Mrs. Foxey Prowler exchanged glances with her sister, and then observed:

"I think I have heard you speak of him. Indeed, I believe I saw him once. A tall, gawky person, rather sandy, and silly-looking?"

How little did Mrs. Foxey Prowler know that the quondam admirer she thus disparaged was only separated from her at that moment by the thickness of the deck of the vessel! How little did Signor Tomkins imagine that only a two-inch plank divided him from the scornful Beauty who was the actual cause of his being where he was,-for whose sake he came abroad to kill himself,-who might have read in the papers that he had committed suicide,-only he changed his mind. But if walls have ears steam-boats have none, and paddle-wheels make too much noise for the betrayal of home truths. Signor Tomkins, therefore, remained in happy ignorance of his proximity to his former flame, and the flame itself went on burning as brightly as if he had never been in existence, while Stubbs was much too discreet to intimate that he knew more of the matter than Mrs. Foxey Prowler thought proper to acknowledge.

Thus we go on in this world,-in the dark half our lives,-not knowing what is taking place almost before our eyes.

For the time being, therefore, the question of Signor Tomkins was disposed of by Mrs. Foxey Prowler, who gave herself up with unrepressed pleasure to the cultivation of the society of her new friends, and this condition of things, it may well be supposed, did not militate against the possible hopes of Carlo Molini, or rudely shatter the dreams of his sister. The Italians, of course, were not slow to praise the beauties of their own land, and talked in such glowing terms of the charms of Bellaggio and its neighbourhood, that it was determined that all of the newly-made circle should pause there en route, and continue the voyage a day or two hence. This was done as agreed on, and of all those with whom we have been occupied on board the steamer, only Signor Tomkins and the Countess de Crèvecœur remained to pursue their original intention.

One by one they went down the ladder at Bellaggio, the last to descend being Mrs. Foxey Prowler, who, happening to turn her head, saw glaring at her through the cabin-window the gooseberry eyes of "yes -no-it must be-it can't-impossible-yes-it was-his nose was not like that but still those eyes"-the eyes of Signor Tomkins.

What the Countess saw also was an unusual trepidation in her lover, who fell back fainting.

606

SCIENCE AT BATH, 1864.

FOR thirty-three years past, men of science have been accustomed to meet together annually for the purpose of comparing notes, registering successes, marking out things still to be achieved, helping each other, teaching and being taught. It is a curious social phenomenon that a brilliant assemblage of ladies, and of people who are not known as men of science, should throng to hear all this done, should profess a lively interest in statistics and ethnology and mathematics, and show an eager wish to accompany the philosophers in their migrations. To be sure, if a thousand people can be found to attend meetings of that Social Science Association, which is said to have been invented to gratify the natural desire of making speeches, and to comprehend whatever is neither amusing nor scientific, it is not surprising that three thousand should devour the really attractive feast which the British Association annually sets before its votaries; and it is, perhaps, one of the most encouraging features of these pleasant gatherings that they mark, year by year, real advancement in science, and show an increased interest in a common pursuit. Few of the lady associates, indeed, betray that fear of being thought ambitious of learning which so much disturbed Mrs. Delany in her youth.

"This morning" (she says in one of her pleasant letters), "as my mathematical master and I were drawing and examining circles, who should come in but Mr. Robert Harley! I blushed and looked excessive silly to be caught in the fact, but the affair which I have endeavoured to keep secret is discovered, and I must bear the reflections of those who think me very presuming in attempting to be wise."

We hope, however, that they may resolve to say with her:

"I shall never talk upon subjects of that kind, but the little I may gain by these lectures will make me take more pleasure in hearing others talk."

The votaries of science, the cultivators of knowledge that was never thought of in the days of the Romans, now assembled in the place where Apollo was formerly worshipped-a place of no ordinary interest to the student of physical science, and of no ordinary attractions to the visitor. How marked the contrast between the fair city of Bath and the great manufacturing town of Newcastle, in which the Association had met in 1863! What a contrast between the limpid Avon gliding through green meadows, parks, and towering hills, and the Stygian Tyne-Stygian, at all events, as it flows by Newcastle-fringed by furnaces, resounding to engines, and canopied by smoke! The one stream seems to linger in a happy valley, which might still be haunted by the forms of whom Spenser sang; the other is like a river of Pandemonium, reddened by furnacefires, bordered by smoking chimneys, and overhung by vapours that shut out the sun and stars. But Newcastle had offered in 1863-as Birmingham will offer in 1865-a fine field of research and instruction, and had given such examples of the progress of manufactures and the applications of science as hardly any other town could give. In Newcastle, too, the visitors had been surrounded by historical associations of great interest, but had selected a district less interesting geologically than the south

west of England, though commercially and socially much more important.

