of inwards, to the great comfort of the inhabitants of the country, and the paramount discomfort of the inhabitants of the fleece, videlicet, the fleas. (Such are the terms set forth in the application to Parliament for a charter.) Secondly, by effecting such a modification of the torrid temperature, that the negroes who now produce wool upon their heads, and the sheep hair, may effect an exchange, to the manifest advantage of both parties, and the obvious increase of British commerce. It is calculated that the natives of the great desert will shortly be enabled to purchase ice creams at three cowries the glass, and to grow blackberries, sloes, and crab apples, where the soil now produces nothing but figs, melons, and pomegranates; while if we cannot realize the much ridiculed notion of washing the blackamoor white, we may reasonably hope to cool him down to a bronze heat, or perhaps ultimately refrigerate him to a bright mahogany. Many subsidiary benefits will result from this grand undertaking. It is notorious that we have sent two expeditions to the North Pole, at a great risk of human life, and a prodigious consumption of time and coals, for the purpose of making the notable discovery that nothing could be discovered; but if the opposing mountains of ice be fairly, hauled away to be hung up to dry upon the equinoctial line, or rather to undergo their annual liquefaction, like the blood of St. Januarius, it is presumable that our next discovery ships will be enabled to proceed without opposition to the loadstone axletree which is supposed to protrude from the sea to the North Pole, carry a specimen of it through Baffin's Bay to the sea of Kamschatka, and so make a short voyage home by the new cut across the Isthmus of Darien. A second and not less important advantage will be the great impulse given to our manufactures, from the number of steam engines that must necessarily be employed in removing and towing such immense masses. Perkins's apparatus will be used, and by navigating the vessels by Carbonari from the neighbourhood of Mount Vesuvius, who are accustomed to coals and explosions, it is calculated that a pressure of fifteen hundred atmospheres to the square inch may be safely experimented, at which charge. an engine of the smallest dimensions will attain such a prodigious concentration of power, as to drag an iceberg of a mile in circumference, supposing the requisite impulsion and velocity can be communicated to it, at the rate of twenty miles an hour. As the whole of the shares are not yet sold, a few subscribers may still be taken in upon application at the proper office. A second undertaking, not less gigantic in its conception or beneficial in its object, has been suggested by the following portion of an ancient Milesian astronomical hymn, entitled "Langolee." "Long life to the moon, for a noble sweet creature, That serves us with lamplight each night in the dark; But as for the moon, by my soul, I'll be bound, sir, This valuable hint is likely to be realized by an ingenious application of Dr. Black's theory of latent heat. It is well known that all bodies contain a certain portion of caloric, which they give out by pressure; almost every substance becomes warm by, friction, cold metals may be hammered till they are hot; and we have now a familiar illustration of this principle in the new instantaneous light machines, which produce fire by simple pressure of the atmosphere. Independently of the quantity of this subtle element with which the moon, in common with all matter, is pervaded, she must have absorbed, almost to saturation, the ardent rays of the sun which have been playing upon her surface for such a succession of ages; and we have thus an immense reservoir of quiescent moonshine ready to be reconverted into active sunshine, if adequate means can be found for its expression. To effect this purpose it is proposed to raise, in patent balloons, a sufficient number of hydraulic presses to compel the moon to give.out caloric in the proportions that may be required. From accurate calculations, it appears that a sufficient quantity may be easily procured to double the attraction of that planet upon the ocean, and of course to enable ships to work double tides, an incalculable benefit to our commerce. By converging the rays into a focus, and directing them to particular ponds and lakes, their temperature may be raised to the boiling point, or 212° of Fahrenheit, which will effect an important saving in the making of tea and all culinary processes, to say nothing of the improvement of the general health by such extensive and natural warm baths. From the known influence of this luminary upon lunatics, some unfavourable symptoms may at first be manifested by our amateur actors, craniologists, writers of Visions of Judgment, followers of Joanna Southcote, believers in prince Hohenlohe's miracles, March hares, and holders of Spanish, Poyais, and Neapolitan stock; but, on the other hand, the additional heat will enable us to grow at least double the quantity of cabbage, an important solace to artisans in general, but more particularly to our tailors. Compensation must of course be made to our writers of sonnets to the moon, who will be cut short of their whole fourteen lines if they cannot apostrophize her as pale Cynthia, and dissert upon her chaste ray and mild lustre ; but this expense will be more than rapid by the treasures that will doubtless be discovered in that repertory of all lost things, from the wits of Orlando down to the wit of Don Juan. The lord of the Lantern and Bush, who has so long stood in his own light, will be let down by a parachute, and exhibited at Bullock's in Piccadilly, as the man out of the moon, from which it is expected to procure a sufficient revenue to raise the wind for the bellows. Many ingenious mechanicians entertain serious doubts as to the feasibility of the third scheme, for which patents have been taken out, though I cannot myself see any scientific grounds for their misgivings. Volcanoes are now universally admitted to owe their projectile power to steam. Water from the surface of the earth, or from some of the. caverns of the deep, comes in contact with the subterranean fires, producing such an instantaneous expansion of vapour, that, in its efforts to escape, it tears open the surface and carries all before it, thus forming a natural steam engine. Hitherto its tremendous power, being left to its own irregular energies, has either ended in smoke, or produced terror, havoc, and destruction, by desolating plains and overwhelming cities. It is high time to stop these mischievous pranks, and avail ourselves of that stupendous engine which nature herself has built, and offers us ready made and for nothing, even supplying an inexhaustible reservoir of fuel without one shilling expense. It is proposed to fix an apparatus over the crater of Vesuvius, so as to convert the mountain into a regular steam engine, turning a river into one of the smaller orifices to generate the vapour in any quantities, and of course providing safety valves for its escape after a certain pressure, which, as the mountain itself forms the boiler, may be carried to many thousand atmospheres upon the square inch. The direction of this incalculable power, which will give the shareholders the command of the whole world, is a matter for future consideration; but it is proposed in the first instance to make Vesuvius instrumental to the complété excavation of Herculaneum and Pompeii which seems but fair, as it was the sole cause of their destruction; and to project all the excavated rubbish into the Hellespont, so as to stop the passage of the Dardanelles to the Turkish fleet, and thus operate a favourable diversion for the Greeks. The projector is decidedly of opinion that by this enormous engine he can, if necessary, stop the diurnal motion of the earth upon its axis-an invaluable security to our Asiatic possessions, as, in the event of a mutiny or revolution in that quarter, we could keep them in the dark for six months, and so ruin them in the cost of candles: or renew the days of Phaeton, by scorching them in the sun until they allowed us to rule the roast. A certain theorist has suggested that we might even raise the earth nearer to the sun, provided it was previously lightened by embarking in balloons all our heaviest and most bulky articles-such as the History of Brazil, the Court of Aldermen, Busby's Lucretius, all our tomes of controversial divinity, the elephant at Exeter Change, &c. &c.-but I confess I am disposed to consider this scheme as the chimæra of a visionary. Others may perhaps be disposed to pronounce a similar judgment upon the fourth project, which will, however, be very shortly in a course of actual experiment. It appears by the last papers from America that a colonel Symmes has proposed to the president to discover a new world, and has demanded a squadron for the purpose. This terra incognita he maintains to be situated within our own globe-that the old earth, in fact, has a young one in its stomach; and the arguments by which he supports this strange position are both numerous and plausible. If Columbus, by merely consulting a map of the world, became convinced that the equipoise of the system required a counter-ponderant continent in the southern ocean, the colonel insists that we may à fortiori conclude that the earth છે |