excite a fire to sufficient heat for metallurgical operations without vitrifying parts of the bricks or stones of the furnace.

A Nuremberg glasscutter happened to let some aquafortis fall upon his spectacles, and noticed that the glass was corroded and softened where the acid had touched it. Taking the hint, he made a liquid, then drew some figures upon a piece of glass, covered them with varnish, applied his corroding fluid, and cut away the glass round his drawing. When he removed the varnish the figures appeared raised upon a dark ground; and etching upon glass was added to the ornamental arts.

According to common report, mezzotinto engraving was suggested by a soldier being observed one morning to rub off the barrel of his musket the rust it had contracted from exposure to the previous night's dew. The observer whether Prince Rupert or not is one of the doubts of history-perceived on examination that the dew had left on the surface of the steel a number of very minute holes, giving the appearance of a dark engraving, part of which had been here and there already rubbed away by the soldier. He therefore conceived the idea that it would be practicable to find a way of covering a plate of copper with little holes, which, being inked and laid upon paper, would undoubtedly produce a black impression; while, by scraping away in different degrees such parts of the surface as might be required, the paper would be left white where there were no holes. Pur

suing this thought, after various experiments, he invented a kind of steel roller covered with teeth, which, being pressed against the copper plate, indented it in the desired manner. The roughness thus occasioned had only to be scraped down where necessary in order to produce any gradation of shade.

One day nearly three hundred years ago, a poor optician was working in his shop in the town of Middelburg, in the Netherlands, his children helping him or amusing themselves with the tools and objects lying about, when suddenly his little girl exclaimed: “Oh papa, see how near the steeple comes!"

Anxious to learn the cause of the child's amazement, he turned toward her, and saw that she was looking through two lenses, one held close to her eye, the other at arm's length; and calling her to his side, he noticed that the eye lens was plano-concave, while the other was plano-convex. Taking the two glasses, he repeated his daughter's experiment, and soon discovered that she had chanced to hold the lenses apart at the proper focus, thus producing the wonderful effect that she observed. His quick wit saw in this a wonderful discovery, and he at once set about making use of his new knowledge of lenses. Ere long he had fashioned a tube of pasteboard, in which he set the glasses at their proper focus, and so the telescope was invented.

The following year, 1609, Galileo, while in Venice, heard of the discovery; and, being greatly struck with the importance of such an instrument, soon discovered the principle of lenses in a shifting tube, and made a telescope for his own use. To having been the first astronomer in whose hands so valuable a gift was placed, Galileo owed both his reputation and persecution.

Among the many traditions concerning William Lee and the stockingframe is one that he was expelled from the university for marrying, and that, being very poor, his wife was obliged to contribute toward the housekeeping by knitting. It was while watching the motion of her fingers that he conceived how to imitate those movements by a machine.

Arkwright accidentally derived the idea of spinning by rollers from seeing a red-hot bar elongated by being passed between two rollers.

The ordinary practice of taking a bath solved for Archimedes the question of how to test the purity of the gold in Hiero's crown. He observed that when he stepped into a full bath the quantity of water which overflowed was equal to the bulk of his body, and it occurred to him that the worth of the crown might be tested by such means. He thereupon made two masses of the same weight as the crown, one

of gold, the other of silver, and immersed them separately in a vessel filled to the brim, measuring exactly the quantity of water that overflowed in each case. Having found by this means what measure of the fluid answered to the quantity of each metal, less in the case of the gold than of the silver-the bulk of the former being less, weight for weight-he next immersed the crown itself, and found that it caused more water to overflow than the gold, but less than the silver. Having found the difference between the two masses of pure gold and silver, in certain known proportions, he was able to compute the real quantity of each metal in the crown, and thus discovered the fraud that had been practised on the king, to whom he hurried, exclaiming, "Eureka! Eureka!" ("I have found it! I have found it!"), an exclamation that has ever since been used to express exultation over a discovery.

