whom bankrupt may apply by petition. Bankrupt to be allowed 7 per cent, if his estate pays 12s. 6d. in the pound; 5 per cent, if 10s.; and under that, 3 per cent.

Those who have been bankrupts before, or taken the benefit of the act, not entitled to allowance; nor persons who have lost 204. in one day, or 2001. in one year, by gaming.

Act to extend to Aliens and Denizens, but not Ireland and Scotland--Act not to take effect until the 1st of May, 1825.

ASPARAGUS.

There is not any vegetable sold in our markets at so high a price as asparagus, and there is not any so easily produced, if the proper mode of cultivation were adopted. The former method of rounding up the beds is entirely unnecessary, and is rather a disadvantage than otherwise. The following is believed to be the best mode of raising this excellent and everwelcome vegetable. Select a flat, rich, loamy soil, plant the roots six inches asunder in lines, and in beds of such dimensions as may be judged most convenient, and in as warm a situation as your grounds afford. Asparagus is (as botanists and horticulturalists say) a maritime plant, and the most suitable and congenial dressing is ocean water, or brine much diluted. This has a further excellent operation, inasmuch as it destroys the weeds which would otherwise infest the beds. The best Autumn covering is what the farmers upon our salt rivers call "sedge"---perhaps salt hay is equally good.

HOUSE PAINTING.

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which purpose amber is generally used in greater or less proportions, pa according to the shade required. A very few experiments with reds, yellows, blues, and browns, will soon render a novice quite able to form a good stone-colour, which is generally preferable within the house, and always without, to a perfect white.

BLACK,-either lamp-black or ivoryblack will mix well with oil; but ivory-black, properly prepared, is preferable: mix it with boiled oil and turpentine only---it will dry the sooner; and, before using it, brush the work intended to be painted, well over with size; the colour should be laid on thin: you may do it twice over in less time than it will take drying, if done once too thick.

RED,--but before we speak of this colour, it may be well to observe all colours that (except black) should be worked up with more or less white-lead, to give them a consistency; for, although some colours may be used ground with oil and turpentine alone, the work wants body, and will not last. Vermilion is the most delicate and brilliant of all reds, being of a perfect scarlet colour; those who mix whiting with white-lead, also mix red-lead with vermilion this article goes a good way, and therefore should be used genuine.

LAKE is the best dark red, being almost a crimson; it grinds freely, and lies with a good body; it should be well ground, otherwise it will lose its brilliancy, and worked pretty stiff.

RED-LEAD is generally used for ordinary purposes; it bears a good body

2

FROM A CORRESPONDENT.

A new article called Circassian, or Cassinette, is now manufacturing in the neighbourhood of Huddersfield, Yorkshire, in very considerable quantities, principally for exportation to the continent; the warp is of cotton, and the weft of wool, and all colours, quantities, and widths, may be had. It wears well, and in some colours looks very genteel. The chief recommendations of this fabric are its cheapness, durability, and incombustibility; not that it will not burn, but it takes fire with difficulty, and is on that account well adapted for children s wear. The Cassinette makes a pleasant dress, particularly in winter; and though it is little more than the same price as calico, it will wear three times as long, and save a fourth dress in washing.

[We hope soon to see a sample of this article, when we will report upon it.-EDIT.]

OX GALLS.

Black and blue coats, or other garments, after being brushed clean from the dirt, will be much brightened, and their colour revived, by brushing them well over with ox gall, and hanging them in the sun to dry; this is the chief ingredient in the liquid called Black Reviver, only to it they add a small quantity of colouring matter. Speaking of ox galls, they have a powerful detersive quality: there is sometimes found in the gall a substance much prized by artists and very valuable, called gall-stone. We suggest to those who may feel an interest in the matter, the possibility of forming this article artificially, by driving off the aqueous particles in the gall by the heat of an oven, by precipitation, or with the aid of alkalies, by crystalization: we have not time ourselves to try the experiment; but

if successful, it would well reward the labour. We shall be glad to hear that it has been tried, and succeeded.

A HAPPY FAMILY.

