The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 12, No. 334, October 4, 1828

A slender tree her fingers caught—
It bent beneath her weight;
'Twas false as love and Mary's fate!
Deceiving as the night!

She fell—and villagers relate
No more of Mary's hour,
But how she rose with deadly might,
And, with a maniac's power,

Fought with her murd'rers till they broke
Her slender arm in twain:
That none could e'er discover where
The maiden's corse was lain.

When wand'ring by that noiseless wood,
Forsaken by the bee,
Each rev'rend chronicler displays
The bent and treach'rous tree.

Pointing the barkless spot to view,
Which Mary's hand embrac'd,
They shake their hoary locks, and say,
"It ne'er can be effac'd!"

    * * H.

SPIRIT OF DISCOVERY

Tanning

The tanner steeps the skin at first in a weak infusion of bark, until it has acquired a nutmeg brown colour, and then he gradually increases the strength of the steeping liquors, and after a time he draws the skin out, and finds that it is converted into leather. A thick piece of hide requires ten, twelve, or fourteen months, to be converted into good leather; and when you consider the length of time consumed in the process, and the great capital necessarily employed, you cannot feel surprised that various plans should have been proposed to lessen both. It was proposed to tan with warm instead of cold liquors; and although the tan appeared to promote the skins in a shorter time, the quality of the leather was so much injured, that it was soon given up. Then it was tried to force the tan through the pores of the skin, by employing great pressure; but this was not found to answer. But you may ask why the tanner does not put the skins at once into a strong liquor? The reason is, that the exterior surface of the skin would soon become tanned, and the central part would remain untanned, which, in a short time, would begin to rot and decay, and the leather so treated would soon fall to pieces. The tanner, therefore, judges of the perfection of the tanning by cutting through the leather; and if he finds it of an uniform brown colour, without any white streak in the centre, he considers that the process has been successfully conducted. It would require much time to describe all the operations of the tan-yard, but many of them are interesting, as regards the chemical agents employed. I might have mentioned to you, that the mode of preparing the skin for tanning, is first to soak it in lime-water, by which the hair is easily detached; but the cuticle and under part of the skin, the cellular substance, are scraped off after it has been soaked in the lime water. A great variety of substances have been used for tanning, as the acorn-cup of the oriental bark; catechu and sumach have been also used; but the oak bark is most generally used, as furnishing a large quantity of astringent matter. It is not the business of the chemist to describe the different kinds of leather, but I may just mention, that the upper leather of shoes is called curried leather; the leather having been tanned, is rubbed over with oil before it is dried, and it is then very flexible, pliable, and durable; but if you take a piece of dry leather, and try to rub it over with oil or grease, you cannot make it enter the pores of the leather; the black colour is produced by rubbing it over with a solution of green vitriol, the sulphate of iron. Russian leather is tanned in an infusion of birch bark, and is said to be afterwards mixed with a quantity of birch tar, to give it that odour for which it is peculiar, which renders it valuable for book-binding, on account of preventing it from being attacked by insects. Tawed leather, used for gloves, is made by impregnating the skin with a liquor containing alum and salt, and afterwards washed in a mixture of yolks of eggs and water; the saline and animal matters combine, and give it that peculiar softness, and such leather is afterwards coloured as may be required; having been rolled over wooden rollers, in which are grooves, it is called Morocco leather. These are the principal varieties of leather employed in this country.—Brande's Lectures—Lancet.

Mites

An indefatigable naturalist has undertaken the very difficult task of arranging the family of acarides, or mites; he divides them into sixty-nine genera, the greater part of them new!

Electro-Attraction of Leaves

The results of a French experimentalist have lately led him to conclude that the leaves, hairs, and thorns of plants tend to maintain in them the requisite proportion of electricity; and, by drawing off from the atmosphere what is superabundant, they also act in some measure as thunder-rods.

Enormous Whale

The skeleton of a whale, 95 feet long by 18 feet high, has lately been deposited in the Cabinet of Natural History at Ghent. In the opinion of many naturalists, among whom is M. Cuvier, this fish could not have been less than 900 or 1,000 years old!

Fly in Wheat

In North America, much damage is done to crops of wheat by the Hessian fly. The female deposits from one to eight or more eggs upon a single plant of wheat, between the vagina or sheath of the inner leaf and the culm nearest the roots; in which situation, with its head towards the root or first joint, the young larva pass the winter. They eat the stem, which thus becomes weak, and breaks; but are checked by another insect, called the destructor, otherwise whole crops of wheat would be annihilated.

Spiders

A correspondent of London's Magazine of Natural History says, that he lately amused himself for more than an hour in observing the proceedings of a little spider, whose bag of eggs had been removed and restored!

Light of the Sea

Its appearance previous to a storm is a very old observation among sailors. It is, however without foundation, as it is to be seen, more or less, all the year round in the Carribean sea, where there are no storms but in the hurricane months. In the hand it has a kind of mucous feel.—Mag. Nat. Hist.

Woodpeckers

A specimen of the least woodpecker was lately shot near Newcastle; and another has since been heard and seen near Coventry. Its noise resembles that made by the boring of a large auger through the hardest wood; whence the country people sometimes call the bird "the pump-borer."—Ibid.