Coming down now to our own time, the account of the discovery of saccharine, one of the numerous by-products of the gas-maker's refuse, whose sweetness is three hundred times more intense than that of cane-sugar, reads almost like a romance.

Dr. Fahlberg had entered the Johns Hopkins University in America in order to devote himself exclusively to a study of the chemistry of coal-tar derivatives. Some months had passed, when one evening at tea-time he detected an intensely sweet flavor upon his bread and butter. He traced the sweetness to his fingers, to his hands, and to his coat-sleeves; and it dawned upon him that it must have been derived from one of the new compounds which he had that day succeeded in producing. He promptly returned to his laboratory and tasted the contents of every vessel with which he had been working. His idea was correct. One of his beakers contained the sweet material.

Those who are conversant with the fascinating philosophy of Bishop Berkeley may remember the following passage in his "Siris," which, read by the light of present knowledge and the imposing list of valuable substances-oils,

dyes, perfumes, flavorings, febrifuges, etc.-now obtained in the process of coal-tar distillation, is almost prophetic:

The virtues of tar-water flowing, like the Nile, from a secret and occult source, brancheth into innumerable channels, conveying health and relief wherever it is applied."

Professor Röntgen came upon his marvelous X-rays-which have opened out new fields of research in physical science, besides being of far-reaching practical utility in surgery, and other departments-quite by chance.

He

was experimenting in the dark with a Crookes vacuum tube, which was covered with some sort of cloth. A strong electric current was passed through it, while close by was some prepared photographic paper, but no camera. Next day he noticed several lines on this paper for which he could not account. By restoring everything to exactly the same condition as on the preceding day, he was able to ascertain the real origin of these mysterious marks. It is curious that Shakespeare should have written in "Hamlet:"

"Sit you down; you shall not budge;
You go not, till I set you up a glass
Where you may see the inmost part of you."
ACT III., Sc. 4.

There is a pathetic story, perhaps not generally known, concerning one who anticipated Daguerre, Fox Talbot, and all other experimenters in solving the problem of fixing the fleeting image of the camera. While half the Academy of Sciences in Paris were struggling with the difficulty, a poorlyclad, half-famished-looking lad left a plate at the shop of Chevalier, the optician, on the Quai de l'Horloge, which proved that he had succeeded where all others had failed. He promised to return next day and show how the victory had been obtained. But from that hour to this he was never seen. Probably he fell sick and was buried in a pauper's grave, and the world will never know the name of the first professor of sun-picturing, or the details of its earliest romance.

"I was singing," says Mr. Edison, "to the mouthpiece of a telephone, when the vibration of the voice sent the

fine steel point into my finger. That set me thinking. If I could record the actions of the point and send the point over the same surface afterward, I saw no reason why the thing should not talk. I tried the experiment first on a strip of telegraph paper, and found that the point made an alphabet. I shouted the words 'Halloa! halloa!' into the mouthpiece, ran the paper back over the steel point, and heard a faint Halloa! halloa!' in return. I determined to make a machine that would work accurately, and gave my assistants instructions, telling them what

I had discovered. They laughed at me. That's the whole story. The phonograph is the result of the pricking of a finger."

Though the examples here given by no means exhaust the roll of accidental revelation, they suffice to show that invention to use the word in its now generally accepted sense-must be preceded by discovery, in the same way as production is a sine quâ non of manufacture. In each case nature provides the material, leaving the execution to the genius, art, and subtlety of man.Chambers's Journal.

