Part 1
THE PENNY MAGAZINE
OF THE
Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
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9.] PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY. [May 26, 1832
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BUTTER.
[Illustration: Yorkshire Cow.]
The various circumstances attending the introduction and use of butter in antiquity, have been investigated by Beckmann with great learning and industry. The conclusion at which he arrives is, “that butter was not used either by the Greeks or Romans in cooking, as is everywhere customary at present. We never find it mentioned by Galen or any other ancient medical writer, as _food_, though they have spoken of it as applicable to other purposes. No notice is taken of it by the Roman epicure, Apicius, who wrote on cookery; nor is there anything said of it in that respect by the authors who treat of agriculture, though they have given us very particular information with respect to milk, cheese, and oil.
“This, as has been remarked by others, may be easily accounted for, by the ancients having accustomed themselves to the use of good oil; and in like manner butter is very little employed at present in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and the southern parts of France.”--Butter is very extensively used in this and most other northern countries; that of England and Holland is reckoned the best.
The production and consumption of butter in Great Britain is very great.--The consumption in the metropolis may, it is believed, be averaged at about one half pound per week for each individual, being at the rate of 26 lbs. a year; and supposing the population to amount to 1,450,000, the total annual consumption would (on this hypothesis) be 37,700,000 lbs. or 16,830 tons: but to this may be added 4,000 tons for the butter required for the victualling of ships and other purposes, making the total consumption in round numbers 21,000 tons, or 47,040,000 lbs., which, at 10_d._ per pound, would be worth 1,960,000_l._
The average produce per cow of the butter dairies is estimated by Mr. Marshall at 168 lbs. a year; so that, supposing we are nearly right in the above estimate, about 280,000 cows will be required to produce an adequate supply of butter for the London market.
Butter made in hot countries is generally liquid. In India it is called _ghee_, and is mostly prepared from the milk of buffaloes[1]: it is usually conveyed in duppers or bottles made of hide, each of which contains from ten to forty gallons. _Ghee_ is an article of considerable commercial importance in many parts of India.
The Arabs are the greatest consumers of butter in the world. Burckhardt tells us, that it is a common practice among all classes to drink, every morning, a cupful of melted butter or ghee; and they use it in an infinite variety of other ways. The taste for it is universal, and even the poorest individuals will spend half their daily income that they may have butter for dinner, and butter in the morning. Large quantities are annually shipped from Cosseir, Sonakin, and Massona, on the west coast of the Red Sea, for Djidda and other Arabian ports.
We shall notice in our Supplementary number for this month the very valuable publication, M’Culloch’s Dictionary of Commerce, from which the above account is extracted.
[Illustration: Zebus: from Specimens in the Zoological Gardens.]
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Footnote 1:
The most common of the Indian breeds of the ox tribe is the _Zebu_, a humped variety, of which the smallest specimens are not bigger than a full-grown mastiff, while others are found almost as large as the finest English cow. They are all useful, both as affording food, and as beasts of burthen.
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OF PEACE.--FROM LORD CLARENDON.
It was a very proper answer to him who asked, why any man should be delighted with beauty? that it was a question that none but a blind man could ask; since any beautiful object doth so much attract the sight of all men, that it is in no man’s power not to be pleased with it. Nor can any aversion or malignity towards the object irreconcile the eyes from looking upon it; as a man who hath an envenomed and mortal hatred against another who hath a most graceful and beautiful person, cannot hinder his eye from being delighted to behold that person, though that delight is far from going to the heart, as no man’s malice towards an excellent musician can keep his ear from being pleased with his music. No man can ask how or why men come to be delighted with peace but he who is without natural bowels,--who is deprived of all those affections which can only make life pleasant to him. Peace is that harmony in the state that health is in the body. No honour, no profit, no plenty can make him happy who is sick with a fever in his blood, and with defluctions and aches in his joints and bones; but health restored gives a relish to the other blessings, and is very merry without them: no kingdom can flourish or be at ease in which there is no peace,--which only makes men dwell at home and enjoy the labour of their own hands, and improve all the advantages which the air, and the climate, and the soil administer to them; and all which yield no comfort where there is no peace. God himself reckons health the greatest blessing he can bestow upon mankind and peace the greatest comfort and ornament he can confer upon states, which are a multitude of men gathered together. They who delight most in war are so much ashamed of it, that they pretend to desire nothing but peace,--that their heart is set upon nothing else. When Cæsar was engaging all the world in war, he wrote to Tully, “There was nothing worthier of an honest man than to have contention with nobody.” It was the highest aggravation that the