in an opaque vessel, in a dark cellar. On agitating the water, the whole contents of the vessel became lighted up so completely as to render all the adjacent objects visible for a moment. On touching them, light was invariably given out from beneath the bands with increased brilliancy; every portion of the cilia being distinctly exhibited, with a splendid greenish lustre, as beautiful as it was evanescent. It was impossible to behold these bodies of innocuous fire, floating amid the brightness which they themselves diffused, and not feel that to convey an adequate idea of their beauty, would be a task more fitted for the imagery of a poet than the language of the naturalist.

If an incision be made in the body of a Beroë when dead, and the watery particles allowed gradually to evaporate, the bands of cilia and the tentacula will appear as if painted in a confused manner on the surface whereon the body has been placed, and when perfectly dry, can be removed by a touch, as completely as if they had never formed a portion of animated existence.

(To be continued.)

THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF
TELEGRAPHS.

THE word "Telegraph" (derived from two Greek words, Tele and Grapho, i.e., I write afar off) is the name given to any mechanical contrivance for the rapid communication of intelligence by signals.

But although the art of conveying intel ligence by signs was practised in the earliest ages, being known even to the rudest savages, and although its importance is not only obvious but continually felt wherever a government is established, it has been allowed to remain in its original state of imperfection down to almost the present day.

Telegraphic communication in an extended sense may be considered to embrace every means of conveying intelligence by gestures and visible signs: such as lanterns, hoisting of flags, beacon fires on the tops of distant hills, carrier pigeons, drums, speaking trumpets (all used by barbarous nations); and more recently, since the invention of gunpowder, by cannons, skyrockets, and blue lights.

The troops and marines which landed on the coast of America during the war, when scouring the woods in detached parties, were regulated by the notes of the bugle, which were so clearly understood that no

false movements were ever made. The immense number of barges and boats which crowd the Imperial Canal of China are directed in their various routes, both by night and day, by the sound of the gong. The Indians of America convey intelligence from hill to hill by throwing out their arms with or without staves in them; and even the Hottentots, the poor degraded Bosjesmans, communicate with each other by arranging fires on the sides of the hills in certain positions.

The use of beacon-fires as a means of giving speedy warning of the approach of an enemy is very ancient, being alluded to by the Prophet Jeremiah, who wrote six centu ries before the Christian era, and counselled the Benjamites "to set up a sign of fire in Bethhaccerem" as evil appeared out of the north, and great destruction.

Beacon-fires were, for many years, a very favorite method of communication in our own country, and in an Act of the Scottish Parliament, 1455, there are directions that one bale or fagot "shall be warning of the approach of the English in any manner; two bales that they are coming indeed; and four bales blazing beside each other, that the enemy are in great force."

Sir Walter Scott refers to this practice in his "Lay of the Last Minstrel;" and Macaulay, too, in his glorious fragment of "The Armada," tells us how

"Broader still became the blaze, and louder still the dim,

As fast from every village round the horse came spurring in.

And eastward straight from wild Blackheath the warlike errand went,

And roused in many an ancient hall the gallant Southward from Surrey's pleasant hills flew those squires of Kent. bright couriers forth:

High on bleak Hampstead's swarthy moor they started for the North,

And on and on without a pause, untired they bounded still;

All night from tower to tower they sprang, they sprang from hill to hill,

Till the proud peak unfurled the flag o'er Darwin's

rocky dales;

Till like volcanoes flared to heaven the stony hills of Wales;

Till

Till

Till

twelve fair counties saw the blaze on Malstreamed in crimson on the wind the Wrekin's vern's lonely height;

crest of light;

broad and fierce the star came forth on Ely's

That some attempt was made by the ancients to improve upon such signals is evident from the tenth book of Polybius, who speaks of two methods of communicating intelligence, one of which was adopted many centuries afterwards by Bishop Wilkins, who describes the plan according to the British alphabet in his curious work entitled "Mercury, or the Secret and Swift Messenger." In addition to these alphabetic systems, which depended merely upon the number or alternate display and concealment of lights, Bishop Wilkins describes one which rested upon the relative position of two lights attached to two long poles, and which, he says, "for its quickness and speed is much to be preferred before any of the rest."

66

Although the Marquis of Worcester, in his "Century of Inventions," 1663, tells us "How at a window, as far as the eye can discover black and white, a man may hold discourse with his correspondent without noise made or notice taken," yet the earliest well-defined plan of telegraphic communication appears to have been invented by Dr. Hook, whose genius as a mechanical inventor has perhaps never been surpassed. This ingenious man delivered, on the 21st of May, 1684, a discourse to the Royal Society, showing how to communicate one's mind at distances of thirty, forty, a hundred, or a hundred and twenty miles, in as short a time almost as a man can write what he would have sent. The learned doctor, however, took to his aid the then recently invented telescope (or, as Bishop Wilkins calls it, Galileous, his perspective.") This subject appears to have occupied Dr. Hook's attention for some time, and the recent siege of Vienna by the Turks evidently revived the matter in his mind, About sixteen or twenty years after Hook's paper, M. Amontous, of the Royal Academy of Paris, brought forward a very similar plan in France, which was worked after the following manner. People were placed in several stations at a certain distance from one another, and, by the help of a telescope, a man in one station was enabled to see a signal made in the next before him; he was then required immediately to make the same signal, so that it might be seen by persons in the station after him. The signals used were either large letters of the alphabet, or figures of various shapes to represent them: the latter being the more

valuable, as by a change of key, the nature of the communication might be kept a secret from those actually employed in making the signals. Amontous tried this method in a small tract of land before several persons of the highest rank at the Court of France. But though Hook's invention and Amontous's modification were published all over Europe, and the former as early as 1684, yet they were not practically applied to any useful purpose until the time of the French revolution.

