morbid and unreasonable; and, as a cruel Nemesis, discrediting his memory by charges and innuendos in gross exaggeration of the faults he deplored, Mr. Froude's sacrilegious abuse of the trust assigned to him as Carlyle's literary executor and custodian of Mrs. Carlyle's private letters.

It is with the third and fourth acts that Mr. Froude's latest publi. cation deals. None of his insinuations and interpolations, however, should mislead any impartial and intelligent reader as to the true significance of the letters printed by him.

Many of these, addressed to her husband when they were separated, and to divers friends and kinswomen, contain graphic descriptions of Mrs. Carlyle's domestic troubles, her worries with her servants, her house-cleaning embarrassments, the economies imposed on her by her scanty allowance for food and clothing, and so forth; but even the vigour and humour with which these minor details are set forth tend to make it plain that, like every other good and honest housekeeper, she found more pleasure than pain in mastering all her difficulties. "Our little household has been set up again at a quite moderate expense of money and trouble," she said in one letter, "wherein I cannot help thinking with a chastened vanity that the superior shiftiness and thriftiness of the Scotch character has strikingly manifested itself." That sentiment, expressed in one letter, is clearly implied in a hundred others. Until her health broke down, Mrs. Carlyle found agreeable opportunities for every laudable indulgence in "chastened vanity" over her more than ordinary shifty and thrifty housekeeping of the Scotch sort.

And she was a good housekeeper, not only for her own pleasure and credit, but also for her husband's sake. It was she who always urged him to work his best, not for money, and not even so much for fame, but for the solid good his work was to do. That he was sometimes harsh and often irritable she never concealed from herself and her intimate friends, but she accepted his infirmities as accessories of his genius, and loved and honoured him none the less on account of them. If, always somewhat selfish, he became more selfish as the years went on, this was partly due to her petting him and humouring him too much.

Nor do the letters, printed by Mr. Froude, at all confirm his assertion that Mrs. Carlyle was debarred from his intellectual society. They prove just the opposite. They prove that she heartily sympathised with all his literary work, not excluding even the "Friedrich," through which he plodded wearily quite as much at her bidding as in obedience to his rigid conscience. They prove, too, that all his best

literary friends were hers, and among the choicest letters now printed, joyous, graceful, and revealing full intellectual equality, are those to Stirling, Forster, and others, with whom she was in frequent personal intercourse, and to Emerson and others at a distance. "Carlyle and his wife live on beautiful terms," Emerson wrote in his diary while visiting England in 1847. "Their ways are very engaging, and in her bookcase all his books are inscribed to her, as they came from year to year, each with some significant lines."

Undoubtedly Mrs. Carlyle had some grievances against her husband, and her heart must have been very sore in 1855 and 1856 when she wrote the passages in her diary which Mr. Froude has been, to use no stronger term, disloyal enough to publish. These passages, however, and the contemporary letters show no more than that, a martyr to headaches and sleeplessness, she resented the patronage offered to her husband by Lady Ashburton and other aristocratic ladies, and was distressed by his liking to be flattered and feasted by them while she was too ill, and too much out of sorts in every way, to enjoy the favours that they rather grudgingly invited her to share with him. That, unfortunately, is a common accident in the careers of literary men, raised late in life to a social dignity, more or less spurious, in which their wives cannot or will not participate. In Carlyle's case it was a shortlived and comparatively blameless accident. Carlyle soon returned to the strait lines of domestic life, although, alas, to groan under the Herculean task of his "Friedrich" history, to find, when it was done, that his poor wife's life was nearly done too, and, then and afterwards, to bitterly repent of all his faults in not showing her by words and deeds that his love for her was as great as her great love for him. "Oh!' he often said to me after she was gone," writes Mr. Froud, "if I could but see her for five minutes to assure her that I had really cared for her throughout all that! But she never knew it, she never knew it.'"

Mrs. Carlyle began her diary in 1855 with these very characteristic words: "I remember Charles Buller saying of the Duchess de Praslin's murder, 'What could a poor fellow do with a wife who kept a journal but murder her?' There was a certain truth hidden in this light remark." Carlyle never thought of murdering his wife. When he knew too late how he had thoughtlessly grieved her by unkindness that was not meant to be unkind, he only reproached himself. It was reserved for Mr. Froude to handle the assassin's weapon. But happily the outrage he has attempted against those who believed him their friend, though it is causing a little commotion just now, will in the end injure no one but himself.

H. R. FOX BOURNE.

A

SCIENCE NOTES.

A SCIENTIFIC VETERAN.

BOUT a year ago I succeeded, with some difficulty, in obtaining a copy of an old classical treatise, Chevreul's "Recherches Chimiques sur le Corps Gras d'Origine animale," a series of papers published in a collected form in 1823, and I assumed, as a matter of course, that the author had long since joined his contemporaries, Cavendish, Priestley, Lavoisier, Wollaston, Davy, Dalton, Berzelius,

&c.

