy weather and bitter cold of these lofty passes. At length, however, the work was completed, and that with such success that the greatest deviation from exactitude was less than a single foot for the whole length of seven and a half miles.

From The Pall Mall Gazette.

THE PRESERVATION OF WINE.

the advantages which are claimed for M. Pasteur's process. A certain number of bottles of Côte d'Or of 1863 were subjected to the heating process in that year, an equal number of bottles from the same vineyard being allowed to remain in the natural state. In the month of March last samples of both were tested. The wine which had been heated was in perfect condition, while the other had a decided flavour of acidity, the special failing to which the principal Burgundies are apt to succumb. A drop examined in the microscope showed the parasite peculiar to vinous acidity. In M. Pasteur's laboratory the commissioners saw

M. DE LAPPARENT, the director of naval construction, has recently made a report to the French Minister of Marine, which de-a loosely corked bottle, two-thirds empty, serves more than a passing notice. A special commission, under M. de Lapparent's presidency, was some time since named to investigate M. L. Pasteur's mode of preserving wine by heating it. The result is that its decided efficacy" is said to be fully established, and the commissioners recommend that the system-which has been adopted by many large wine-dealers in France-should, as a preliminary trial, be applied to the wine shipped for the use of the navy. The Minister" has read the report with the liveliest interest," and has approved its recommendations, which are

to be carried out.

which had been first opened in June, 1865. The wine, of very ordinary quality, having cost originally only 45 centimes the litre (about 34d. a bottle) had acquired the colour of age but did not exhibit the slightest symptom of sourness or bitterness. It had been heated before bottling. Under the same circumstances an unheated wine would have turned to vinegar in a few days. The commissioners made an experiment of a very simple character for themselves. They removed the corks and two glasses of wine from two bottles, one of wine which they had seen heated, the other of unheated wine, and replaced the corks, preserving a communication with the outer air by the insertion of a bent glass tube, which excluded dust. In three days a very obvious scum had formed upon the surface of the unheated wine. Microscopical examination proved it to be due to Mycoderma vini, which soon degenerated into Mycoderma aceti, and the wine became undrinkable. The other bottle was still very drinkable" a considerable time afterwards, and showed no trace of acidity, although from prolonged contact with the air it had lost some of its strength and other qualities. A quantity of wine was heated, carefully casked, and sent a ten months' cruise in the Jean Bart. Some of the same wine, unheated, was shipped at the same time. At the end of the voyage the heated wine was in perfect condition, showing the colour peculiar to old wines, while the other, in consequence of an astringent flavour, turning to sourness, had to be consumed at once to avoid total loss.

66

The process is simply heating the wine to a temperature of from 52° to 55° centigrade (125° to 131° Fahrenheit), the lower temperature being for the finer qualities. The apparatus employed is a modification by M. Brun, an engineer, of Perroy's machine for distilling fresh from sea water. The worm of the still is contained in a chamber called the refrigerator, which in the process of distillation is kept continually supplied with cold sea water; in the wine-heating process the chamber is filled with wine, which is retained there until raised to the desired temperature by the steam which passes through the worm. One of these machines will heat about 11,700 gallons in ten hours, at a cost of £1 3s. 6d.; about a penny for every forty gallons. It should be stated that in heating, about one-half per cent. of alcohol is lost, and must be subsequently added if the wine is to be maintained at its original strength. It was found difficult to determine the best material for the chamber; experiments were made for this pur- It would seem that all these experiments pose, and it resulted that the purest tin was were tried upon such wines as are usually the least objectionable, some wine which supplied in large quantities to the French had been heated five times over in such an navy, and are of course not of a very high apparatus to a temperature of 149° Fahren-quality. It thus apparently remains to be