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

By fabling Nilus, to the quivering touch

Of Titan's ray, with each repulsive string

Concealing, sounded through the warbling air
Unbidden strains."

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,

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

which the descriptions bear the most unequivocal marks; as in almost all of them we merely see the different parts of known animals, united by an unbridled imagination and in contradiction to every established law of nature. Learned men may attempt to decipher the mystic knowledge connected under the form of the Sphinx of Thebes, the Pegasus of Thessaly, the Minotaur of Crete, or the Chimera of Epirus; but it would be folly seriously to expect to find such monsters in nature. We might as well endeavour to find the animals of Daniel, or the beasts of the Apocalypse, in some hitherto unexplored recesses of the globe. Neither can we look for the mythological animals of the Persians,-such as the Martichore, or destroyer of men, having a head on the body of a lion and the tail of a scorpion; the Griffin, or guardian of hidden treasures, half-eagle and half-lion; or the Cartazonon, or wild ass, armed with a long horn on its forehead. Ctesias, who reports these as actual living animals, has been looked upon by some as an inventor of fables; whereas he only attributes real existence to hieroglyphical representations.

The fables of men with tails, the natural apron of the Hottentot women, of the supposed natural deficiency of beard in the Americans, together with syrens, centaurs, &c. can only be excused by the simple easy credulity of our ancestors.

The fables of pigmies may have been credited through the custom of exhibiting in the same sculpture, in bas-relief, men of very different heights; of making kings and conquerors gigantic, while their subjects and vassals are represented as only a fourth or fifth part of their size.

THE SPHINX.

The wide diffusion of this mystical figure seems to indicate that it had some more profound and general signification than the overflow of the Nile. Modern writers mostly reject this interpretation, even in Egypt, and consider it emblematic of the kingly power. Layard, in his first work on Nineveh, suggests that it was more probably an emblem of the Supreme Deity. It is an error to say that the Egyptian Sphinx combined the head of a virgin with the body of a lion. This was the later Greek sphinx, after the primitive idea of its mystical meaning had been lost. "The Egyptian sphinx was invariably male," and united the body of a lion with the head of a man, surmounted by a serpent (Wilkinson's Ancient Egypt, 2d series, vol. i. p. 146; and Faber's Mysteries of the Cabiri, vol. i. p. 209). This triformed monster occurs in many other countries besides Egypt, viz. in Assyria, with the head of a man, the body of a lion or bull, and the wings of a bird or of a seraph-the flying servent. In Persia and Etruria the same (Chardin's Travels,

and Dennis's Etruria, vol. i. p. 51). In Lycia, as the woman, lioness, and seraph (Fellowes's Lycia, and sculptures in the Lycian room in the British Museum). It also occurs among ancient Chinese religious emblems (Kaempfer's Japan, vol. i. p. 182); likewise in India (Maurice's Indian Antiquities, vol. iv. p. 750); and may be seen in the paintings of the ancient Mexicans. Its invariable triple form exhibits the primitive idea of the threefold nature of the Godhead-an idea whose universal diffusion indicates an origin of the most remote (probably antediluvian) antiquity. The globe with wings and serpents, also very widely diffused, seems to represent the same idea, and to be only a variation of the symbolic figure.

SECRET OF THE ALCHEMISTS.

The pretended secret of the Alchemists was their transmutation of the baser metals into gold, which they occasionally exhibited to keep the dupes who supplied them with money in good spirits. This they performed in various ways. Sometimes they made use of crucibles with a false bottom; at the real bottom they put a quantity of gold or silver, which was covered by powdered crucible, mixed with gum or wax; then the material being put into a crucible, and the heat applied, the false bottom disappeared; and at the end of the process the gold or silver was found at the bottom of the crucible. Sometimes they made a hole in a piece of charcoal, filled it with oxide of gold or silver, and stopped up the hole with wax; or they stirred the mixture in the crucible with hollow rods, containing oxide of gold or silver within, and the end closed with wax. By these means the gold or silver wanted was introduced during the operation, and considered as its product. Sometimes they used solutions of silver in nitric acid, or of gold in aqua-regia, or of amalgam of gold or silver; which, being adroitly introduced, furnished the desired quantity of metal. A common exhibition was to dip nails into a liquid, and take them out half-converted into gold; these nails were one-half gold and one half-iron, and the gold was covered with something to conceal its colour which the liquid was capable of removing. Sometimes they used metallic rods, one-half gold and the other silver; the gold was whitened with mercury, and being dipped into the transmuting liquid and heated, the mercury was dissipated, and the gold appeared.

Lord Bacon compares the Alchemists to the young men who carefully digged and re-digged their father's field in search of a treasure which they never found; but whose labour was amply repaid by the fertility imparted to the soil which they turned up with other intentions.

Domestic Manners.

SPINSTER.

FOR the first time in the annals of archæology, the early implements of spinning and weaving were met with in the graves of the Alemanni, at Oberflacht, in Suabia, discovered in 1846. Among these were found spindle-pins; but the distaff did not appear. Here were also the perforated rounds of stone, which were probably affixed to the ends of the spindles to cause them to revolve more rapidly by their weight, obedient to the twirl of the industrious housewife.

This manual operation, so indispensable in early times, furnished the jurisprudence of Germany and England with a term to distinguish the female line, fusus; and a memento of its former importance still remains in the appellation of spinster. Alfred, in his will, speaks of his male and female descendants by the terms of the spear-side and spindle-side; and the German jurisprudents still divide families into male and female by the titles of schwertmagen, sword-members, and spill or spindelmagen, spindle-members. Hence spears in graves are as significant as spindles and spindle-heads.

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The term spinster, or single woman, in law, is now the common title by which an unmarried female is designated. Generosa," says Lord Coke, "is a good addition for a gentlewoman; and if such be termed spinster, she may abate the writ." This, however, is not so now, for the word spinster is applied to all unmarried women of whatever rank or condition. It was formerly customary to call an unmarried lady of station Mistress instead of Miss, and this may have the same grounds as Lord Coke's observation.

GOSSIPS.

Gossip is from the Anglo-Saxon God-sibbe, "cognatus in Deo." Our Christian ancestors, understanding a spiritual affinity to grow between the parents and such as undertooke for the child at baptism, called each other by the name of God-sib, that is, kin through God; and the child, in like manner, called such his godfathers and godmothers.-Verstegan.

LOVERS' PRESENTS.

A Ms. in the Harleian Library states: By the civil law, whatever is given, exponsalitia largitate, betwixt them that are