Part 2
At Venice the experiment was performed in a much more imposing manner. The heaviest man in the party was raised and sustained upon the points of the fore fingers of six persons. Major H. declared that the experiment would not succeed if the person lifted were placed upon a board. He conceived it necessary that the bearers should communicate directly with the body to be raised. I have not had an opportunity of making any experiments relative to these curious facts; but whether the general effect is an illusion, or the result of known or of new principles, the subject merits a careful investigation.
Amongst the descriptions of mechanism calculated to excite popular curiosity, the following is very striking:--
One of the most popular pieces of mechanism which we have seen is the magician, constructed by M. Maillardet, for the purpose of answering certain given questions. A figure, dressed like a magician, appears seated at the bottom of a wall, holding a wand in one hand, and a book in the other. A number of questions ready prepared are inscribed on oval medallions, and the spectator takes any of these which he chooses, and to which he wishes an answer, and having placed it in a drawer ready to receive it, the drawer shuts with a spring till the answer is returned. The magician then rises from his seat, bows his head, describes circles with his wand, and consulting the book as if in deep thought, he lifts it towards his face. Having thus appeared to ponder over the proposed question, he raises his wand, and, striking with it the wall above his head, two folding doors fly open, and display an appropriate answer to the question. The doors again close, the magician resumes his original position, and the drawer opens to return the medallion. There are twenty of these medallions, all containing different questions, to which the magician returns the most suitable and striking answers. The medallions are thin plates of brass of an elliptical form, exactly resembling each other. Some of the medallions have a question inscribed on each side, both of which the magician answers in succession. If the drawer is shut without a medallion being put into it, the magician rises, consults his book, shakes his head, and resumes his seat. The folding-doors remain shut, and the drawer is returned empty. If two medallions are put into the drawer together, an answer is returned only to the lower one. When the machinery is wound up, the movements continue about an hour, during which time about fifty questions may be answered. The inventor stated, that the means by which the different medallions acted upon the machinery, so as to produce the proper answers to the questions which they contained, were extremely simple.
We give, in conclusion, the author’s very just observations on the ultimate effect of inventions which at first sight appear to have no really useful object:--
Ingenious and beautiful as all these pieces of mechanism are, and surprising as their effects appear even to scientific spectators, the principal object of their inventors was to astonish and amuse the public. We should form an erroneous judgment, however, if we supposed that this was the only result of the ingenuity which they displayed. The passion for automatic exhibitions which characterized the eighteenth century, gave rise to the most ingenious mechanical devices, and introduced among the higher orders of artists habits of nice and accurate execution in the formation of the most delicate pieces of machinery. The same combination of the mechanical powers which made the spider crawl, or which waved the tiny rod of the magician, contributed in future years to purposes of higher import. Those wheels and pinions, which almost eluded our senses by their minuteness, reappeared in the stupendous mechanism of our spinning-machines, and our steam-engines. The elements of the tumbling puppet were revived in the chronometer, which now conducts our navy through the ocean; and the shapeless wheel which directed the hand of the drawing automaton has served in the present age to guide the movements of the tambourine engine. Those mechanical wonders which in one century enriched only the conjuror who used them, contributed in another to augment the wealth of the nation; and those automatic toys which once amused the vulgar, are now employed in extending the power and promoting the civilization of our species. In whatever way, indeed the power of genius may invent or combine, and to whatever low or even ludicrous purposes that invention or combination may be originally applied, society receives a gift which it can never lose; and though the value of the seed may not be at once recognized, and though it may lie long unproductive in the ungenial soil of human knowledge, it will some time or other evolve its germ, and yield to mankind its natural and abundant harvest.
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CHRIST CHURCH.
The recent additions to the buildings of the hospital consist of the Hall, and the Mathematical and Grammar Schools. The _Hall_, built under the superintendence of Mr. Shaw, whose sudden and melancholy death excited the public regret a few weeks ago, is constructed of Haytor granite, in the pure Gothic style of architecture, having an embattled summit, adorned with pinnacles, and flanked at each extremity of the front by an octagon tower. The southern side of this building is seen through an iron railing from Newgate-street. An open arcade, used as a play-ground for the boys in wet weather, forms the lower story. The dining-hall occupies the upper story, and is a noble apartment, calculated to accommodate eight hundred scholars. It is 157 feet in length by 52 in breadth, and 47 in height. At the eastern end is a large organ, used to lead the hymns of the children. The western end is occupied by a gallery for the use of visitors; and against the north wall a pulpit is erected for prayer and exhortation. The walls are decorated by several fine pictures by Holbein, Verrio, and others, illustrative of the history of the place. To this hall the public are admitted by tickets every Sunday evening from the first Sunday in February to Easter, to witness the _public suppers_, as they are called, of the boys. Tickets may be obtained from any of the governors; and the sight is an extremely interesting one. The building was opened for public use on the 19th of May, 1829.
