at Naples, or a legion of spirits playing at skittles the dear beloved one dead. Think of the sacred with the crockery in the kitchen of the King of affections and secrets of the heart that have been Naples? We are not in the habit of denying between you and that impassive image. Think such phenomena as a devastating earthquake of the parting, think of the hope to meet again, Truly no. But which is the more intelligible, think of your agony of spirit, of your unspeakand the more reconcilable to our humble and re-able sorrow, of the struggle you have come mote knowledge of the workings of the Almighty through under no eye but the eye of Heaven. Creator of the vast Universe-the earthquake Then look at the professional lady or gentlethat swallowed Lisbon, or Mr. Mompesson's spi- man in the dark corner-the Medium with the ritual drummer that "for an hour together would hands on the mahogany table-who will make beat Round-Heads and Cuckolds, the Tat-too, you the tour of Europe, and (always with the and several other points of war, as well as any aid of a table) raise your beloved one in any drummer"? I am very sorry to find, in con- town or city on short notice, to pull any chatnexion with these most ridiculous stories, such a terer by the skirt, or ring a bell, or play a man as Mr. Owen asking, "If we are to reject note or two on an accordion, or drivel out a as fable the narratives here submitted, are we platitude in raps for the excitement of exhausted not tacitly endorsing the logic of those who gentility; and then ask yourself whether this argue that Jesus Christ never lived ?" This seems a fitting exponent of your love and mimight be well enough for Spiritual Magazines sery; whether this seems a fitting stage in the and such like, but O Mr. Owen, Mr. Owen, do progress of the soul; whether these ways are you find no internal evidence in the New Tes- like the ways of the Providence unto whom tament, of a Divine commission and a Sacred all hearts are open and from whom no secrets Truth, a little above Mompesson drummers, are hid. Rochester knockings, and Stockwell breakages of kitchen-ware?

To return to Mr. Owen. In the story of Mr. Thompson, an Apparition of the Living, seen It is utterly unavailing to collect any number by Mother and Daughter, the fetch or double of names, and parade them as the names of of a man lying in his ordinary night-shirt in people who believe or who have believed in any bed, is met by two ladies not specially intemanifestation whatsoever, opposed to the com-rested in him. The fetch is dressed in a blue mon sense and experience of mankind. Dr. frock-coat, black satin waistcoat, black pantaJohnson and many persons of his time, consi-loons, and hat, with linen particularly fine, derably above the average in respect of intellect and acquirement, believed in the Cock-lane Ghost. The Cock-lane Ghost happened to be found out-chiefly because it was so malicious as to make a very serious charge against an individual, and consequently imposed a peculiar responsibility on persistent investigators. Otherwise, it might not have been found out. But if the Cock-lane Ghost had not been found out, would that array of names have any right to silence me, who utterly deny the spirituality of Cock-lane? Not in the least. I should not set merely myself against the names; I should set against them-possibly with some warmth of indignation-the reverent experience of mankind in general, of God's great ways and laws. "What does the Lord mean by this? I am certainly dying," said Mrs. Southcote in her extremity. Had I been at her bedside, along with Mr. SHARPE the engraver, and other unimpeachable disciples, I would have taken leave to reply, "What the Lord means, O Joanna, I, poor child of clay that I am, do not undertake to say; but as to what the Lord does not mean, I am occasionally visited with glimpses of the truth; and that He never meant to deify you on earth, and that you cannot hide your swindling old countenance in earth's kind bosom too soon, I venture with confidence to asseverate. And I take the liberty to say this, Mrs. Southcote, you will please to observe, not in a knowledge of the Lord's ways, but in a knowledge of your

ways."

