TABLE TALK.

Grey River Argus, Volume VIII, Issue 566, 2 September 1869, Page 4

TABLE TALK.

(From Once a Week.) Prodigy lovers will be gratified by the intelligence that a fall of what in other days have been called bloody rain has lately been witnessed. A few weeks back the Neapolitans found their streets stained with red, and their garments spotted, with sanguinary-looking drops. Examined closely, the coloring matter of this shower was found to consist of small red grains, sensibly round, and varying from the two-hundredth to the four-hundredth part of an inch in diameter. When the mysterious element of this fall was dispelled, it was clear that the rusty particles were really dust specks drawn up hy the wind from African deserts and borne with it across the Mediterranean. This is not an unprecedented phenomenon. Twenty years ago a French philosopher collected a large quantity of dust of the same quality, and probably from the same source, from a house top at Valence ; and, again, a German found the peculiar African grit in Berlin. These facts show how pests and plagues, and the germs of disease may be carried from country to country by the transporting power of the wind ; it is not always inanimate dust that is thus wafted to immense distances. A shower of insects fell at Araches, in Savoy, last Jannary, which, upon examination, proved to be of a species peculiar to the forests of Central France ; and a few years back, Turin was visited by millions of larvae of a fly found nowhei'e but in the Island of Sardinia. These are recent and well proven cases ; many more striking instances might be collected from chronicles of things curious. I like to see the itenerant inspectors of weights and measures at work in my district, they so often show us a side of human nature that would otlierwi.se be invisible. And don't they often unearth a Pharisee 1 There is a small tradesman in my neighborhood who is known by a habit he has of sending home his goods wrapped in leaves of the Xible. He enfolds pats of butter with the Psalms, and gives a chapter of Revelations to be digested with his customer's cheese. At rirst his patrons thought him a heathen thus to desecrate the sacred pages ; but it turned out that he did it with good intent, professedly in order to disseminate the Scriptures. So he came to be esteemed for his seeming uprightness. But, alas for mortal frailty ! familiarity, even with good, seems to breed contempt for it. When the weight inspectors came to examine this pious man's balance, they found that it was so falsely adjusted as to rob half an ounce from every article weighed by it. There must have been some way of paying for the Bibles. A trumped-up charge (which was dismissed) against a clergyman for alleged 1 drunkenness, is only worth mentioning, from an extraordinary expression of opinion in the judgment of the Bishop of Manchester, as read by Dr. Bayf ord. The clergyman's medical attendant stated that he had sanctioned a prescription of rum and milk for him, as he was in a weak and nervous state. Whereupon the episcopal judgment is, that it was remarked as a curious eireu instance, and one evidently open to misconstruction, that the defendant should have persisted in the use of such a medicine as rum and milk, instead of adopting some remedy equally efficacious and less equivocal. What remedy would the right reverend gentleman suggest to the medical profession ? The use of rum and milk has been long recognised as of the greatest value in cases of delicate or consumptive patients ; and it has been found to sustain life when all other means have failed. Why should two teaspoonsfnl of rum in a tumbler of milk be an equivocal remedy 1 That is a grand idea of Mr Crampton's for making invulnerable forts. He proposes to form them of cast iron, but instead of building them up of blocks and pieces, j to cast them whole, and what is more, to found them in situ. Say a tower of defeuce is wanted anywhere upon the many exposed parts of our coast, Mr Crompton will go to the spot with all the raw material of an iron foundry. He will erect on the intended site a mould for his casting, and around it he will build a series of cupola f urnaces for the melting of the iron— eight, ten, or a dozen, as the size and thickness of the metal waits may require. The hollow form of the fort being completed, hundreds of tons of iron will be liquified ; and then all the stupendous crucibles will, at a signal, simultaneously discharge their contents into the mould. The great mass of metal will be left for a week or two to cool, and then the bxick and mortar matrix and all the cupolas will be cleared away, leaving the fort without a seam. To the modern engineer nothing is impossible, at least on paper : to the great untaui'ht in these matters this simple method of castlecasting may recall the Irishman's plan for making cannons, Get some holes and put ■ a lot of iron round Van. ' A species of nature-printing has lately

come into vogue among decorative artists that deserves mention, They who notice papeivhangings in imitation of wood^ panneling may have seen some modern specimens, in which the grain of the wood appears with a fidelity far beyond the reach of art. In some of even the cheaper descriptions of oak=stained papers, all the veins and fibre-marks are re-produced with exquisite beauty, and a reality that puzzles everybody who does not know how the work is done, The fact is, that the wood-grain prints itself, A finelymarked plank is taken, and its surface, after being perfectly planed, is treated with a chemical preparation which has the effect of opening the pores of the wood and, at the same time, of thoroughly hardening the fibre. In this way an intaglio printing-office is obtained, from which fac-similes can be worked by hundreds, just as from a copper-or-steel-plate engraving. The natural impressions are as far beyond the combings and scratchings of the hand-grainer as are photographs beyond the works of the silhouette-cutter. Where it is desirable to exhibit the grain on an irregular surface, the paper copy is used as a transfer ; it is wrapped around the receiving object while the color is moist, and then withdrawn, so as to leave its impression behind it. The inventors have called this process xylography; a name, by the way, which has already been applied to the wood-engraver's art.