Amusing and Instructive.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 7, Issue 348, 8 February 1866, Page 1

Amusing and Instructive.

Invention ot Photography. Mr Thomas Wedgwood, who was never married, died in the year 1805, at Gunville, Dorsetshire. 'He was a man of considerable scientific attainments. During his father's lifetime he prosecuted his studies with his aid and that of Alexander Chisholm, and made such progress in researches into the properties of light, &c., that in 1792, Sycars before the death of Josiah, he communicated to the Royal Society an account of his “ Experiments and Observations on the Production of Light from different bodies by Heat and Attraction.” His continued experiments and researches resulted in the discovery of the process of photography, and in 1802, in conjunction with Sir Humphrey Davy, who assisted him in his experiments, he made those discoveries known by a paper printed in the ‘‘ Journal of the Royal Institution of Great Britain,” under the title of “An Account of a Method of Copying Paintings upon Glass, and of making Profiles by the Agency of Light upon Nitrate cf Silver ; with observations by H. Davy." This is the first recorded attempt at fixing the images ofthecaraeraobscura (which Wedgwood appears to have used from a youth) oy the chemical influence of light. But for the death of this deep-thinking and wonderful man (Thomas Wedgwood) which took place about two years after this time, doubtless, the world would have largely bonefitted by his labors in this particular field. As it was he died before ho had succeeded in permanently fixing the pictures ho had obtained, and it was left to later experimentalists to perfect that wonderful art which he had discovered, and of whose success ho had laid 1 lie foundation.—Jewitt’s Life of Wedgwood. A gentleman who had long been subject to the nocturnal visitation of thieves in his orchards, wishing to preserve his property without endangering any one’s life, procured from an hospital the leg of a subject, which he placed one evening in a steel trap in his garden, and next morning sent the crier round the town to announce that “ the owner of the leg left in Mr —— ’s grounds la.-t night, might receive it upon application.” He was never robbed again.

A Few Simple Questions. —Did you ever know anything used as a comparison to trembling hut an aspen-leaf ? Did you ever see the chains which arc said occasionally to bind the freeborn mind ? Did you ever light your cigar with the flames of love? Was ever your face browned by the sunshine of prosperity : or have you been obliged to resort to an umberella by the dark clouds of adversity ? Did you ever see an alabaster brow, an adamantine soul, and icy luart. or an iron frame?

Woxdebfcl Casike Fecusdut- —A bitch of the cross Newfoundland breed, belongingtoMaster Walter Mason, littered, we are informed, sixteen fine large healthy pups on the 16th inst. The circumstance is all the more extraordinary as it was (he first litter of the animal.—New Zealand Herald, January 17.

The Ivewsaater ArPEKCiATED.— "Without, my newspaper, life would narrow itself to the small limits of my personal experience?, and humanity be compressed into the 10 or 15 people I mis with. Now, 1 refuse to accept this. I have not a sixpence in consols, but I want to know how they stand. I was never—l never in all likelihood shal be—in Japan ; but I have an intense curiosity to know what our troops did at Yokohama. I deplore the people who suffered at that railroad smash : and I sympathise with the newly-married couple so beautifully depicted in the “Illustrated,” as they drove off in a chaise and four, the bald, old gent at the ha!! door waving them a last adieu. I like the letters of the correspondents, wish their little grievances about unpunctual trains, or some unwat routable omission in the Lit urgy. I even like the people who chronicle the rainfall, and record the little facts about the mildness of the season. As for advertismeis, I regard them as the glass and mirror of the age. Show me but one page of the “ Wants” of any country, and I engage myself to give a sketch of the current civilization of the period. What glimpses of rare interiors do we gain by these brief paragraphs! llow full of euggestiveness and of story wo they!—Blackwood’s Magazine.