If the stranger arrives in Bath after daylight, he beholds the city lying like a dim fairy-land, a misty realm in the hollow of the wooded hills, its stately terraces and crescents marked out by lines above lines of light; and should the music of the abbey bells be floating dreamily through the air and dispose him to a twilight reverie, he may think of the days when first the Romans came to this spot and found the site of the hot springs, now so full of life and cheerfulness, a lonely and desert morass from which clouds of white vapour rose into the air. Should the visitor have come from Northumberland, he has left the grim fragments of the Roman Wall which seem fitted for their place on the wild and rugged northern hills— a monument of the military power of Rome; and here he stands upon the site of the baths, the temple to Minerva, and the palatial dwellings which marked the more luxurious aspects of Roman dominion: he has left a town that was fortified by the Romans from military considerations, and has come to a site that was colonised for its advantages to health and luxury. He has left a rough energy, a hard Scandinavian element in the people, and has come to a quiet city of elegance and refinement, is surrounded by a population very different from the Northumbrians in qualities and race, and finds himself amidst associations quite unlike those of the busy town upon the Tyne.

Bath has an importance which is all its own-an importance not derived from being a county, capital, or centre of provincial life, nct due to commercial or manufacturing enterprise, to municipal or ecclesiastical dignity, or to the other local circumstances which give importance to most English cities, although that famous Bishop of Wells, who bought the old Roman city from William Rufus, did rebuild an abbey here, and decree that its new church should be the cathedral of Somerset. Bath, at the beginning of the present century-nay, earlier-and before the days (some eighty years since) when the new mail-coach, projected by Palmer, then manager of the Bath and Bristol Theatres, accomplished the distance between London and Bath in fourteen hours, (!) was a place of resort for the whole kingdom; persons in search of health, persons in search of society, pleasure-hunters, fortune-hunters, and gamblers, used alike to throng to Bath, and now that these various migrants disperse themselves over Britain and the Continent, Bath flourishes on her own riches, her own society, and her own attractions. But the noble church, the fabric of later bishops and priors-shorn of cathedral dignity, yet called the abbey, and giving to the Bishop of Bath and Wells part of his title is now simply a parish church, abandoned to evangelicism and Simeon's trustees. Bath continues, however, to be emphatically a city of rest and elegance and ease: her stately terraces and squares and crescents recal the days when the tide of fashion swept through them, and the Queen of the West, still sitting serene and fair amidst her sheltering hills, extends hands of mercy to mankind. Her streets are not defaced by factories, no cinders blacken her rural pathways, no dark clouds of smoke enshroud her sunny hills. And on what an ancient historic dignity this city rests! Those unfailing thermal springs which made Aqua Solis famous when Pompeii and Herculaneum flourished, and which caused this spot to be adorned by temples, baths, and villas when Rome was mistress

of the world, still flow without loss of temperature or diminution of volume. Two thousand years have since passed away, and a mass of soil from ten to twenty feet thick separates the level of modern Bath from the pavements of the Roman city, yet still those wondrous springs remain unchanged, and issue now in the same abundance and at the same heat as then.