"POET" is a word which naturally reminds us of the names of Kalidas and Bhababhuti, Shakespeare and Milton, Goethe and Schiller, names dearer to us than anything we have ever known. Each one of these names instils in us a feeling of unalloyed love and affection for the great masters of poetry. We forget the thousands of miles that lie between our birthplace and theirs. We forget the centuries that stand in the way of our direct and palpable touch with them. No traces are to be found of the ages when these dear children of God came to us with their divine messages-for God's message comes to the world only through two sources, the pen of the poet and the mouth of the prophet-all have been submerged in the span of that great enemy of man called Time which divides us from them; but their names are a living memory; they stand before us delivering their heavenly message. Why is all this? That is a question which comes naturally to the mind of every lover of art, poetry, and literature. None of us have seen these great masters, the most perfect specimens of human genius. We should all give anything to see them. But how many of us should care to see that Kalidas who was striking with his axe on the root of that branch upon which he was sit

ting, or that Shakespeare whose early genius was discerned in his skill as a deer-stealer? It is not that Kalidas, neither is it that Shakespeare, of whom we are enamored. The Kalidas who stealthily saw the first bloom of love. in the heart of the lovely, simplehearted girl Sakuntala; who made Sakuntala establish a relationship with a roe by adopting it as her child; who witnessed her take the dust off the eyes of her future lord with her lips; who in the thick of the forest saw and felt for the love pangs of young Sakuntala's heart, and gave her his sympathy-it is that Kalidas whom we long to see. It is that Shakespeare, to see whom we should give all our possessions of this mundane world, who bore witness to the sufferings of disappointment of young Hamlet-a prince indeed, and a prince of men; who witnessed the cruel assassination of guileless and loving Desdemona by Othello; who amply congratulated himself on having been able to mete out a condign punishment to the unfaithful, treacherous Lady Macbeth; who made Miranda confess that her ambition was humble because she had loved Ferdinand, the third person" she ever saw, and the first one she sighed for."

Speaking plainly, it is his poetry

that makes the name of the poet a dear one to us. If I am asked the question, What is poetry? I should say, "Tell me what is not poetry, and I will tell you what it is." It is easier to tell what poetry is when we know what it is not. I will now attempt to make out what is not poetry. Byron has told us,

66

Freedom's battle once begun,

Bequeathed by bleeding sire to son,
Though baffled oft, is ever won,"

and it is truly said that genuine poetical powers are discernible in these three lines. The question will be asked, What is that in these three lines which is poetry? They have rhyme; it is clear that the poet thinks slavery to be an undesirable bondage-a curse; the poet's love of freedom is also plain. Which one of the three things that we see in the lines is poetry? If a verse, simply for the sake of its rhyme and melody, comes to be recognized as poetry, I am afraid our great masters, Shakespeare and Milton, would have to rest contented with the appellation of mere versifiers or poetasters, and would have to retire from the contest to make room for some divine Muse like our present Poet-Laureate or the poet of Asia and of the World. We often call these advertisements, in perhaps unblemished rhyme, poetry, and more often their writers poets. Even sublime thoughts only are not poetry. If they were so, certainly Bacon and Spenser, Voltaire and Rousseau, Carlyle and Emerson should be among the great poets of the world, or the following lines of J. Q. Adams should make him a great poet:

"This hand, to tyrants ever sworn the foe, For freedom only deals the deadly blow; Then sheathes in calm repose the vengeful blade,

For gentle peace in Freedom's hallowed shade."

Adams's appreciation of freedom does not fall far short of Byron's, but that is a very poor reason why the former's four lines must be deemed as highly poetic as the three of the latter. It is difficult to establish a man's poetic powers even when in his verses there is a remarkable combination of perfect

tions or passions." I shall be asked why is it that I prefer to call Byron's lines real poetry, and not those of Adams? What is present in Byron's three lines which is absent in the lines of Adams? There is rhyme in both. But there is one feature-a grand transcendental feature in Byron's

which we fail to find in Adams's. And that is Byron's emotion, his love of freedom. This love of freedom is not his opinion; it is not a scientifically proven truth to him; it is not a discovery; it is his passion. The strength of this passion is a clear evidence of his high poetic powers. Without this passion his lines are dry and insipid, anything but poetry. Every one of us has noticed on various occasions that the awakening of passionate eloquence of a true orator simultaneously awakens the emotions and passions in the minds of his audience. John Stuart Mill,

that great connoisseur of human character, observed this very clearly. The great scholars and critics of ancient Sanskrit literature have also said that this passion is the real test of poetry. "Bâkyam Rasâtmakam Kabyam (Passionate words are poetry). Poetry is a combination of thought with emotion. Poetry has, indeed, nothing to do beyond what I call emotion or passion. It is no business of poetry to lead us to a new system of thought; let science and philosophy do that; poetry undertakes to kindle in us new sentiments and new emotions as well as the dormant passions.