The telegraph then brought into use, in either 1793 or 1794, was the invention of M. Chappé, and though in general principles it was very similar to the machine invented by Hook, yet in detail it was greatly superior. His first station was on the roof of the Palace of the Louvre; and M. Chappé, having received from the "Committee of Public Welfare" a message to be forwarded to Lisle, where the French army was then stationed, gave a known signal to Mont Martre, which was the second station to prepare. At each station there was a watch tower, where telescopes were fixed, and the person on watch gave the signal of preparation. This was repeated all along the line, which brought each person in a state of readiness to receive the intelligence. The master at Mont Martre then received letter by letter the sentence from the Louvre, which he repeated with his own machine, and this was again repeated from the next height with as much rapidity as was possible under the circumstances, until the message finally arrived at Lisle just two minutes after leaving Paris. The upright post which was erected on the Louvre had at the top two transverse arms, moveable in all directions by a single piece of mechanism. M. Chappé invented a number of positions for these arms, which stood as signs for the letters of the alphabet, and even these were reduced as much as possible; moreover, as the signs were arbitrary they could be changed every week, so that the sign of B for one day might be the signal for M the next,-all that was necessary being that the persons at the extremi→ ties should know the key. Two working models of this instrument were executed at Frankfort and sent by Mr. W. Playfair to the Duke of York, and hence the plan and alphabet of the instrument came to England.

Like all inventors, M. Chappé met with great opposition and discouragement: the people were averse to the use of telegraphs at all. His first instrument and station were destroyed by the populace, his second

shared the same fate, it was burnt to the | ground, and M. Chappé himself narrowly escaped with his life, for the populace threatened to burn him along with his telegraphs. Subsequently, as we have already shown, the subject was taken up by the French government, and his telegraph afterwards extensively used on the continent.

This description of telegraph, which was called the aerial, was first established in England in 1795, a line of stations being formed from the Admiralty to the sea-coast, and information was by this means conveyed from London to Dover in seven minutes. The expense of maintaining and working the line from London to Portsmouth was three thousand three hundred pounds per annum. We believe the last used in this country was that from Liverpool to Holyhead, which was at work as late as 1852, at a cost of fifteen hundred pounds a year.

Up to this period, however, as Mr. Vallance observes, telegraphic communication had only been a means of intercourse that was serviceable during those portions of the twenty-four hours when the greater light, that ruler of the day, was visible, and when clear weather admitted uninterrupted vision for a distance of ten miles. It had, indeed, been proposed to remedy this disadvantage by nocturnal telescopes, for the lamps of which gas seemed so admirably adapted: but this would do nothing towards lessening the interruption that wet and foggy weather occasions; so the proposed change was not considered worth the great expense which must have been incurred to effect the alteration. Mr. Vallance next thought that an incompressible liquid confined in a pipe might be caused to move through the whole length of the tube, by operating on it at either end, and that, too, whether the pipe was one or a hundred miles long. Bossuet had proved the possibility of this for a distance of three miles half a century before. Each end of the pipe was connected to an apparatus which would cause any movement of the water inside to act upon and move a hand. Air confined in small pipes has also been tried, but both systems are attended with many serious disadvantages.

In July, 1747, Dr. Watson, Bishop of Landaff, together with several electricians, ascertained the passage of electricity through water by sending shocks across the Thames, which experiment they subsequently repeated on a still larger scale through the New River at Newington; and in the

August of the same year they transmitted shocks through two miles of wire and two miles of earth at Shooter's Hill. The passage of electricity through water excited great interest, and these experiments were repeated by Franklin, in 1748, across the Schuylkill at Philadelphia, and in 1749 by De Luc, across the Lake of Geneva.

Although electricity is now the agent used in common for all telegraphic operations, its mode of application has been as manifold as the number of laborers in this most interesting combination of science and art. The electrical plans used for communicating information may be included in the three following divisions: first, that in which simple frictional electricity was alone used; next, the galvanic, where voltaic electricity was employed; and lastly, the electro-magnetic, which combines the agencies of electricity and magnetism. The first method was used from 1747 to 1800; the second from 1800 to 1825; and the third from 1825 to the present time.

The discovery of frictional electricity is of very ancient date. Thales, who lived about six hundred years before the Christian era, is reported to have discovered the power developed in amber by friction; by which it is enabled to attract pieces of straw and other light substances. Theophrastus (B. C. 321) and Pliny (A. D. 70) also refer to this fact; but it does not appear that any of the ancients reasoned upon these observed effects, they simply observed and recorded them as facts, and this knowledge was quietly kept till the commencement of the sixteenth century, when Dr. Gilbert instituted a series of experiments upon the subject. He found that this marvellous property possessed by amber was not ccnfined to that substance alone, but belonged to several other bodies: such, for instance, as the diamond, glass, sulphur, sealing wax, resin, etc.

In 1617, a curious book, entitled "Prolusions," etc., written by a Roman Jesuit named Strada, proves that there was a vague idea floating about concerning a magical magnetic telegraph. In this book there is a fabled contrivance of two magnetic needles, attached to dials bearing a circle of letters, and which possessed the property of always indicating the same letters, so that when one needle was made to point to any particular letter, the other needle, however distant at the time, placed itself so as to point to the same letter. A detailed account of this curious idea will be found in the "Spectator" No. 241, and in the "Guardian "No. 119.