O reader, possibly halting between spiritual evenings in darkened drawing-rooms, and the broad truc world outside, think of that figure of

and apparel carefully adjusted. There is the same comfortable faith that no mistake was possible in this case, as in every other. The ladies could not have been deceived as to the person; the story could not have become exaggerated. It was certainly the fetch or double of the sick man whom they met, dressed in his Sunday's best; logical or illogical, the facts must be accepted in their integrity. This story opens the question of a spiritual life in clothes, and how a ghost could dress itself with scrupulous care, and with a special attention to its laundry. In the aforesaid Spiritual Magazine of last month, there is another story, "What was It?" similar to this I have quoted from Mr. Owen. A gentleman and his wife are seen driving in their chaise along a certain road. They pass their intimate friends and relations without speaking, to their infinite terror and confusion; and when, shortly after, they do actually appear in good honest beef-fed flesh and blood, every one cries out, "A ghost, a ghost!" horse, chaise, rugs, caps, bonnets, reins, wheels-all ghosts too! The Fata Morgana is a natural fact; so is the mirage; so are certain stories of ships, and horsemen, and armies, where never actual ships or horsemen or armies were, or could be; but meteorologists explain away all this class of spectral illusions in a very satisfactory manner; and I think that the ghostly horse and chaise, with many other ghostly circumstances, might also be explained away scientifically, if worth the trouble of meeting with gravity and earnestness. And granting even that we cannot always find out the cause of everything, is that a reason why we should straight

one with amazement. In the case of my friend, spoken of before, a very impassive face, a steady hand, and an unfaltering voice, threw the medium off the scent; and a name was given which had as much connexion with him as with myself. If any one watches the hand of the person trying the alphabet, unless there is an unusual amount of self-control, the pencil will linger at certain letters wished for, and a keen sight and ready brain will make these the letters rapped out. But I concede the power, also, of the mesmeric thought-reading: a power that I think to be far more rare than its upholders assert, but far more frequent than its deriders would allow.

way believe in the supernatural? Was that poor little child at Road, murdered by spirits? Was the Waterloo-bridge mystery the work of Mr. Mompesson's demon? No one-not even the most enthusiastic spiritualist-goes the length of saying that these things were done by other than living agents. But when it comes to knocks against the floor, disguised voices in the air, falling crockery, and locomotive bolsters, with any other utterly useless and extravagantly absurd physical manifestations, human agency is thrust aside; the power of sleight of hand, which our conjurors have rendered familiar to us, is ignored; the most ordinary requirements for reliable evidence are abandoned; the loosest accounts are taken as of mathematical accuracy and undeniable truth; no allowance is made for natural exaggeration, or for natural mistakes; the most shadowy idea, the least definite perceptions, are put into strong, broad, trenchant language; and we, unbelievers, are required to subscribe to the whole account, under pain of being set down as animals or atheists. The ordinary amusement of each person, in a large company, writing down a certain story which has to be whispered from one to the other, and the strange variations between the first version and the last, might supply to the most credulous, a startling instance of growth by repetition. There are few of us who can repeat a circumstance exactly as we saw it, or tell a story in the same words and The story of the Governess with the Double, spirit as that in which it was told to us. In- excellently told as a narrative, is not a bad indeed, the very fact of embodying a thing in stance of the way in which "proof" of such things words at all, often gives it a weight and value accumulates. The story is related to Mr. Owen which it did not originally possess. The Law by one young lady. That one young lady tells Reports are full of these discrepancies; yet Mr. Owen that the incidents occurred at a cerevidence, which would not be admitted when tain seminary where she was one of forty-two dealing with the theft of a pocket-handkerchief, pupils. Also, that the seminary was under the is to pass unquestioned when the subject is that" superintendence of Moravian directors." Also, wondrous mystery, the Spirit World, and its connexion with man.