prophet could find out in the description of the greatest wickedness, that “the way of peace they knew not;” and the greatest punishment of all their crookedness and perverseness was, that “they should not know peace.” A greater curse cannot befall the most wicked nation than to be deprived of peace. There is nothing of real and substantial comfort in this world but what is the product of peace; and whatsoever we may lawfully and innocently take delight in is the fruit and effect of peace. The solemn service of God, and performing our duty to Him in the exercise of regular devotion, which is the greatest business of our life, and in which we ought to take most delight, is the issue of peace. War breaks all that order, interrupts all that devotion, and even extinguisheth all that zeal which peace had kindled in us; lays waste the dwelling place of God as well as of man; and introduces and propagates opinions and practice as much against Heaven as against earth, and erects a deity that delights in nothing but cruelty and blood. Are we pleased with the enlarged commerce and society of large and opulent cities, or with the retired pleasures of the country? do we love stately palaces and noble houses, or take delight in pleasant groves and woods, or fruitful gardens, which teach and instruct nature to produce and bring forth more fruits, and flowers, and plants, than her own store can supply her with? all this we owe to peace; and the dissolution of this peace disfigures all this beauty, and, in a short time, covers and buries all this order and delight in ruin and rubbish. Finally, have we any content, satisfaction, and joy in the conversation of each other, in the knowledge and understanding of those arts and sciences which more adorn mankind than all those buildings and plantations do the fields and grounds on which they stand? even this is the blessed effect and legacy of peace; and war lays our natures and manners as waste as our gardens and our habitations; and we can as easily preserve the beauty of the one as the integrity of the other under the cursed jurisdiction of drums and trumpets.
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DR. FRANKLIN’S MORAL CODE.
The great American philosopher and statesman, Benjamin Franklin, drew up the following list of moral virtues, to which he paid constant and earnest attention, and thereby made himself a better and a happier man:--
Temperance Eat not to fulness; drink not to elevation.
Silence Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
Order Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
Resolution Resolve to perform what you ought: perform without fail what you resolve.
Frugality Make no expense, but do good to others or yourself; that is, waste nothing.
Industry Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
Sincerity Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly; and if you speak, speak accordingly.
Justice Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
Moderation Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries.
Cleanliness Suffer no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation.
Tranquillity Be not disturbed about trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
Humility Imitate Jesus Christ.
The same great man likewise drew up the following plan for the regular employment of his time; examining himself each morning and evening as to what he had to do, what he had done, or left undone; by which practice he was better able to improve his future conduct.--
_Morning._ _Hours._ { } Rise, wash, and address Almighty The question, What { 6 } God! contrive the day’s business, good shall I do to-day? { 7 } and take the resolution of the day; { 8 } prosecute the present study; and { } breakfast.
9 } 10 } work. 11 } 12 }
1 } Read or look over my accounts, 2 } and dine.
3 } 4 } 5 } Work. 6 } 7 }
_Evening._ _Hours._
The question, What good { } Put things in their places; have I done to-day? what { 8 } amusement; supper; examination have I left undone which I { 9 } of the day; address ought to have done? {10 } the Almighty
11 } 12 } 1 } 2 } Sleep. 3 } 4 } 5 }
A steady perseverance in _some plan_ for the arrangement of our time, adapted to circumstances, cannot fail improving our general conduct in life, and rendering us better members of society, and better Christians.
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PROGRESS OF EDUCATION IN ASIA MINOR.
An American missionary and his wife have established a school at Smyrna, for the instruction of children of both sexes in the English language, and in general elementary education, after the most approved system. This school is chiefly attended by the children of English parents settled in the country. It must be productive of important good; for it is a positive fact, that only a few years ago, from the want of some such establishment, and the carelessness of their fathers, many of whom had married women of the country, these children were not only sadly deficient in those rudiments which the poorest among us now acquire, but positively ignorant of the English language. You would meet, for example, a Mr. John _this_, and a Miss Mary _that_, with names the most English, who would not know how to address to you a single decent sentence in the idiom of their fathers; and it need scarcely be added, that in English character, intelligence, and energy, they were almost equally deficient. Two or three respectable families of Dutch descent also send their children to this school.
The other European settlers, who are nearly all Catholics, have not yet had the good sense to overcome their religious prejudices, and to send their children to be educated by a Protestant minister; but, even confined as they are, we look upon the labours of the respectable American missionary in this part of the world as praiseworthy and important.
