It is the common brittle star (Ophiocoma [rous apertures, through which hundreds of rosula), and well deserves its English suckers can be extended, and perform the name. When your dredge has been emptied, functions both of feet and of hands, for you see a mass of snaky looking arms they serve as means for locomotion, and instruments for securing their prey. Sars, a Norwegian naturalist, has made us acquainted with some interesting facts regarding the production of the young of one species, and the changes which they undergo. The annexed figure (Fig. 39) is a copy of one by him, representing the Fig. 38, twining about, and even while you look some of them separate from the rest. Struck at so strange a sight, you lift up one for closer examination; in a moment, all the arms are flung off, and the central disk alone remains in your hand. The only way to prevent this disruption, is to have a vessel of fresh water on board, and throw into it such specimens as you wish to preserve in their full integrity. They die instantaneously; a momentary dip into boiling water, and exposure to a good fire, or a brisk current of air, will preserve them sufficiently to enable you to pack them up, and convey them in safety homeward. The common brittle star is really a pretty and a curious object. You can scarcely find two that are quite alike; they differ in size, in the spinousness of their arms, and in the variety of bright colours, blue, orange, yellow, pink, and red, that they exhibit. Their distribution seems to be greatly influenced by the nature of the sea-bottom. Your dredge at one "haul" may bring up a score or two, all of this species. In another half-hour, when you have changed your situation, not one of them is to be found; but others, destitute of the spiny investment, supply their place. The young, when liberated, swim freely about, undergo a series of transformations Passing on now to a third family (Aste- which are fully described and figured, and riada), we have what are regarded as the at the end of a month assume the appeartrue star-fishes (Fig. 23). The five arms ance of radiate animals. Of the precise here are not mere appendages to the central changes in other species, we are at present disk, but each of them contains within it- uninformed. It is possible that some reader self a part of the digestive system, diverging of the Family Friend may yet be the first to from the stomach which is in the central give the information of which we are at portion of the body. Deep grooves, or present destitute, and thus contribute his avenues, run along the lower surface of quota to the stock of scientific knowledge. each ray, and these are pierced by nume-tooq-aloot (To be continued.) ORIGINAL POETRY. THE JOY OF SUMMER. BY ROWLAND BROWN. O, IT is not the time for the heart to be sad, To the angel who reigneth with flowers at her feet. Not now, in this season of beauty and bloom, Should chill thoughts surround us of grief or the tomb; For unstain'd is the sky with a cloud dark or dim, As the earth seems to pour forth a thanksgiving hymn. I hear the sweet zephyrs invisibly pass, grass, And the sweet sound they whisper melodiously seems Like the voices of fairies we hear in our dreams. And the waters that gleam from resplendent cascades, And wake with their laughter the cool forest shades, Leap forth with loud shouts to the radiant light, Like a child whose whole being is swayed with delight. And in glory the boughs of the beautiful trees, Seem dancing to music of bird and of breeze; And the flowers that lift up their sweet forms from the sod, Seem to speak to the soul like the still voice of God. O, not now, then, the heart should with grief be oppress'd, When earth with such tokens of pleasure is blest; But with sky, bird, and breeze, should our spirits impart Unto GOD, earth's first treasure, the LoVE OF THE HEART! THE BEGGAR CHILD. Contentment unto thee is given, Sweet child, few are thy daily wants, For earth's well-purchased joys. Thou dreamest not that earth-born care, Thy heart is glad as wood birds wild, I weep to think that coming years, But look not to the future, child, Thy spirit which in Heaven may have, Than any on this side the grave, Then, cheer thee, child of poverty, 'Tis Heaven alone that maketh thee, JOHN GEORGE THOMSON. ASLEEP. A SNOW-WHITE shroud and a winding-sheet, I shall soon have fallen asleep, my sweet, Ah, well! See, dreamingly falls the rain, Nay, nay, little Lucy, you must not weep, I am fading away; I am falling asleep; E. W. HUDDLESTON. THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF (Concluded from page 154.) THE next electric telegraph in order of date is that of Mr. Francis Ronalds, who in 1816 constructed one by which he was enabled to send signals with considerable rapidity through a distance of eight miles of insulated wire. In 1823, Mr. Ronalds wrote to the Lords of the Admiralty, requesting an inspection of his electric telegraph, strongly recommending