This is by no means the case, for only the other day he read a paper at the Academy of Sciences, in the course of which he said: Moreover, gentlemen, the observation is not a new one to me. I had the honour to mention it here, at a meeting of the Academy, on the 10th May, 1812."

Here is a chemist who was born before phlogiston was dead and buried, when the composition of air and water was newly discovered, and who is therefore just as old as modern chemistry, and is now vigorous enough in body and brain to still contribute to its advancement. May his venerable voice long continue to be heard from his old, old place in the Academy!

W

ELECTRIC FISHING.

HEN July has ended, and the darkness of night again comes over the lakes and fjords, the sturdy Scandinavian bonder patches and caulks his rough home-made boat, and fixes on its bow an overhanging fire grate preparatory to the prolific sport of fishspearing by night. The fire, made of resinous pine knots and beech bark, is lighted on the grate, which is placed as near to the surface of the water as possible. The fish swim towards the light, are speared and captured easily.

A trial has been made in France, by "Government permission," of a great improvement upon this. An electric light, enclosed, like Swan's, Edison's, &c., in a small glass globe, is sunk in the water, and the fish come to it with very commendable docility (from the

fisherman's point of view). Other boats then surround them with the nets, and the fête concludes fatally for the guests.

The account I read states that this method of capture is so deadly that "there seems to be much doubt whether it will ever be allowed as a recognised kind of fishing within territorial waters."

This appears to me a very odd mode of looking upon the question, much about the same as doubting whether an improvement in the mode of winning coal from the seam too easily, or extracting gold from quartz reefs with superlative facility, should be permitted.

If it prove to be practically as effectual as imagined, it might be made a means of preserving and enriching the fisheries, for with such advantage on the side of the fisherman, the Government might introduce most desirable restrictions, as regards the meshes of the nets and the sale of fish, whereby the wasteful destruction of young half-grown fish should be prevented.

If heavy penalties were inflicted on all who offered for sale any salmon under 10 lbs. weight, any turbot under 5 lbs., any red mullet under 12 ounces, and so on, our supplies of all these fish would be materially improved both in quantity and quality.

The electric light might thus be made a means of selecting our fish before catching them, to the mutual advantage of both the ichthyophagi and the fish themselves. The growth of fish is so rapid and their multiplication, when once they attain a fair growth is so prolific, that no possible human efforts, if restricted to full-grown specimens, could materially damage the prospective supplies.

J

FIREPROOF UPHOLSTERY.

UST a short note, by way of suggestion. Now that asbestos is obtained so abundantly, and the possibility of weaving it into fireproof fabrics is solved, why should noť all the upholstery of our libraries, picture galleries, museums, and other receptacles of unreplaceable treasures be made of this material?

Such a furnishing might have saved the Shakespeare Library, especially if the book-shelves had been made of an asbestos papiermaché, the production of which is fairly within the range of Birmingham ingenuity and enterprise.

S

ELECTRICITY AS A SOURCE OF POWER.

IGNORI BARTOLI and PAPASOGLI have recently made some experiments in which, by substituting carbon for the zinc of ordinary batteries, they obtain a respectable amount of electro

motive result, from the oxidation of the carbon at ordinary atmospheric temperatures.

The amount of force they now obtain is quite as great as that brought forth by their fellow-countrymen Galvani and Volta at their beginnings with metals. If we can make as much progress with cold carbon oxidation in voltaic batteries as we have made with zinc, electricity would really become the rival to steam of which so many are dreaming.

As it is, we burn coal to make steam, use that steam to drive dynamo, and then apply the electrical result to purposes to which the steam is directly applicable. Power is lost at every step, and the greater the number of steps the smaller the final mechanical result per ton of coal consumed.

Or we may obtain our electric power directly by the oxidation of a metal, such as zinc, in the voltaic battery; but here again the primary source of power is the carbon which was used to reduce or deoxidize the ore, and thus supply the metal for reoxidation. But zinc costs £16 per ton, and the chemical equivalent of zinc being 65, and that of carbon 12, twelve tons of carbon do as much combining work as 65 tons of zinc. Hydrogen has, weight for weight, twelve times the chemical energy of carbon, or 65 times that of zinc.

As coal consists (with the exception of a little ash and water) of carbon and hydrogen, the economy of a battery in which coal should be substituted for zinc is easily calculated.

Those who dream of superseding steam power by electric power should look in this direction instead of trusting to the joint-stock company mongers of the day, whose schemes consist of driving a steam engine to drive a dynamo to produce the electricity, and then use the electricity to do work that the steam engine might have done directly.

A vast amount of power is lost in converting the mechanical force of the steam engine into electrical force in the dynamo, and another similar loss in reconverting this force into mechanical force. The introduction of a storage battery only adds another source of loss. The electrical engineer would be wonderfully clever who should so combine these as to obtain at the working end of the series one-third of the power exerted by the steam engine that animates the plaything.

My readers need not be alarmed. I am not about to start a rival to these gentlemen in the form of a coal battery. I merely indicate the direction in which something practical may possibly be produced by the end of the twentieth or twenty-first century, i.e., when, at our