What, however, is of still more importance at Smyrna, as regards numbers and a whole people, is the settlement of a good Greek seminary for the education of the young Greeks. The British consul has been recently allowed to take this establishment under his special protection; and, with the arms of England over its gateway, it has now nothing to fear from the Turks, but goes on teaching steadily and quietly.
An intelligent friend, who was in England a short time ago, delighted us with an account of an annual examination of the pupils of this Smyrna school. The Greeks, who, with all their defects--defects that have mainly resulted from the oppression of the Turks, and their own want of education--are a quick, intelligent people, curious, and eager for information, crowded the place of assembly, and when, in the course of the examination, a son, or a younger brother, or any young relative or friend, acquitted himself well, their satisfaction and glee were forcibly expressed by their animated countenances. It added to our satisfaction to learn that many of this audience were common sailors or artisans--a proof that education is, as it ought to be, cheap, and within the means of the industrious poor. A number of the youths thus educated are so far advanced in the study of the ancient Greek (which glorious language will be gradually restored to common use, as the modern Greeks advance in civilization), that they get up and play scenes from the tragedies of Euripides. To these representations the Greeks of Smyrna throng with the most lively delight. They do not at present understand one-third of what they hear, but they will “live and learn.”
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_Queen Elizabeth._--Lord Chief Justice Coke told this anecdote of Queen Elizabeth upon the bench:--“When I was the Queen’s Attorney-General she said to me, ‘I understand my counsel will strongly urge the Queen’s prerogative, but my will is, that they stand for our Lady the Truth, rather than for our Lady the Queen, unless that our Lady the Queen hath the truth on her side.’ And she also used to give this in charge many times, when any one was called to any office by her, that they should ever stand for the Truth rather than for the Queen.” This was told thirteen years after Queen Elizabeth’s death; yet too many facts prove that she was accustomed to violate her own precepts.
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_Good Effects of a Predilection for some celebrated Author._--A predilection for some great author, among the vast number which must transiently occupy our attention, seems to be the happiest preservative for our taste. Accustomed to that excellent author whom we have chosen for our favourite, we may possibly resemble him in this intimacy. It is to be feared, that if we do not form such a permanent attachment, we may be acquiring knowledge, while our enervated taste becomes less and less lively. Taste embalms the knowledge, which otherwise cannot preserve itself. He who has long been intimate with one great author will always be found to be a formidable antagonist; he has saturated his mind with the excellences of genius; he has shaped his faculties insensibly to himself by his model; and he is like a man who ever sleeps in armour, ready at a moment! The old Latin proverb reminds us of this fact--_Cave ab homine unius libri_: be cautious of the man of one book.--_Curiosities of Literature._
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THE WEEK.
May 27.--The anniversary of the birth at Florence, in the year 1265, of DANTE ALIGHIERI, the great father of Italian, and, it may almost be said, of modern European poetry. Dante, whose family was of noble descent, was carefully educated in all the learning of his age, and began to compose Latin poetry in his boyhood. Fortunately he relinquished the use of that language when he grew older, and applied himself to composition in his native Tuscan tongue--a circumstance not more fortunate for his own fame than for the literature of his country and the world. His life, passed among the political agitations of the time, was a busy, turbulent, and, upon the whole, unhappy one; the party in the state to which he attached himself having been defeated by their opponents, and he himself sentenced to be burnt alive--a fate from which he only preserved himself by remaining in banishment, and flying from one place of refuge to another. It was while he was thus a proscribed exile and wanderer that he is supposed to have written his famous ‘Commedia Divina, or Vision of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise,’ a poem which has ranked him with the greatest masters of his art. He finally settled at Ravenna, and died there on the 14th of September, 1321, after a short illness, in the extremity of which he composed his own epitaph, in six rhyming Latin hexameters, which were engraved upon his tomb. Byron, in the fourth canto of ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,’ alludes to the foreign death and sepulchre of the great poet in the following lines:--
“Ungrateful Florence! Dante sleeps afar, Like Scipio, buried by the upbraiding shore; Thy factions, in their worse than civil war, Proscribed the bard whose name for evermore Their children’s children would in vain adore With the remorse of ages.”
An old author mentions an anecdote of Dante, which forcibly illustrates the studious ardour of his mind. Having gone one day to the house of a bookseller, from one of whose windows he was to be a spectator of a public show exhibited in the square below, he by chance took up a book, in which he soon got so absorbed that on returning home, after the spectacle was over, he solemnly declared he had neither seen nor heard anything whatever of all that had taken place before his eyes.
