+

Stomachical, on the Important Science of Good very prominent member of which was placed Living. By Launcelot Sturgeon, Esq. London: opposite to a noble haunch of venison, which, Whittaker, 1822.' (1 as may easily be supposed, was in universal request. He carved it with an alacrity and disposed of it with a degree of good-humour that was truly magnanimous; until a sleek, red-faced gentleman in a bob-wig, at the other end of the table, sent his plate a second time for another slice of fat; to whom our friend, eyeing him with some disdain, replied: "Another slice of fat, indeed! No, sir! There is but one slice left that is worth eating, and you cannot be so unconscionable as to expect it." Whereupon, he very composedly helped himself to what remained. His conduct was very generally applauded; and for our own part, we conceived the highest opinion of his judgment, and have ever since held him in the greatest respect.'

The author starts by affirming that a stomach which is proof against all trials is the greatest of all blessings; and declares it would be easy to demonstrate that it exercises an extended influence over the destinies of life. Epicurism is the result of that choicest gift of heaven, a refined and discriminating taste;' while gluttony is a mere effort of the appetite. To assist the uninitiated in forming a refined taste, seems to be the author's aim; and in a succession of chapters he lays down what he terms 'moral maxims and reflections,' all calculated to tend in that direction. Many reasons might be assigned for dining late; but one is sufficient: that, trivial concerns being dismissed, all our thoughts may be concentrated on our plate, and our undivided attention bestowed on what we are eating. No one should hurry over a good dinner, and we are amazed to learn that five hours are a reasonable time to remain at table; while the author is careful to remark that 'a well-bred man never looks at his watch in company. He who keeps dinner waiting commits an irreparable injury, and such men should be looked upon as the common enemies of society. A bad dinner admits of no palliative, for one may as well be starved as poisoned, and he who invites you to take pot-luck,' must bear you some latent injury. 'Beware of such perfidious friends;' and to give more forcible expression to his indignant feelings, Mr Sturgeon suggests a new reading of Horace

This man is vile; here, Roman! fix your mark.
His sole is black!

to

Only one offence is worse, and that is, interrupt a man in the exercise of his jaws; therefore, never make an observation that requires an answer to any one while he is eating.'

The following paragraph must be quoted entire: When constrained to speak, abridge all superfluous words as a waste of valuable time; thus, if you wish to take wine with any one, instead of making a formal request to that effect, just bend the body quietly, and merely say: "Honour of some wine" and if the same broken sentence be addressed to you, make no reply, but gently bob your head and fill your glass. But if either want of appetite or want of sense should lead you into a warm discussion during dinner, don't gesticulate with your knife in your hand, as if you were preparing to cut your antagonist's throat.'

The author is careful to advise the reader to avoid being seated near any large joint, unless you choose to incur the risk of being forced to waste your most precious moments in carving for others instead of for yourself.' Still, if one's untoward fate should place him behind a joint, a turkey, or a goose, no mistaken ideas of politeness should induce him to part with all the choice bits before he helps himself. Rise above such prejudices,' is the sage advice, of which weak minds are alone dupes; and turn a deaf ear to every request for any particular part on which you may have set your own inclination. We remember,' proceeds our author, to have dined, some years ago, with a country corporation, a

Passing reluctantly by many things about invitations to dinner which, we are told, should always be penned in the morning, fasting-we scan hastily several chapters, and glean titbits here and there. The moral qualities of the stomach' are dilated upon, and the author affirms that 'the greatest defect in the constitution is a bad stomach. If the stomach be unsound, the heart which is lodged in it must be corrupted. It therefore follows,' continues our facetious gastronome, that all abstemious people are persons of bad character. This leads to a chapter on The Philosophy of the Stomach,' which opens with a learned argument in support of the proposition that a certain well-known proverb should read, Eat to live, and live to eat;' the writer contending that designing persons, by substituting not for and, have destroyed the meaning and the whole value of the axiom. Such persons, he adds, are only envious reformers, who, having nothing to eat themselves, would persuade us to stint our own precious stomachs, in order to ruin the revenue, and so deprive cabinet ministers of their dinners; whereas the supreme object of every good citizen should be to multiply dinners by every means in his power. The great purposes of digestion are thus amusingly described: Not only is it wholly destructive of all rational enjoyment to swallow down one's meat without taking proper time to comment upon its merits and expatiate upon the happiness it procures us-or, in other words, to chew it with measure and reflection, and turn it as often as a minister does a new measure of finance before he can make it palatable-but on this trituration depends not alone the ineffable pleasure to be derived from expressing and compounding the juices of the viands and the flavour of the sauces, but the important object also of their undisturbed repose during the process of digestion.'