My amiable friend and contemporary calls on the Conductor of this Journal to stand up" to the question of how a certain medium obtained the name and address of a country curate, whose friends were assisting at the séance, together with certain passages of his history. I beg it to be understood that I, the writer, "stand up" to it for myself, and not for him. Granting even that the guess was right-and without something more explicit in the way of testimony I would not grant it-yet am I to balance one lucky guess against half a dozen unlucky guesses, and assume the spiritual veracity of the one, but by no means the material humbug of the other? The spirits never, by any chance, spell a name, or rap out a fact right through, without hesitation. Glib enough in mere common-places, no sooner do they come to facts than they stutter, stammer, hesitate, try back, make mistakes, so as to give the medium ample time for studying the countenance of the person to whom the message is being addressed; and, unless the one is a sad bungler, or the other more reticent and self-composed than most people are, a possible name is rapped out, which fills every

Nothing is rejected by the partisans of this superstition. Even Mr. Owen, scholar, and gentleman of careful training as he is, accepts everything that falls into his way with a most remarkable wholeness of belief. Things which have been exploded as confessed impostures years ago, he repeats in this Footfall book of his with a naïveté that makes one stare. John Wesley's rapping demon, the Fox imposture, the hoax carried on at the Castle of Slawensik, Mademoiselle Guldenstubbé's account of the uncomfortable young Governess with a Double: in a word, all the supernatural stories with names and dates to them which have been current of late years, he adopts.

"that every person in the house saw the Double." Hereupon Mr. Owen tells the story as if it had been told to him by the forty-two pupils, the Moravian directors, and all the servants in the establishment, and as if they all agreed in all the particulars! Yet on examining the text, I do not find the least hint that Mr. Owen has made any inquiry into the narrative of any human being but the one young lady!

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Corroborative evidence," he says, indeed, "can readily be obtained by addressing the directors;" but he neither says what corroborative evidence, nor that he has ever referred to one of them (or to any one of the remaining one-and-forty pupils) for a single word of corroboration.

Tried by the ordinary rules of evidence, not one of these stories can stand; nevertheless, I rise from the perusal of this book with a high regard for Mr. Owen, personally. He is a gentleman of a sweet temper, and expresses himself as a gentleman should: using none of the many very offensive missiles abundantly stored in the Spiritual Magazine. He is a very good writer, and has an admirable power of telling a story. That one of his stories which is called THE RESCUE, is by far the best of its kind to be

found. Excellent throughout, it is told with a singular propriety, modesty, clearness, and force.

STRONG GUNS.

manufacture in this country has been so much improved that its explosive force is greater than that of the powder made for governments abroad. Also, we test guns to extremity by our new ways of using them; in experiment we test them wilfully to the utmost, by adding steadily to the force of the explosion until we discover what strain they will bear before they burst. The great unsolved problem is, to find a gun that is not to be burst by any force of gunpowder. The force of gunpowder being first ascertained, and the strain that solid substances will bear, being also known to the engineer-how to construct a gun that will bear more than the utmost possible strain produced by the explosion of gunpowder, is the question.

If there arose in this country a great magician who, by the magic of genius joined to intense labour, solved every unsettled question that now stands in the way of our knowing how to make an absolutely strong and serviceable field gun, what would his chance be with the Ordnance Select Committee? So many minds are now devoted to gun-making, that about thirty inventions a week come before that committee for discussion. This committee consists of specially informed men, who, as we are quite disposed But the explosive force of gunpowder, a to believe, do their best. But the subject is knowledge of which is the first condition of inone about which the wiser a man is, the more quiry, has not been settled yet by the philosonumerous are his uncertainties. As for the phers. It has been variously estimated at anytest of proof, it is notorious that an inventor's thing between seven and seventy tons to the gun bursts only because of one out of a square inch. As Captain Boxer said, in the thousand reasons that do not affect the credit course of the discussion, "notwithstanding the or the principle of the invention. There is a most careful calculations, involving the highest rush against the old cast-iron artillery; the taste order of mathematics, made by those practically of the day is for guns that are built, not cast. acquainted with the subject, no satisfactory But who shall be gun-builder? We read the results had yet been obtained." The gentleman other day, that the bursting of a large gun at who opened the discussion fixed it at seventeen Dover had destroyed several artillery volunteers, tons on the square inch. Mr. Bidder, the Presiincluding the coroner who should have held the dent of the Institution, had calculated it at inquest on the killed, and, in the same news-twenty; Mr. Vignoles found it often nearer to paper, the false news that Mr. Whitworth's ideal thirty; and Professor Airy had thought that of a piece of ordnance had been rejected by under certain circumstances the force was much the select committee. Sir William Armstrong does not pass uncriticised. We are not suffered to settle down in the belief that it is he who is the happy benefactor of his country. As for the Lancaster guns, how they burst!-for reasons, of course, that have nothing to do with their merits. There were held, early in the year, half a dozen meetings of the institution of Civil Engineers, at which, on the test of a paper by Mr. James Atkinson Longridge in exposition of his own view of perfect artillery, nearly all the great authorities on the subject of artillery and the inventors entered into discussion with each other. Hardly an opinion was expressed that was not contradicted, and we might almost add no fact was stated that was not denied. The paper and discussion, giving the best extant view of the pros and cons of one of the great questions of the day, have been edited by Mr. Charles Manby and Mr. James Forrest, the Honorary Secretary and Secretary of the Institution, in a book which we have read carefully through. We have got out of it, a lively sense of the sufferings of the select committee, that must sit in judgment upon questions so unsettled.

