Natural Magic. WONDERS OF THE SUPERNATURAL. MANY of these Wonders are to be explained by the illusory appearances of the works of nature themselves being transformed into realities by the imagination of the observer. The river in the valley of Mount Ida, which every year ran with blood in commemoration of the death of Memnon, who fell in single combat with Achilles, is an example of this illusion. This fragment of Grecian fable originated in the more ancient tradition, that the river Adonis, which had its source in Mount Lebanon, was coloured annually with the blood of the unfortunate youth who perished by the mortal bite of the wild-boar which he pursued. An inhabitant of Byblos observed that the soil watered by the river was composed of a red earth, which, being dried by the heat, was carried by the wind into the river, and thus communicated to it the colour of blood. Among the poetical fictions of Greece, was the transformation into a rock, near the island of Corfu, of the Phoenician vessel which brought back Ulysses into Thrace. Pliny mentions that a rock in that locality actually had the appearance of a vessel in full sail, and a modern traveller has described this curious resemblance.-Bibliothèque Universelle, Littérature, tom. ii. p. 195. The foot of Budda is imprinted on Adam's Rock in Ceylon, and the impress of Gaudma's foot is revered among the Birmans. Dr. John Davy conjectures that the one is a work of art; and Colonel Sym regards the other as resembling more a hieroglyphic tablet than a natural phenomenon. The huge herculean rocckh of the same writers is but the exaggerated condor of America; and the monstrous kraken, which the northern mariners sometimes mistake, to their ruin, for an island is, probably, but an individual of the cetaceous tribe. The ancients believed that there were some animals which produced their young from the mouth: now the young of the rattlesnake, when alarmed, often take refuge in the mouth of their mother, and, of course, emerge again when the alarm has ceased. HYDROSTATIC WONDERS. The magic cup of Tantalus, which he could never drink, though the beverage rose to his lips; the fountain in the island of Andros, which discharged wine for seven days, and water during the rest of the year; the fountain of oil which burnt out to welcome the return of Augustus from the Sicilian war ; the empty urns which, at the annual feast of Bacchus, filled themselves with wine, to the astonishment of the assembled strangers; the glass tomb of Belus, which, after being emptied by Xerxes, would never again be filled; the weeping statues of the ancients; and the weeping virgin of modern times, whose tears were uncourteously stopped by Peter the Great when he discovered the trick; and the perpetual lamps of the magic temples, were all the obvious effects of hydrostatical pressure. -North British Review, No. 5. 66 THE BLOOD OF ST. JANUARIUS." One of the most imposing miracles of Rome is the blood of St. Januarius, which is said to have been preserved in a dry state for ages, but liquefied itself spontaneously, and rose and boiled at the top of the vessel which contained it. M. Salverte informs us that this blood of the saint is made by reddening sulphuric ether with alkanet root, and then saturating the liquid with spermaceti. This preparation will remain fixed at a temperature of 10o per cent above freezing, and melts and boils at 20°, a temperature to which it can be raised by holding the phial for some time in the hand. FIRE-PROOF FEATS OF THE ANCIENTS. The art of breathing fire, of protecting the human skin from the heat of melted metals or red-hot iron, and of rendering wooden buildings proof against fire, seems to have been practised from the earliest ages. Two hundred years before Christ, Eunus established himself as the leader of the insurgent slaves by breathing fire and smoke from his mouth; and Barchochebas, the ringleader of the revolted Jews in the reign of Hadrian, claimed to be the Messiah from his power of vomiting flames from his mouth. The priestesses of Diana Parasya, in Cappadocia, as Strabo states, commanded public veneration by walking over burning coals; and according to Pliny, the Hirpi family enjoyed the hereditary property of being incombustible, which they exhibited annually in the temple of Apollo on Mount Soracte. Pachymerus tells us that he has seen several accused persons prove their innocence by handling red-hot iron; and, in 1065, the monks produced as a witness, in the great church of Angers, an old man who underwent the proof of boiling water, and that too, as their reverences state, from the bottom of the boiler, where they had heated the water more than usual! Sylla could not set fire to the wooden tower raised on the Piræus by Archelaus; and Cæsar could not burn the tower of larch, which was doubtless made fireproof by a solution of alum. The use of certain chemical embrocations, the substitution of the fusible metal of Darcet, which melts at a low heat, and the application of plasters of asbestos to the feet, or of a saturated solution of alum to the skin, were among the arts thus called into use.-North British Review, No. 5.* MAGICAL DRINKS. The professors of ancient as well as modern magic found powerful auxiliaries in the soporific drugs and poisonous beverages which derange the intellectual as well as the physical condition of man. The waters of Lethe, and the beverage of Mnemosyne, which killed Timochares in three months after he had quaffed it in the cave of Trophonius, are examples of the soporific and stupefying drinks of the ancients. The Nepenthes of Homer, the Hyoscyamus Datura, the Solanum, the Potomantis, the Gelatophyllis, and the Achamenis of Pliny, the Ophiusia of the Ethiopians, and the Muchamore of Kamtschatka, were all the instruments of physical and intellectual degradation. The Old Man of the Mountain, in the time of the Crusades, is said to have enchanted his youthful followers by narcotic and exhilarating draughts. The Hindoo widow is supposed to ascend the funeral pile physically as well as morally fortified against pain. The victims of the Inquisition, similarly prepared, are said to have frequently slept in the midst of their torments; and M. Taboureau assures us that the merciful jailors made their prisoners swallow soap dissolved in water (the vehicle doubtless of more powerful medicaments), to enable them to bear the agonies of torture.