When we keep these characteristics of poetry clearly before us, to single out true and genuine poetry becomes easier. A study of what does not awaken in us a feeling of emotion is no

more poetry than Euclid's definition of a point or of an acute angle. The elegiac verse that fails to inspire in us a sense of affection and a feeling of deep sorrow is a poetry not worth the name. The lyric that cannot make us offer our deepest sympathy to the individual emotions of the poet is nothing short of versification. We have not unfrequently heard many a man of culture talk glibly about an author of some prose work being the happy possessor of poetic gifts, simply because, as it happens, it is impossible to make any improvement upon the beauty of his narrative. I have a serious quarrel with them I fail to see why poetic powers must be necessary for arranging a story in, prose or perfecting a narrative! Intelligence and imagination are all that is needful. Novels of this description are not poetry because they are mere narrative compositions, and as such are no part of what I call the emotions or passions of poetry. John Stuart Mill has told us that the period of our life, childhood, when the eagerness to hear stories and fables is most keen, is the period when our faculty to appreciate poetry is least developed. "Aesop's Fables," "Tales from the Arabian Nights," "Fairy Tales," "Robinson Crusoe," and "Adventures of Don Quixote' are the poetry of our childhood. Then we appreciate them more than Milton's "Lycidas" or Tennyson's "In Memoriam," Shelley's" Skylark" or Gray's "Elegy."

There is a popular belief that it is in childhood that we can study poetry with the greatest profit, because, as is said, it is then that we receive impressions quickest; and a study cannot fail to leave a deep and lasting impression upon us even though we may not appreciate it as a matter of fact we do not. This is a wholly contradictory and erroneous belief. It seems difficult to understand how a study that has not been enjoyed because not appreciated can leave an impression upon any person. Impression without appreciation is a contradiction. It is erroneous also, because in childhood the first bud of those feelings and emotions upon which

alone poetry plays is yet unborn, much less taken shape. There are others who believe that a true poet must be gifted with the power of studying human nature, manners and customs, closely and accurately. This appears to be hardly anything like the qualification or a gift which the true poet must possess. Professor Edward was an admittedly great philosopher even though he could not tell his own horse from those of his friends. In like manner, it is perfectly reasonable that one completely ignorant of human nature, manners and customs, can be a poet too. Indeed, when I recall the fact that most poets have been utterly indifferent to human nature, human manners, and human desires, if not complete ascetics in regard to them, I might say without fear of contradiction that the exactly opposite view is nearer the truth. A knowledge of human nature is a qualification needful for the novelist, whose real art it is to paint truly human character, act and deed, whose real skill is in being able to describe graphically the feelings of others. Very different is the function of the poet. The novelist gives us a true picture of others. besides himself, whereas the poet presents us with a picture of the waves and emotions of his own heart. For lack of incidents, which in his hands. take the shape of a plot, the novelist is resourceless. But the poet cares no more for those indispensable materials. of the novelist than he does for opinions opposed to the dictates of his imagination. He takes a handful of sawdust and makes a present of it to us a lump of gold. A formidably dark and gloomy night, an uninhabited desert or a thick forest, a solitary dilapidated castle or a superb palace, in them an exquisitely beautiful woman with all the charms and virtues that is in the power of the Almighty to bestow upon a dear child of His, these are some of the materials without which the novelist is ill at ease, without which his imagination cannot play, without which the sentimental feelings of the novel reader cannot be awakened. But the mere sight of the new cloud was the cause of an overflow of sentiments and