There is a man travelling, and exhibiting in one cage, a dog, a cat, a mouse, and a sparrow; they live together like brothers and sisters. These four animals sleep in the same bed, and eat at the same dish: the dog, indeed, serves himself first, but he does not forget the cat, who has the complaisance to give to the mouse certain little tit-bits much to his taste, and to leave to the sparrow the crumbs of bread, which the others do not envy him. The dog licks the cat, the cat combs the dog, the mouse plays with the cat's paw, and the sparrow flutters high and low, pecking sometimes one and sometimes another. It would, perhaps, be well for the unity of society, if certain of its members had been brought up in such a cage.

pocket, asked the price of one about as long as his pocket was deep. “A guinea," was the reply of the person in the shop. A guinea!" ejaculated our astonished friend; "how much does it weigh ?" "Near three pounds," said the shopman. "What! seven shillings a pound for a sausage! No, no," he exclaimed, "I won't eat sevenshilling pieces in that way," leaving the shop and the sausage. We know not what the prime cost of this article may be, but we know there must be an enormous profit somewhere. It is said this fish-sauce maker has obtained a princely fortune. Why should we import minced meat from Germany at all? We will venture an English round of beef against baron Geramb's whiskers (no trifling odds) that we can make as good sausages in England, and at less than a seventh part of the price.

Sausages are not the only unnecessary and extravagant importations from Germany. We shall take an early opportunity of communicating the most approved method of making sausages.

A CONCISE VIEW OF THE PLANETARY SYSTEM.

The planets are retained in their orbits by the power of gravity; but as the sun is by far the largest body in our system, if no other power acted on them, they would be drawn down to the sun. All bodies, therefore, that move in curves, as the planets do round the sun, must be acted upon by two principles; and motion being right-lined, we suppose the Almighty gave each planet this kind of impulse at its creation; so that between one power drawing to the centre, and another acting perpendicular to it, the planets are impelled in eliptic orbits round the sun, as a pebble tied to a mill-stone, and thrown from the hand, would revolve round the mill-stone. An idea of this is given by a ball impelled singly in a square in two directions, one perpendicular to the other; when both act, they give the diagonal of the square, &c.

Our system must be conceived as within the concave sphere, seeming

to be formed by the fixed stars, and the sun as near the centre of it, a huge globe of fire, near a million of miles in diameter, and near one hundred millions of miles from the earth, according to calculations made by the transits of Venus: he turns round on his axis in twenty-five days and eight hours, as may be seen by spots on his face, and was no doubt intended to give light, heat, and vegetation to the six primary and ten se condary planets which revolve around them.

All these planets move round the sun from west by south to east, in orbits nearly circular, and almost in the same plane. The comets move in all manner of directions, in orbits which are very long ellipses, much inclined to one another, and to the orbits of all the planets. The tails of comets are only thin vapours; for, if they were flame, no star could be seen through them.

The time in which any planet goes round the sun is the length of its yeur; and the time in which it turns round on its axis is the length of its day and night taken together.

The nearest planet to the sun is MERCURY; he goes round him in eighty-seven days and twenty-three hours, is about three thousand Eng. lish miles in diameter, and distant from the sun forty-two millions of miles; he moves in his orbit about one hundred thousand miles every hour; the length of his days and nights are unknown, being about fifty-six times the sun's apparent diameter from him; he sets and rises too near the sun for any observations to be made of his spots.

VENUS goes round the sun in two hundred and twenty-four days and seventeen hours; her diameter is near seven thousand nine hundred miles; her distance from the sun is seventynine millions of miles; her hourly motion in her orbit is sixty-nine thousand miles, and she turns round on her axis in twenty-four days and eight hours of her time. By her axis inclining seventy-five degrees from a perpendicular to her orbit, she has two summers and two winters at her equator.

The EARTH is the next planet in the order of the system.

MARS, still higher in the system, is a hundred and sixty-seven millions of miles distant from the sun, moves at the rate of forty-seven thousand miles in an hour, goes round the sun in six hundred and seventy-eight days, and turns round on his axis in twenty-four hours and forty minutes of our time, and is about one-fifth as large as our earth; his red appearance is occasioned by a gross thick atmosphere with which he is surrounded, and which is supposed to supply his want of a moon.

JUPITER, the largest of the planets, is five hundred and seventy millions of miles distant from the sun, and above four hundred millions of miles from our orbit; he moves round the sun in about twelve years of our time, at the rate of thirty thousand miles per hour. He is near ninety thousand miles in diameter (that is nearly one thousand times as large as our earth), is accompanied by four moons, some bigger and some less than the earth, which revolve round him as our moon does round us; and the faint substances on his face, called his belts, are supposed to be parts of his atmosphere drawn into lines by his exceeding quick revolution on his axis, which is once in nine hours and fortyuine minutes.

SATURN, the second in magnitude, and the most distant of all the planets, is nine hundred and forty nine millions of miles from the sun, near seventy thousand miles in diameter, and moves at the rate of eighteen thousand miles per hour, but is too remote for his spots to be seen. equipped by five moons, besides a broad luminous ring, which also reflects the sun's light strongly upon him. This planet is near thirty of our years in making his revolution round the sun.

He is

These calculations are given in round numbers, and are founded on mathematical as well as ocular certainty.