The _Mathematical_ and _Grammar Schools_ are contained in one building; of which the cut represents the southern front. It is constructed of yellowish brick with stone facings, in what is called the Tudor style of architecture, and from the designs of Mr. Shaw. A statue of Charles the Second ornaments the eastern wing. This building was opened for public use on Easter, 1832. The expense of the new hall, schools, and wards, are understood to be about £30,000.
[Illustration: The Dining-Hall.]
[Illustration: The Mathematical and Grammar Schools.]
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BRITISH INDIA.
[Historical and Descriptive Account of British India (in the Edinburgh Cabinet Library). 3 vols. 12mo. Edinburgh, Oliver and Boyd, 1832. Price 15_s._]
To the imagination of the people of Europe, for more than two thousand years, a peculiar charm has hung around the name of India. Its remoteness and separation from our quarter of the globe; its high, and at the same time anomalous civilization; its singular and fantastic institutions of civil polity; its mysterious, stern, and imposing religion; its dazzling abundance of gold and precious gems, and other productions, which have usually most inflamed the cupidity of men; its sunny sky and teeming soil, and its swarming population,--all these considerations long threw over India the colours of a land seen in a dream, or read of in some volume of romance or poetry. Nor when, at last, commerce had made a high road to it over the waves, and for the narratives, filled with unexplained wonders, of individual voyagers, we had fleets constantly arriving, loaded with its merchandize, did it cease still to dwell in the public mind as a splendid vision. In many respects the nearer and more distinct view only disclosed new features of magnificence and attraction. From a foreign country, with which we carried on trade by means of some two or three marts, established here and there on the border of the immense peninsula, India has become, throughout nearly its whole extent, a part of our own empire--a subjugated and tributary possession of our little island. This is the most extraordinary of all the revolutions which have marked the history of that portion of the earth, and, together with the state of things which has grown out of it, the political and social systems which have sprung up under the British connexion, and the changes through which both are likely to pass, gives an interest to the subject of India greatly exceeding any that before surrounded it.
The present publication, as its general title, which we have quoted, indicates, is an account of British India, considered not only historically, but in its actual condition. It is the work of several writers, some of whom have long been eminent for their acquaintance with the subjects which they here undertake to illustrate. Only the first volume, and somewhat more than the half of the second, is devoted to what may be properly called the history of India; but the remainder of the second volume, which appears to be contributed by the same writer, Mr. Hugh Murray, consists of five chapters--on the Hindoo History and Mythology; on the Hindoo Manners and Literature; on the British Government of India; on the British Social System in India; and on the Industry and Commerce of India: which may be considered as belonging to the same portion of the work. These two volumes are written in a flowing, perspicuous, and agreeable style, and will be found to present a very interesting and useful outline of the succession of great events, of which India has been the theatre since it was overrun by the first swarm of its western invaders. The principal fault we have to find with the narrative is, that the notices of important transactions are occasionally so brief as to be unsatisfactory, if not almost unintelligible, and that this unpleasant effect seems, in some degree, to be occasioned by an over anxiety on the part of the author to preserve the mere smoothness of his style, by the omission sometimes even of a necessary clause, or sentence of explanation, which might have interrupted the ease or equability of its current. In other instances, the brevity with which parts of the story are treated may be imputable solely to the limited space which the author had at his command; but the effect is sometimes awkward enough. The only account, for example, which we have of the late contest with the Birmese, is contained in the following two sentences, the second of which, by the bye, would seem almost to contradict the first: “Since the termination of the Pindarree contest, no important event or acquisition has distinguished the history of British power in Indostan. The only war undertaken on a great scale was the arduous but finally successful one with the Birman empire, by which the Company gained a considerable territory along the Bay of Bengal.”--(ii. 283.) We would also recommend to Mr. Murray a more liberal insertion of dates than we usually find in his historical compilations. The year in which an event happened can always be given without much expenditure of space; and nothing contributes more to the clearness of such narratives as the present.