The Tea Shrub

Has been naturalized in Java with complete success; so that, sooner or later, the Chinese monopoly will come to an end.

Floating Island

From the earliest times, there are to be found in authors, notices of the singular geological phenomena of floating islands. Pliny tells us of the floating islands of the Lago de Bassanello, near Rome; in Loch Lomond, in Scotland, there is or was a floating island; and in the Lake of Derwent Water, in Cumberland, such islands appear and disappear at indefinite periods. Mr. A. Pettingal, jun. has recently described a floating island, about a mile southwards of Newbury port, 140 poles in length, and 120 in breadth. It is covered with trees; and in summer, when dry weather is long continued, it descends to the bottom of the lake.—American, Journal of Science.

An immense Medusa

A species of sea-serpent, was thrown on shore near Bombay, in 1819. It was about 40 feet long, and must have weighed many tons. A violent gale of wind threw it high above the reach of ordinary tides; in which situation it took nine months to rot; during which process travellers were obliged to change the direction of the road for nearly a quarter of a mile, to avoid the offensive effluvia. It rotted so completely, that not a vestige of bone remained.—(C. Telfair, Esq. to R. Barclay, Esq. of Bury Hill.)

Himalaya Mountains

Captain Gerard, in exploring these mountains, with a view to measurement, had ascended to the height of 19,600 feet, being 400 feet higher than Humboldt had ascended on the Andes. The latter part of Captain Gerard's ascent, for about two miles, was on an inclined plane of 42°, a nearer approach to the perpendicular than Humboldt conceived it possible to climb for any distance together.—Heber's India.

Hippopotamus

The head of a Hippopotamus has recently been brought to England, with all the flesh about it, in a high state of preservation. This amphibious animal was harpooned while in combat with a crocodile, in a lake in the interior of Africa. The head measures near four feet long, and eight feet in circumference; the jaws open two feet wide, and the cutting-teeth of which it has four in each jaw, are above a foot long, and four inches in circumference. Its ears are not bigger than a terrier's, and are much about the same shape. This formidable and terrific creature, when full-grown, measures about 17 feet long from the extremity of the snout to the insertion of the tail, above 16 feet in circumference round the body, and stands above 7 feet high. It runs with astonishing swiftness for its great bulk, at the bottom of lakes and rivers, but not with as much ease on land. When excited, it puts forth its full strength, which is prodigious. "I have seen," says a mariner, as we find it in Dampier, "one of these animals open its jaws, and seizing a boat between its teeth, at once bite and sink it to the bottom. I have seen it on another occasion place itself under one of our boats, and rising under it, overset it, with six men who were in it, but who, however, happily received no other injury." At one time it was not uncommon in the Nile, but now it is no where to be found in that river, except above the cataracts.

THE COSMOPOLITE

A CHAPTER OF BULLS

I confess it is what the English call a bull, in the expression, though the sense be manifest enough.—POPE.

We are friends to the exposition of the weak sides of great men, inasmuch as it reads them a valuable lesson on their own infallibility, and tends to lower the molehills of conceit that are raised in the world as stumbling-blocks along every road of petty ambition. It would, however, be but a sorry toil for the most cynical critic to illustrate these vagaries otherwise than so many slips and trippings of the tongue and pen, to which all men are liable in their unguarded moments—from Homer to Anacreon Moore, or Demosthenes to Mr. Brougham. Our course is rather that of a good-humoured exposé, the worst effect of which will be to raise a laugh at the expense of poor humanity, or a merited smile at our own dulness and mistaken sense of the ridiculous.

First, of the ancient Poets, who make departed spirits know things past and to come, yet ignorant of things present. Agamemnon foretels what should happen to Ulysses, yet ignorantly inquires what is become of his own son. The ghosts are afraid of swords in Homer, yet Sibylla tells Aeneas in Virgil, that the then habit of spirits was beyond the force of weapons. The spirits put off their malice with their bodies; and Caesar and Pompey accord in Latin hell; yet Ajax in Homer, endures not a conference with Ulysses.

In Painting alone we have a rich harvest. Burgoyne in his travels, notices a painting in Spain, where Abraham is preparing to shoot Isaac with a pistol!

There is a painting at Windsor, of Antonio Verrio, in which, he has introduced himself, Sir Godfrey Kneller, and Bap. May, surveyor of the works, in long periwigs, as spectators of Christ healing the sick.

In the Luxembourg is a picture of Reubens, in which are the queen-mother in council, with two cardinals, and Mercury!

There may be, also, a sort of anachronism of the limbs, as in the case of the painter of Toledo, who painted the story of the three wise men of the east coming to worship, and bringing their presents to our Lord, upon his birth, at Bethlehem, whence he presents them as three Arabian, or Indian kings; two of them are white, and one of them black; but, unhappily, when he drew the latter part of them kneeling, which, to be sure, was done after their faces, their legs being necessarily a little intermixed, he made three black feet for the negro king, and but three white feet for the two white kings; and yet never discovered the mistake till the piece was presented to the king, and hung up in the great church.