lime is a preventive of cholera, the hands of a paper-mill ought certainly to be free, as a slight smell of it, though only slight, pervades the whole building. Leaving the machine, however, undescribed for the present, we will get out of the din of wheels, and the vapours of warm moist blankets that pervade it, and endeavour to render the whole process intelligible by beginning with the straw. All our readers are doubtless aware that straw is a hollow tube, and the ladies know that in bonnets at least it has a beautiful glaze on the outside, but they are not perhaps aware that that glaze is in reality an extremely minute film of glass, so that a straw is a bundle of small fibres glued together, and lining the inside of a glass tube, of which it is the object of the paper-maker to deprive it. To effect this, and leave the fibres of it as free as possible, the straw, previously cleaned and cut in short lengths, is boiled in a strong solution of soda ley, which dissolves both the glass and the glutinous substance. We look for a moment into a vast cauldron, whence issues a smell of stale hay, and a cloud of hot steam, and cannot say that we have seen the process of boiling, but, declining to put our head further in, follow our conductor to where another large boiling vat is being emptied into a little waggon, to be carried to the bleaching pits close by. It looks not unlike the spent tan from the tanpits, and is almost as dark, and we are puzzled how that dirty-looking heap is ever to be made into strong sheets of white paper, when we are referred to a large tank at the end of the room, where some hundredweights of chloride of lime are dissolved in some thousands of gallons of water, and account at once for the smell pervading the whole mill. The

brown mess in the little waggon being now wheeled on two rails, over one of the bleaching pits, is emptied into it, and a gutta percha syphon tube being put into the bleach liquor, the pit is filled up with it, and left for 24 hours, by which time the chlorine and the colour of the straw will have fought so fiercely as to be worse than the celebrated Kilkenny cats, for not a vestige of either remains. We don't wait for that, however, but go down to the mill properly so called, i.e. the place where the bleached and boiled straw is ground into a pulp. Here in an oval trough, a sanguinary machine, full of knives, is revolving rapidly, while the straw passing through it and round the trough, and through it again and again, is rapidly reduced to a substance somewhat resembling curdled milk, and having an addition of smalt or ultramarine, looks very like the sky-blue of our school days, left till next morning. Here also the size, a compound of soda and resin, is added to it (without which it would be blotting paper). Let us leave it to its insatiable tormentor to go back to the room we first entered, but here we fancy we must fail to give much idea of the machine; suffice it to say, the pulp from the mill, still looking like curdled skyblue, being kept in a constant state of agitation by agitators who, strange to say, do not do mischief to the hands they work among, is run into a small trough with a slit at the bottom, through which the pulp flows on to a kind of round towel, made of wire gauze, where it parts with some of its water, and which, travelling over its rollers, steadily carries it of a uniform thickness over a square trough, connected with a pump, which sucks most of its water through the wire gauze, and with the help of

some hundredweights of air above, presses it into something like solidity. Now it wants all the sharpness of our eyes to follow its movements, as it first goes under rollers, looking like large rolls of flannel, then along travelling blankets, up to the ceiling and down to the floor, and in and out, and round and round, under one hot roller of copper and over another, and at last emerges from the end a web of paper, some five feet wide, and capable of going on from here to Edinburgh, if required. It don't go to Edinburgh, though, at least not in its present state, but, passing into the cutting machine, is divided into three strips therein, and then cut off at stated lengths, by a sort of horizontal guillotine, falling into the hands of three boys in the universal paper caps, to be carried away presently into the pressing and sorting rooms, where a number of women, after examining the sheets and rejecting the faulty ones, pack them in quires and reams for the market.

"It forms a paper somewhat harder and slightly more brittle than the best rag papers, but admirably adapted for printing on, as from those very qualities the type indents it less than the more flexible and tougher rag paper, than which it is, moreover, cheaper.

"The above is one of the many modern examples of the debt due by the arts to the sciences, especially that of chemistry. The researches begun so vigorously by our great countryman Davy, on the chemistry of agriculture, and since so ably followed out by Reugelius, Liebig, and the German schools of chemistry, besides greatly benefiting all classes by an increased produce of the first necessaries of life, have in many more than this solitary

instance benefited our manufactures, by pointing out some new use for material hitherto wasted, and so indirectly greatly cheapened the original article. There is, however, yet room for improvement here-room for chemical knowledge to work. The soda ley, in which the straw is first boiled, contains in it some valuable substances, viz., the silica or coat of flint glass off the straw, and the glutinous matter. These, however, are in their present state useless, and are obliged to be boiled down, and then burnt in a furnace-a process which the power of the alkali over the bricks of the furnace renders both troublesome and costly. We looked into a blazing cavern, where the process is continually going on, and saw masses of white hot stalactite hanging from above, formed by the bricks dissolving in the alkali.

"This will, however, be doubtless turned to good account by the ever-advancing knowledge of the chemist. Meanwhile, I have perhaps shewn my readers that they may find a better simile for absolute worthlessness than by saying that an article is not worth a straw.'

GLACIERS.

We

WALKING with some friends in an upland district, in which the limestone used for agricultural purposes is found in great quantities, we were struck with the singular appearance of the surface of the rock, which had been cleared of the alluvial deposit on the top of it, in order to its being broken up for burning. The space left exposed was an area of about thirty feet. The rains which had recently fallen had thoroughly washed it, and thus given a very bold relief to several large blocks or boulders of stone which lay upon it. On examining these, we found that three of the four were masses of common trap or whinstone, and the fourth a block of grey granite. might not have been much astonished to find the unshapely lumps of trap, because the little hills around the place where we were consisted mainly of whinstone, but it was more difficult to pass the granite without observation and scrutiny. Though well acquainted with the rocks of the district in a circumference of thirty miles, we knew of no granite of the description before us having been found in position in it. A closer observation revealed to us other interesting matters connected with these boulders. One of them seemed poised, as if by a cunning hand, on an eminence in the limestone, and looked as if, when the soil was removed from it, it should have rolled off its pinnacle and rested on a flattened surface which it presented to the eye as we now examined it. But our curiosity was yet more increased when we noticed a mark, or slight furrow, on the surface of the limestone, corresponding to the project