The third volume is the work of various authors. The Zoology of India is treated of in the first five chapters, by Mr. James Wilson, who is well known for his familiarity with the subject of Natural History, and whose descriptions are in general lively and graphic, while he appears to have exerted a very laudable industry in the collection of his materials from the best sources. Two chapters on Indian Botany follow from the pen of Dr. Greville, who has had the advantage of some valuable communications from Dr. Wallich, the able and zealous superintendent of the Botanic Garden at Calcutta. The climate, the hydrography, the geology, and mineralogy of India, are then described by the learned pen of Professor Jameson; after which comes a chapter on the general medical effects of the Indian climate by Dr. Ainslie, late of the Medical Staff of Southern India; and another on the Spasmodic Cholera, as it appeared in that country, by Mr. Rhind. A popular view of the Hindoo astronomy and mathematics, followed by an account of some interesting trigonometrical surveys executed by the late Colonel Lambton, is then given by Professor Wallace; and the volume concludes with two interesting chapters by Captain Clarence Dalrymple, in which that officer describes the manner in which the navigation to India is at present performed, and discusses the question as to the best means of establishing a steam communication between that country and England.
We regard this publication as extremely well adapted to introduce its readers to an acquaintance with India. In respect to many matters it is fitted indeed rather to stimulate to further inquiry than to afford complete satisfaction; but this, which is an unavoidable consequence of the limited size of the work, we do not look upon as a defect in an elementary book. Whatever the subject, the first view of it which is presented to the mind of the student ought to be a general one, for the plain reason that it can in no otherwise be a comprehensive one.
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THE HYDROSTATIC BED FOR INVALIDS.
We are favoured by Dr. Arnott, the author of ‘The Elements of Physics,’ with an unpublished extract from the fifth edition of his work, now in the press. The invention here described promises to be such a real blessing to humanity, that we feel great pleasure in assisting to make known an improvement of such importance in the healing art; particularly as its value is not a matter of speculation, and as its benevolent author freely allows its use wherever the wants of his fellow-creatures require its application:--
In many of the diseases which afflict humanity, more than half of the suffering and danger is not really a part of the disease, but the effect or consequence of the confinement to which the patient is subjected. Thus a fracture of the bone of the arm is as serious a local injury as a fracture of one of the bones of the leg; but the former leaves the patient free to go about and amuse himself, or attend to business as he wills, and to eat and drink as usual--in fact, hardly renders him an invalid; while the latter imprisons the patient closely upon his bed, and brings upon him, first, the irksomeness of the unvaried position, and then the pains of the unequal pressures borne by the parts on which the body rests. These, in many cases of confinement, disturb the sleep and the appetite, and excite fever, or such constitutional irritation as much to retard the cure of the original disease, and not unfrequently to produce new and more serious disease. That complete inaction should prove hurtful to the animal system, may by all be at once conceived; the operation of the continued local pressures will be understood from the following statements. The health, and even life, of every part of the animal body depends on the sufficient circulation through it of fresh blood, driven in by the force of the heart. Now when a man is sitting or lying, the parts of his flesh compressed by the weight of the body do not receive the blood so readily as at other times; and if from any cause the action of his heart has become weak, the interruption will both follow more quickly and be more complete. A peculiar uneasiness soon arises where the circulation is thus obstructed, impelling the person to change of position; and a healthy person changes as regularly, and with as little reflection, as he winks to wipe and moisten his eye-balls. A person weakened by disease, however, while he generally feels the uneasiness sooner, as explained above, and therefore becomes what is called restless, makes the changes with much fatigue; and should the sensations after a time become indistinct, as in the delirium of fever, in palsy, &c., or should the patient have become too weak to obey the sensation, the compressed parts are kept so long without their natural supply of blood that they lose their vitality, and become what are called sloughs or mortified parts. These have afterwards to be thrown off, if the patient survive, by the process of ulceration, and they leave deep holes, requiring to be filled up by new flesh during a tedious convalescence. Many a fever, after a favourable crisis, has terminated fatally from this occurrence of sloughing on the back or sacrum; and the same termination is common in lingering consumptions, palsies, spine diseases, &c., and generally in diseases which confine the patients long to bed.
It was to mitigate all, and entirely to prevent some, of the evils attendant on the necessity of remaining in a reclining posture, that the hydrostatic bed was contrived. It was first used under the following circumstances.