As few of those who are old enough to appreciate the pleasures of the table possess their masticators unworn by the edge of time and service, our author finds it hard to lay down any fixed rule on this subject; but affirms, as the result of a long series of experiments, that a mouthful of solid meat requires thirty-two bites of a perfect set of teeth to prepare it for deglutition. Assuming that these requisites have been secured, the author says that all one requires besides is repose, and gravely recommends the following as an opiate before retiring to bed: Take equal parts of brandy and rum, each a large,

wine-glassful, half a glass of arrack, and the same quantity of curaçoa. To these add the juice of two small limes, and the rind-peeled thin-of one, with quant. suff. of refined sugar to render the whole palatable. Then pour in double the quantity of strong decoction of gunpowder tea, boiling hot, with two glasses of warm calf's-foot jelly. Stir well together, and swallow instanter.' To this he naïvely adds: 'If it fail of the desired effect, it can only be because either your conscience or your stomach is overloaded.'

Mr Sturgeon then proceeds to argue in favour of an improved system of education, by means of which children should, instead of reading Ovid's Metamorphoses, be instructed in those of Mrs Glasse, and proceed through a regular course of culinary classics.' He would have geography taught by associating Shrewsbury and Banbury with their cakes, the Isle of Wight with its cracknels, Kent with its cherries, Norfolk with its biffins, and Sussex with its dumplings. In the same spirit he would have travellers give their attention to matters of real utility, and carry culinary rather than astronomical instruments into unexplored regions. Instead of planetary, they should be required to take alimentary observations, to visit markets instead of libraries, and hold consultations with cooks instead of disputing with academicians.

These are a few of the entertaining morsels which, in the aggregate, make up a savoury dish of satire; and we can well imagine how many a bon-vivant of the last generation laughed at, even while he approved, these precepts on the art of good living.

MUMMY-FLOWERS.

the garlands in which the mummy of Amenhotep I. was elaborately swathed. With others of the royal mummies were found fine detached speeimens of both kinds of lotus, the blue and the white, with stems, blossoms, and seed-pods complete. Still more interesting is it to learn that upon the mummy of the priest Nebsoohi, maternal grandfather of the King Pinotem II. (twentyfirst dynasty), there was found a specimen of the lichen known to botanists as the Parmelia furfuracca. This plant is indigenous to the islands of the Greek Archipelago, whence it must have been brought to Egypt at or before the period of the Her-Hor Dynasty (1100 or 1200 B.C.). Under the Arabic name of Kheba,' it is sold by the native druggists in Cairo to this day.

These frail relics of many a vanished spring have been arranged for the Boolak Museum with exquisite skill by that eminent traveller and botanist Dr Schweinfurth. Classified, mounted, and, so to say, illustrated by modern examples of the same flowers and plants, they fill eleven cases -a collection absolutely unique, and likely ever to remain so. The hues of these old-world flowers are said to be as brilliant as those of their modern prototypes; and, but for the labels which show them to be three thousand years apart, no ordinary observer could distinguish between those which were buried with the Pharaohs and those which were gathered and dried only a few months ago.

1

THE SONG OF THE HEART.

BLITHELY sings the young heart, and cheerily shines the sun; ་་

'Tis spring o' the year, 'tis early morn, and life is but begun.

The day is bright, the heart is light,
And all the future years
Stretch forth as fair, with never a care,
Nor clouds, nor tears.

sun';'

'Tis the summer now, 'tis mid-day heat, the work of life
is begun.

But Hope runs high, while the steadfast eye,
Fixed on the goal of Fame,

Heeds not the glare, for he who will dare, I
Must win a name."

"

In an interesting article which appeared in a recent number of the Academy, Miss Amelia B. Edwards describes some curious additions to the Boolak Museum of Cairo. Several of the royal mummies discovered last year at Deir-elBahari were, it will be remembered, found garlanded with flowers, those flowers being for Boldly sings the young heart, but scorchingly shines the the most part in wonderful preservation. M. Arthur Rhoné, in a recent letter to Le Temps, has described the extremely curious way in which these garlands are woven. They consist of the petals and sepals of various flowers, detached from their stems, and inclosed each in a folded leaf of either the Egyptian willow (Salix salsaf) or the Mimusops Kummel Bruce. The floral ornaments thus devised were then arranged in rows-the points being all set one way and connected by means of a thread of dateleaf fibre woven in a kind of chain-stitch. The whole resembles a coarse 'edging' of vegetable lace-work. Among the flowers thus preserved are the bright blue blossoms of the Delphinium orientalis, or larkspur; the blue lotus, or Nymphaea carulea; the white of Nymphaea lotus, with pinktipped sepals; the blossoms of the Sesbania Egyptiaca; and the orange-hued flower of the Carthamus tinctorius, or safflower, so largely employed as a dye by the ancient inhabitants of the Nile valley. The dried fruit, as well as the dried yellow blossom, of the Acacia Nilotica is likewise present; and mention is also made of the blossom of a species of water-melon now extinct. The foregoing are all interwoven in

Cheerily sings the old heart, while slowly sets the sun;
Tis autumn chill, 'tis eventide, and rest is now begun,
Brave was the heart that did its part,

And ever upheld the right;"

Now sets the sun, the work is done'; "tr
Now comes the night.