Questions of range and aim are easily disposed of. It is almost admitted that the round shot from the old-fashioned artillery has in the beginning of its course a swifter pace than the shot from a rifled gun, and that it is, for close firing, to be preferred: while the long ranges are obtained by means for securing an extreme force of gunpowder which have to be borne and resisted by the metal of the gun itself. The gunpowder

1

greater. One great authority attributed to gunpowder, two forces: one statical, and one percussive. To which an equally great authority replied, that statically a pound of gunpowder cannot do more to generate speed than a pound of butter, and that if it were to act percussively it must destroy both shot and gun.

upon

The

As to what might be determined the strength of material, the results of experienceand most clearly in the case of cast iron-appear to vary within quite as wide a range. settled fact, however, is that the construction of gunpowder-proof artillery is a problem of which the solution, sure to be attained some day, seems to be only just beyond the reach of science in the present hour.

Also there is an admitted theory to work upon if necessary. It is being worked upon more or less closely, by recent inventors of artillery; but there are men of authority who, while they admit it, hold that for divers reasons we gain nothing by its application. The discussion to which we have referred was opened by Mr. Longridge, with an account of an invention based upon that theory, and admitted by all disputants to represent the most complete acceptance of it. Roughly expressed, the theory is this:-Metals have in their way, like india-rubber, tensile power, and when strained beyond it, they are broken. Now, in a solid cast-iron gun-assuming it to be uniform throughout-when the discharge takes place, the greatest strain is on the inner surface, and the strain lessens as we advance to the outside, through the thickness of the metal;

fallen upon Mr. Longridge's idea. Five years ago, he adds, when he mentioned the principle to Sir William. Armstrong, and his method of applying it, that gentleman said Mr. Brunel had also entertained the same idea, and had spoken to him with reference to making a gun on this principle, but finding another man engaged on it, had dropped the subject.

Mr. Longridge's method, in practice, was to coil a quantity of wire on a drum, fixed with its axis parallel to that of a lathe on which the gun was placed. On the axis of this drum, there was another drum, to which was applied a break so adjusted as to give the exact tension proper for each coil of wire. Accuracy of tension with hoops Mr. Longridge regards as impracticable. The process of shrinking on, he is convinced, is not to be depended upon. In his own method he looks upon the inner cylinder, about which wire is coiled, "simply as a means of confining the gases and of transmitting the internal pressure to the wire." His principle is, of course, applicable to the cylinders of powerful hydraulic presses. And five or six years ago, Captain Blakely, in the specification of a patent for ringed guns, referred to an outer covering of wire, or rods wound spirally in one, as means of strengthening old guns.