May 28.--The birth-day of the late Right Honourable WILLIAM PITT, second son of the great Earl of Chatham, who was born in 1759. He was the favourite of his father, who even in his childhood, it is said, used to place him before him on a table, and encourage him to harangue with oratorical form and solemnity. He afterwards used to attend the debates in the House of Commons, where it was his practice, in listening to all the more distinguished speakers, to consider how every successive argument they used might be answered. He was educated for the bar, and went the western circuit once or twice; but being introduced into Parliament almost as soon as he was of age, he forthwith abandoned everything else for politics. On the dissolution of the Rockingham administration, in 1782, Mr. Pitt became Chancellor of the Exchequer, while yet little more than twenty-two years of age; and before the close of the following year he was prime-minister. From this period his life belongs to the history of his country, whose affairs he continued to direct, with the exception of the three years, from 1801 to 1804, till his death, in the forty-seventh year of his age, on the 23d of January, 1806. No man ever gave himself up more entirely to his high office than Mr. Pitt did. To his public duties he sacrificed alike his health and his fortune; and, owing to entire inattention to his private affairs, died not only poor, but encumbered with heavy debts, which Parliament voted a grant of money to pay.
May 29.--_The Restoration of King Charles II._--By an act of parliament made in the twelfth year of the reign of Charles II. (the year of his restoration), the church still celebrates the return to the throne of this monarch.
May 31.--_Ascension Day. Holy Thursday._--On this day the church celebrates the ascension of Our Saviour. It is usual for the bounds of parishes to be perambulated on this festival.
June 1.--The birth-day of the celebrated French painter, NICOLAS POUSSIN, who was born at Andelys, in Normandy, in 1594. Poussin, whose family was poor, though ancient and respectable, endured many privations and hardships while studying his art, and, before his merits had become known, was frequently reduced to such straits as to be obliged to sell his pictures for little more than what the colours had cost him. But, even after he attained celebrity, Poussin made but little money, and lived in great simplicity. It is he of whom it is told, that having one evening received a visit from a certain bishop, he was lighting him down stairs himself, when the bishop said, “I much pity you, Poussin, that you have not one servant.”--“And I you, my Lord,” replied the painter, “that you have so many.” Poussin died at Rome, in 1665, at the age of seventy-one.
[Illustration: Nicolas Poussin.]
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THE BRITISH MUSEUM.--No. 2.
THE MEMNON.
[Illustration: Front view of the Younger Memnon.]
Those who visit the British Museum cannot fail to have observed in the room of Egyptian antiquities, a colossal statue of which only the head and breast remain. It is numbered 66 in the catalogue and on the stone.
Though this statue is commonly called the “younger Memnon,” a name to which for convenience we shall adhere, there is no reason in the world for calling it so, but a mistake of Norden, a Danish traveller who visited Egypt in 1737. He then saw this statue in its entire state, seated on a chair, in precisely the same attitude as the black breccia figure, No. 38, but lying with its face on the ground; to which accident indeed the preservation of the features is no doubt mainly due. Several ancient writers, and among them the Greek Geographer Strabo, speak of a large temple at Thebes on the west side of the Nile, to which they gave the name of the Memnonium, or Memnon’s temple. Norden fancied that the building, amidst whose ruins he saw this statue, was the ancient Memnonium; though he supposed, that another statue of much larger dimensions than this in the Museum, and now lying in numerous fragments in the same place, was the great Memnon statue, of which some ancient writers relate the following fact--that at sun-rise when the rays first struck the statue, it sent forth a sound something like that of the snapping of the string of a lute.
It is now generally admitted that the real statue of Memnon is neither the large one still lying at Thebes in fragments, nor this statue in the Museum, which came out of the same temple--but another statue still seated in its original position on the plain of Thebes, and showing by numerous Greek and Latin inscriptions on the legs, that _it_ was the statue of which Strabo, Pausanias, and other ancient writers speak. The entire black statue, No. 38, is also _a_ Memnon statue, for it resembles in all respects the great colossus with the inscriptions on its legs, and it has also the name of Memnon written on it and enclosed in an oblong ring, on each side of the front part of the seat, and also on the back.
If this colossus in the Museum (No. 66) was entire in 1737, it may be asked how came it to be broken? We cannot say further than the following statement:--