Hushed now is the tired heart, and set now is the sun;
"Tis winter-time, the stars gleam out, the new life is begun.

Calm is the sleep, and long and deep,

But bright will the waking be;% 1
The Cross has been borne, the Crown will be worn 7.
Through all Eternity,
MARY J. MURCHIE

Printed and Published by W. & R. CHAMBERS, 47 Pater noster Row, LONDON, and 339 High Street, EDINBURGH.

All Rights Reserved.

i

▪,

POPULAR

-100 HOY TENSIO mood 91 quo abs

LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART.

No. 992.-VOL. XIX. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 30, 1882

non tar du få godt etably fun apvelt opus NORWAY UNDER THE SNOW.

1

13

ared oft modi toBY A NORWEGIAN. - dj'a
wde Libw lodal u tot trud by
HAVE you ever been to Norway in the winter
You have not! Well, do you know what seventy
degrees under freezing point means? Not exactly
I am glad you qualify the negation. You mean
to say you have read in travellers' accounts of
Siberian and American colds, of negative degrees
of temperature, when horses perish and birds drop
dead? I have read of those too, but never ex-
perienced them; either dit must be that our
Norwegian degrees are a
are smaller than others,
or else we have in Norway a different draught,
as we should say, in the air. However that
may be, we have every year such a tempera-
ture, and it is then that we 1
we Norwegians enjoy
ourselves. Let me endeavour to sketch a winter-
day in Norway when the thermometer is seventy
degrees below freezing point. sanoz oddaje

You go to bed overnight warm and comfortable, your last recollection of existence being bright and roaring

in the stoveyroom.

your

12

19

you

edit PRICE 1d.

A rap at the door, and enters, in the fashion of the country, a pretty blue-eyed Norwegian maid, who cheerfully asks how you have slept, and tells you that it is the coldest night we have had this winter She brings with her a cup of excellent coffee and the necessaries for a morning's ablution, as the tub has no temptation to-day; but what seems, however, to appeal stronger to your imagination, and act on your tenderest feelings of gratitude towards the damsel, is the fagot-wood and logs she carries, which, soon ablaze in the capacious stove, send a thrill of comfort to the core of your heart. You hasten up and look at the thermometer by the window: it stands between sixty and sixty-five degrees below freezing point; you rub your hands with delight at the idea; it has been seventy degrees in the night. Now it is really cold !',

We gather at breakfast in the commodious dining-room of the house, where a blazing logfire sends its cheering influence to the farthest end of the hall, and we admire the fanciful play of the winter sun's rays on the Brazilian flora gfire of the ice-covered windows. We talk and chaff of over the breakfast, discuss last night's dance, summer, of balmy air, of walks in the dusk of and lay plans for the enjoyment of the short day a northern summer's evening with the girl you of the North. Never did you seem love, of the scent of hay, and the fragrance of to see your friends; you hesitate between asking mountain herbs, and you are rudely awakened them all to come in the afternoon, or going to a from "your ethereal existence by sharp detonating dance at some neighbouring gaard, where there is sounds. But if you know the sound, you know a gathering; and as there are young folks of the also that it is merely the herald of tremendous company, the latter is decided on, noyow art frost. You hear the old oak staircase crack; you But let us go outside. You sully forth, hear a splitting noise in the frame of the window, dressed to the white of your eyes' in furs; and and your bedpost seems to have got gout in its it is with a pleasant sensation of importance legs; but sleep on! it is only the natural that you hear the knirken, as we say in Norway, susceptibility of wood to cold. Day "breaks, under your heels as you walk on the crisp snow, too 1:|: : you are awakened by an irritating sensation Everything has a frosty and bright appearance, about your moustaches, and you find that these only the poor sparrow perched on the stack of have actually fastened onto the coverlet and corn provided for his wants (a Norse custom), are white with frost; but only keep well under chirps sadly while the wily magpies under the feather-bed d of soft down of the eiderfowl caves looks like an old philosopher, and tries hard from the Lofoden Islands, and you will find to appear to have not the least knowledge of you are of external after all, in sp external appearappear where the spring chickens, the eggs and the ances, on excellent terms with yourself. cherries, and all the other good things have gone