know much more when we hoop Armstrong guns, than they did of old who hooped Mons Meg and fired out of her more than three hundred pounds of granite in a lump. Cannon formed of prismatic bars of wrought iron hooped together were known in the old times of India, the oldest nation known. Mr. Longridge begins by recalling the names of Robins and Hutton from the past, and citing those of Nasmyth, Whitworth, Mallet, and Armstrong in the present. He describes his plan of a wire gun, and expounds it theoretically on high grounds of mathematics. The experimental gun that failed, was a mere specimen cylinder of which the end was blown off, as predicted. He has plugged close cylinders with government cannon powder, and has found that a cylinder with ten coils of wire on it could not be burst. Our improved gunpowder tries guns. A shot fired with John Chinaman's powder, General Anstruther said in the subsequent discussion, was sent three hundred yards, and a like shot, impelled with John Bull's powder, went twelve hundred yards. "It is said," observes Mr. Longridge, "that no sixty-eight pounder in the service can now be fired with safety with a full charge of powder. Our powder in old days was slower of combustion than it now is. We must not ascribe, therefore, to their being more dishonest traders now than of yore, the more Mr. Longridge's theory passed the debate unfrequent bursting of guns in the present day." disputed, though for reasons already cited there Several best authorities add the fact-if it was little expression of faith in the power of be one, for several as good authorities deny applying it. Mr. Bidder, the president, did not it-that a cannon just made is more likely to forget to remind the debaters, that wire could burst, than a cannon that has been set aside un-not only be applied with the greatest ease, used for a few years after its manufacture. In exactly in the way indicated by theory, but that the United States, guns of the same description, it is the strongest material known. Iron bears tried thirty days after casting, burst after about twice the strain as wire, that can be safely apeighty rounds; one, kept six years, endured plied to it when in the bar. eight hundred discharges before it burst; another, fired two thousand five hundred and eighty-two times, had not burst at all. Again, in old days past, their charge of powder was blown out of the guns unconsumed; now, thanks to the tightly fitting shot, every particle explodes before the shot has left the chase.

Mr. Gregory, who had been for two or three years a member of the Select Committee of Ordnance, thought that the hooped guns, if less perfect theoretically, were less liable to subsequent injury. Several disputants, indeed, suggested that if a wire gun were to be hit by a shot of the enemy, and three or four wires were to be broken, it would be disabled. Mr. Longridge denied that. He would also bind his wires with

sheath. Captain Blakely described trials withstood by his cast-iron gun, with three wroughtiron hoops shrunk on it. It was fired at Shoeburyness during nineteen months, and it proved by seven to one more durable than the cast-iron service gun, and three times better than the brass gun. But he agreed in praise of wire, and said, "Indeed, if monster cannon were wantedmortars to throw several tons several miles, for example-recourse must be had to wire."

Then, as to the material of cannon; Mr. Longridge recals the bursting of a steel gun of Mr. Krupp's at Woolwich, to which it is replied after-solder, and protect them under a cast-iron wards: This was because the gun was designed for a sixty-eight pound shot, and a shot weighing two hundred and sixty pounds was used. A twelve ponnd howitzer of Mr. Krupp's had been tried to the utmost, till it was itself blown high up into the air by the force of explosion, but it was not to be burst. There is no certainty about cast iron; in one case, a cast-iron gun sustained fifteen hundred or two thousand rounds: while another, said to have been cast from the same metal, under precisely the same conditions, did not last out a day. Mr. Longridge looks upon wrought iron and steel as improvements in material that do not touch the real defect, but which leave us with the want of a gun like his wire gun, that is mathematically adjusted to the different degrees of strain suffered by each part of its substance in the moment of explosion. Mr. Mallet, Captain Blakely, and others, had

Mr. Britten then told his experience as to the rifling of our ordinary service guns. It enabled shot half as heavy again to be used, conical instead of round, which might be shells able to carry a bursting discharge three times as great as that of round shells. The smooth bore gun varied in a range of twenty-seven hundred yards, as much as twenty-three yards from the line of aim. The same gun when rifled, at a