The principal feature of the excellent "inaugural" address which Sir Charles Lyell, as president, delivered to a brilliant and enthusiastic gathering in the Bath Theatre, was an exposition of the phenomena of thermal springs. To those who might tremble to think that they dwell so nearly on the line of dormant volcanoes, it is reassuring to be told that no serious disturbance or eruption has taken place since the time of the Romans, although during that long and eventful interval the high temperature of those springs has not diminished; and also that in proportion as we recede from centres of igneous action, the thermal waters diminish in heat and number. Their uniformity of temperature at all seasons, and the unvarying proportions in which from age to age they hold the same mineral ingredients in solution, are very surprising phenomena. The president pointed out that a connecting link between the volcano and the hot spring is recognisable in the great abundance of thermal waters in those foreign regions which are subject to volcanic eruptions. He regards the waters as representing the clouds of aqueous vapour which are evolved (often for days together) from craters during an eruption. Insomuch as the hot spring does not raise from the depths the voluminous masses of solid matter which are raised and poured forth by the volcano, the analogy might seem to fail, but springs really transfer an immense quantity of solid as well as of gaseous matter from the interior to the surface. The Bath waters are not remarkable for the quantity of mineral matter they hold in solution, yet if solidified, it would form in a year a square column nine feet in diameter and a hundred and forty feet high. The president adverted to the supposition that the nitrogen gas which is evolved, is derived from the deoxidation of the atmospheric air carried down by rain-water, for these thermal waters may be derived from some mountain region possibly far away. He regards the Bath springs like most other thermal waters, as marking the site of some great convulsion and fracture in the crust of the earth. The rent through which they rise is situated in horizontal strata of lias and triassic rock three hundred feet in thickness, and at a level less than a hundred feet above the sea. Three metals-copper, strontium, and lithium have been lately found in the Bath waters by Professor Roscoe. The presence of one or more of these elementary bodies previously undetected may be connected with that wonderful efficacy of some mineral springs, which no artificiallyprepared waters have rivalled, and the newly-found ingredients may, as the president remarked, hereafter furnish medical science with the means of combating disease. Lithium (which has been already used in medicine) exists abundantly in the hot spring which issues at a depth of 1350 feet in a copper-mine at Redruth, and gives to this spring its unique character. After adverting to the strong presumption that some relationship exists between the action of thermal waters and the filling of rents with metallic ores-that both are the complementary results of one and the same natural operation, the president spoke of the metamorphism

of sedimentary rocks, and mentioned the conclusion to which experiments have led, that the minerals contained in the metamorphic rocks have been derived from liquid solutions by means of decomposition and chemical reaction; and he appears disposed to regard hot springs as among the most effective instruments of the slow refrigeration of intensely heated subterranean matter by slowly abstracting heat just as the clouds of vapour seen during an eruption carry it off in a latent form. Professor Daubeny contributed an appropriate pendant to the president's dissertation. He remarked on our not having detected in the Bath and some other famous thermal waters (those of Gastein, in the Tyrol, for example) any mineral ingredient of such medical potency as to account for their beneficial effect upon the system. The professor has lately endeavoured to trace in the Bath waters some ingredient before unknown, and has investigated the quantity as well as quality of the gases which issue with the thermal waters. He estimates the quantity of nitrogen gas disengaged in "the King's Bath" alone at 222 cubic feet in twenty-four hours. Nitrogen is characteristic of thermal springs, and the evolution of this or any other gas from springs apparently connected with volcanic action seems to have been permanent from the time of their earliest mention in history. He referred to the Lago Naftia, near Catania, where the water is in a state of constant ebullition from the escape of carbonic acid and sulphuretted hydrogen gases, accompanied by the vapour of petroleum (from which the name of Naftia is derived), and the spot is known to have been from this cause an object of popular superstition in the early ages of Greece. In other places-places remote, too, from existing volcanic action, gases are given out at this day on the very spots from which they are believed to have issued in the time of ancient Greece; for instance, at the hot springs which issue at the foot of Mount Eta, in Thessaly, and are referred to by Sophocles.

From analogy, therefore, Professor Daubeny regards the evolution of gas from the Bath waters as essentially connected with the existence of the heat by which they are characterised. Nearly ninety-six per cent. of the whole quantity is made up of the two constituents of the atmosphere, only the nitrogen is in much larger proportion. Since he published his memoir on the Bath waters in 1833, geologists have become satisfied of the connexion between thermal waters and volcanoes, and evidences of the disengagement of nitrogen from volcanoes have accumulated. He therefore infers that its evolution is connected with igneous action, and is witnessed in thermal waters because they derive their heat from the same chemical forces which give rise to the phenomena of volcanoes. In volcanic eruptions, as well as in certain thermal springs, salts of ammonia are, moreover, evolved. It would seem, therefore, that some process of oxidation goes on in the earth in the spots where this phenomenon is manifested. Passing from the speculative to the economic, Professor Daubeny adverted to the waste of the heat which remains in the thermal waters after they have supplied the baths, seeing that 180,000 gallons, at a temperature at least 40 deg. higher than the air, issue from the King's Bath alone in every twenty-four hours. In the south of France houses are heated by pipes conveying the water of adjacent hot springs, and he proposes that the waste thermal waters of Bath be utilised in like manner for a winter garden, and the growth of early vegetables and