A lady after her confinement, which occurred prematurely, and when her child had been for some time dead, passed through a combination and succession of low fever, jaundice, and slight phlegmasia dolens of one leg. In her state of extreme depression of strength and of sensibility, she rested too long in one posture, and the parts of the body on which she had rested all suffered: a slough formed on the sacrum, another on the heel; and in the left hip, on which she had lain much, inflammation began, which terminated in abscess. These evils occurred while she was using preparations of bark, and other means, to invigorate the circulation, and while her ease and comfort were watched over by the affectionate assiduity of her mother, with numerous attendants. After the occurrence, she was placed upon the bed contrived for invalids by Mr. Earle, furnished for this case with pillows of down and of air of various sizes, and out of its mattress portions were cut opposite to the sloughing parts; and Mr. Earle himself soon afforded his valuable aid. Such, however, was the reduction of the powers of life, that in spite of all endeavours, the mischief advanced, and about a week later, during one night, the chief slough on the back was much enlarged, another had formed near it, and a new abscess was produced in the right hip. An air-pillow had pressed where the sloughs appeared. The patient was at that time so weak that she generally fainted when her wounds were dressed; she was passing days and nights of uninterrupted suffering, and as all known means seemed insufficient to relieve her, her life was in imminent danger.
Under these circumstances, the idea of the hydrostatic bed occurred to me. Even the pressure of an air-pillow had killed her flesh, and it was evident that persons in such a condition could not be saved unless they could be supported without sensible inequality of pressure. I then reflected, that the support of water to a floating body is so uniformly diffused, that every thousandth of an inch of the inferior surface has as it were its own separate liquid pillar, and no one part bears the load of its neighbour--that a person resting in a bath is nearly thus supported--that this patient might be laid upon the surface of a bath over which a large sheet of the water-proof India-rubber cloth were previously thrown, she being rendered sufficiently buoyant by a soft mattress placed beneath her--thus would she repose on the face of the water, like a swan on its plumage, without sensible pressure anywhere, and almost as if the weight of her body were annihilated. The pressure of the atmosphere on our bodies is of fifteen pounds per square inch of its surface, but, because uniformly diffused, is not felt. The pressure of a water-bath of depth to cover the body, is less than half a pound per inch, and is similarly unperceived. A bed such as then planned was immediately made. A trough of convenient length and breadth and a foot deep was lined with metal to make it water-tight; it was about half filled with water, and over it was thrown a sheet of the India-rubber cloth as large as would be a complete lining to it if empty. Of this sheet the edges, touched with varnish to prevent the water creeping round by capillary attraction, were afterwards secured in a water-tight manner all round to the upper border or top of the trough, shutting in the water as closely as if it had been in bottles, the only entrance left being through an opening at one corner, which could be perfectly closed. Upon this expanded dry sheet a suitable mattress was laid, and constituted a bed ready to receive its pillow and bed-clothes, and not distinguishable from a common bed but by its most surpassing softness or yielding. The bed was carried to the patient’s house, and she was laid upon it; she was instantly relieved in a remarkable degree: sweet sleep came to her; she awoke refreshed; she passed the next night much better than usual; and on the following day, Mr. Earle found that all the sores had assumed a healthy appearance: the healing from that time went on rapidly, and no new sloughs were formed. When the patient was first laid upon the bed, her mother asked her where the down pillows, which she before had used, were to be placed; to which she answered, that she knew not, for that she felt no pain to direct: in fact, she needed them no more.
It may be here recalled to mind, that the human body is nearly of the specific gravity of water, or of the weight of its bulk of water, and therefore, as is known to swimmers, is just suspended or upheld in water without exertion, when the swimmer rests tranquilly on his back with his face upwards. He then displaces water equal to his own body in weight as well as in bulk, and is supported as the displaced water would have been. If his body be two and a half cubical feet in bulk (a common size), he will just displace two and a half cubic feet of water, equal in weight to his body. If, however, instead of displacing the water with his mere body, he choose to have something around or under him which is bulky with little weight, as the mattress of the bed above described,--when his weight has forced two cubical feet of that under the level of the water around, he will float with four-fifths of his body above the level, and will sink much less into his floating mattress than a person sinks in an ordinary feather-bed. It thus appears that by choosing the thickness of the mattress, and if unusual positions are required, by having different thickness in different parts, or by placing a bulk of folded blanket or of pillow over or under the mattress in certain situations, any desired position of the body may be easily obtained.