--North British Review, No. 5. SOUNDING STONES AND SPEAKING HEADS. Pausanias tells us that a marvellous stone was placed as a sentinel at the entrance of a treasury, and that robbers were scared away by the trumpet-accent which it sent forth. Mineralogy presents us with several stones which have the property of resonance; and it is probable that a stone of this description was so suspended as to be struck by a metallic projection when the external door of the treasury was opened. Strong boxes or safes have been made to emit sounds to alarm their owners when broken into surreptitiously. M. Salverte states that Louis XV. possessed one of these, and that Napo * In an eloquent paper attributed to Sir David Brewster. leon was offered one at Vienna in 1809; and we have seen similar boxes which, when opened by a false key, throw out a battery of cannon and shoot the intruder. The Clink-stone indicates by its very name its sonorous qualities. The red granite of the Thebaid in Egypt possesses similar properties; and so musical are the granitic rocks on the banks of the Orinoco, that their sounds are ascribed to witchcraft by the natives, while the stones themselves are called by the missionaries loxas de musica. Mr. Mawe informs us that there are large blocks of basalt in Brazil which emit very clear sounds when struck; hence the Chinese employ them in the fabrication of musical instruments. Several years since, an artisan of Keswick exhibited a "Rock Harmonicon," composed of slabs of stone, upon which difficult pieces of music are performed. The Speaking Heads of the ancients contained the terminations of tubes which communicated with living orators, concealed either behind them or at a distance. The speaking head of Orpheus, of such celebrity among the Greeks and Persians, uttered in this manner its oracular responses at Lesbos. Pope Gerbert constructed a speaking head of brass, about A.D: 1000; and Albertus Magnus completed another, which not only moved but spoke. Lucian tells us that the statue of Esculapius was made to speak by the transmission of a voice from behind, through the gullet of a crane, to the mouth of the figure. An examination of the statues at Alexandria indicated the same process; and when the wooden head spoke through a speaking-trumpet at the court of Charles II., a popish priest, to whose tongue it owed its efficacy, was found concealed in the adjoining apartment. Sir A. Smith distinctly heard the sounds issuing from the granite statue of Memnon in Egypt in the morning: these sounds are ascribed by others to the same cause as the sound in granite rocks. M. Salverte regards them as wholly artificial, and the work of Egyptian priestcraft; and he contrives a complicated apparatus of lenses, levers, and hammers, by which he supposes that the rays of the sun, as the prime mover, produce the marvellous sounds: "For as old Memnon's image, long renown'd Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination, book i. p. 109. But the most celebrated of these acoustic wonders is the Jebel Narkous, or Mountain of the Bell," a low sandy hill in the peninsula of Mount Sinai, in Arabia Petræa, which gives out sounds varying from that of a humming-top to thunder, I while the sand, either from natural or artificial causes, descends its sloping flanks. From an analogous phenomenon recently observed in our own country by Hugh Miller the geologist, that at Jebel Narkous is thought to be the accumulated sounds occasioned by the mutual impact of the particles of sand against each other.-Selected and abridged from the North British Review, No. 5. MAGNETISM AND MAHOMET'S COFFIN. With the magnetical knowledge of the ancients, M. Salverte ranks that mariner's compass which, after Mr. W. Cooke, he supposes to be the "intelligence” which animated and conducted the Phoenician navy; and he conceives that the arrow which enabled Abaris to traverse the earth by an aerial route was nothing more than a magnetic needle. The great miracle of modern times, the suspension of Mahomet's coffin in the air, was more than once performed in the heathen temples of the ancients. Now a magnet suspending a weight may have been exhibited as a decoy to the ignorant; but the coffins, if they were suspended at all, were suspended with cords or wires, which, by a judicious arrangement of the lights in reference to the position of the spectator, could be easily rendered invisible. CHINESE MAGIC MIRRORS. These Mirrors are called Magical because, if they receive the rays of the sun on their polished surface, the characters or flowers, in relief, which exist on the other side, are faithfully represented. The secret of their manufacture is thus explained by Ou-tseu-hing, who lived between 1260 and 1341: "The cause of this phenomenon is the distinct use of fine copper and rough copper. If, on the under side, there be produced by casting in a mould the figure of a dragon in a circle, there is engraved deeply on the disc a dragon exactly similar. Then the parts which have been cut are filled with rather rough copper; and this is, by the action of fire, incorporated with the other metal, which is of a finer nature. The face of the mirror is next prepared, and a slight coating of tin is spread over it. If the polished disc of a mirror so prepared be turned towards the sun, and the image be reflected on a wall, it presents the clear portion and the dark portion, the one of the fine and the other of the rough copper. Ou-tseu-hing adds that he had ascertained this by a careful inspection of the fragments of a broken mirror. FABULOUS ANIMALS. Cuvier considers the greater number of the unknown animals of the ancients to have an origin purely mythological, of |