By an attempt at the same kind of calculation to find the distance of the fixed stars, it was found that the whole diameter of the earth's orbit

would not make a paralax or angle with the nearest of them! their distance, therefore, must be inconceivably great. Light diminishing as the squares of the distances, the sun's rays cannot enlighten the fixed stars; and a telescope which magnifies two hundred times, does not sen sibly magnify them; it is, therefore, highly probable that they are suns like ours, shine by their own unborrowed lustre, and were not intended for our service, but to give light, heat, &c. to systems of worlds of their own, formed for the same purposes as ours, which are too remote for our eyes, though assisted by the best glasses. We find the worlds of our system covered with continents, seas, hills, &c. Who can doubt, therefore, but they are inhabited as well as all the worlds of the other systems? How much too big is this idea for the human imagination? By telescopes, thousands of these suns have been found more than the naked eye can perceive; and were our glasses still better, we should no doubt find more. It is not im probable that there may be stars so far distant that their light has not reached the earth since the creation.

Let

Let us, on the wings of Imagination, launch into the immensity of space, and behold system beyond system, above us, below us, to the east, the west, the north, and the south. us go so far as to see our sun but a star among the rest, and our system itself as a point, and we shall even then find ourselves but on the confines of creation! How inadequate, then, must be the utmost stretch of human faculties to a conception of that amazing Deity who made and governs the whole! Should not the narrow prejudices, the littleness of human pride, soften into humility at this thought?

ROSES AT CHRISTMAS.

Now that roses are budding and blooming, is the time to lay by a treat for Christmas: select from your rosetrees such buds as are just ready to blow; tie a piece of thin thread round the stalk of each; do not handle the bud or the stalk; cut it from the tree with the stalk two or thee inches

in length; melt sealing-wax, and quickly apply it to the end of the stalk; the wax should be only so warm as to be ductile; form a piece of paper into a cone-like shape, wherein place the rose; screw it up so as to exclude the air. Do so by each; put them all into a box, and the box into a drawer, all which is intended to keep them free from air. On Christmas-day or any other day in winter, take them out, cut off the end of the stalks, place them in a flower-pot or bottle, with luke-warm water; or, if in a heated room, the water may be cold: in two or three hours they will blow as in the meridian of summer, retaining all their grateful fragrance.

ANNALS OF GULLING. No. IX.

SWINDLING HORSE-DEALERS.

The annexed letter has reminded us of noticing a nest of swindlers who infest the west end of towna set of horse-dealers. Their plan is, to dress up a fellow of straw in the first style, place another as his groom, set him up at a hotel, and mount him upon a dashing horse. His duty is to ride about the Park, attend Tattersal's, &c. &c. in order to pick up gulls, who will either give a high price for his apparently fine horse (not worth ten pounds), or, if he can, get the money without giving the horse in return. The swindlers alluded to in the following letter are part of the gang:—

SIR;-I am a cavalry officer---a junior cornet; and having obtained leave of absence for the purpose of purchasing a horse to replace that out of which I have been swindled, I cannot employ an hour this evening, at my hotel, better than in setting

forth the manner in which I have been plundered, and submitting it for publication in your valuable periodical, which doubtless circulates amongst those young fellows who, from inexperience and a plentiful stock of cash, are liable to become dupes to the system which has been practised upon me: it will, I trust, serve as a caution to them in pur chasing horses.

On joining my regiment the other day at Rumford, I was told that a troop of respectable horse-dealers was at the inn, and about to proceed to some fair in Norfolk. I naturally enough took it into my head that this might afford me an opportunity of purchasing a good horse: I had one at this time, a most excellent animal, although, when I was master of him, I thought he shook me too much in trotting: now that I have lost him, I firmly believe he did not possess a fault in the world; but being all the former part of my life a midshipman, I knew nothing of riding, and therefore thought his gait was rather a rough one, unfortunately for myself, and perhaps for him too, as he may not have met with so easy a master. I mounted my horse, rode out, and called at the inn in my way, to see the horses which were for sale. On examination, I did not like any I saw, and rode away. When I returned to the barracks, a dealing or farmer looking man rode up to me at the gate, and after admiring my horse, asked me, respectfully, if I would part with him? to which I replied in the negative. But he still pressed his question, adding, that he would not mind giving a good price.

Now, as I said before, I did not much like my horse, on account of his hard trotting; so I said I would take fifty guineas. He walked about the horse, and hum'd and haw'd, during which time another man came up, and began to admire a mare which the other fellow rode, and asked him "would he sell her?" as "he quite fancied the mare!" After some words between them (to which I was curious to attend), the bargain was concluded, and 451. was the sum to be paid.,