its adoption for government purposes; but, alas! the experiments of the philosopher were offered all in vain to that highly respectable body of intelligent men, and with its usual procrastination and supineness the English government could not be induced even to try an electric telegraph. "Lord Melville was obliging enough," says Mr. Ronalds, "in reply to my application to him, to request Mr. Hay to see me on the subject of my discovery; but before the nature of it had been known, except to the late Lord Henniker, Dr. Rees, Mr. Brande, and a few friends, I received an intimation from Mr. Brande, to the effect 'that telegraphs of any kind were then wholly unnecessary, and that no other than the one then in use would be adopted.' I felt very little disappointment," he continues, "and not a shadow of resentment on the occasion, because every one knows that telegraphs have long been great bores at the Admiralty. Should they again become necessary, however, perhaps electricity and electricians may be indulged by his lordship and Mr. Barrow with an opportunity of proving what they are capable of in that way." In 1827, Harrison Grey Dyer, an American, constructed a telegraph at the race-course on Long Island, and supported his wires by glass insulators fixed on trees or poles. From that period to 1837, we have no less than eleven different telegraphs, and in 1837 six different arrangements, exclusive of the one patented by Messrs. Cooke and Wheatstone in the June of the same year. The deflective telegraph was introduced into Russia in 1822 by Schilling; at Gottingen, by Gauss and Weber, in 1830; and into Munich in 1837 by Steenhul. In 1844 the registering telegraph of Professor Morse, employing the electro-magnet, was introduced between Baltimore and Washington. In America so far back as 1852 there were no less than fifteen thousand miles of wire erected and constant use in that country, at which time we were using the old aerial telegraph on one line at least, viz., between Liverpool and Holyhead! The first electric telegraph worked in England was on wires laid down between the Euston Square and Camden Town stations: and late in the evening of the 25th of July, 1837, in a dingy little room near the booking office at Euston Square, by the light of a flaring dip candle, which simply made the darkness visible, sat Professor Wheatstone with a beating pulse and a heart full of hope. In an equally small room at the Camden Town station, where the wires terminated, sat the co-patentee, Mr. Cooke, together with Mr. now Sir Charles Fox and Mr. Stephenson. These gentlemen listened with intense anxiety to the first word spelt by that trembling tongue of steel which will only cease to discourse with the extinction of man himself. Mr. Cooke in his turn touched the keys, and returned the answer, "Never did I feel such a tumultuous sensation before," said Professor Wheatstone, as when all alone in the still room I heard the nee dles click; and as I spelt the words I felt all the magnitude of the invention, now proved to be practical beyond cavil or dispute." The telegraph thenceforward, so far as its mechanism was concerned, went on without a check; and the modifications of this instrument, which is still in use, have only been made for the purpose of rendering it more economical in its construction and working: two wires at present being employed, and in some cases only one. After the successful working of the mile and a quarter line, the directors of the London and Birmingham Railway proposed to lay it down to the latter town, if the Birmingham and Liverpool directors would continue it on their line; but they objected, and the telegraph received notice to quit the ground it already occupied. Of course its sudden disappearance would have branded it as a failure in most men's minds, and in all probability the telegraph would have been put back many years, had not Mr. Brunel, to his honor, determined to adopt it on the Great Western. It was accordingly carried at first as far as West Drayton, i.e. thirteen miles: and afterwards to Slough, a distance of eighteen miles. The wires were not at this early date suspended upon posts, but insulated and encased in an iron tube which was placed beneath the ground. The telegraph hitherto had been strictly confined to railway business, and in fur system of Great Britain; or that beneath the narrow pavement of the alley lies its spinal cord, composed of two hundred and twenty-four fibres, which transmits intelligence as imperceptibly as the medulla oblongata does beneath the skin? Emerging from this narrow channel the 'efferent" wires branch off beneath the different footpaths, ramify in certain plexuses within the metropolis, and then shoot out along the different lines of railways, until the shores of the island would seem to interpose a limit to their further progress. Not so, however, as is well known, for beneath the seas, beneath the heaving waves, down many a fathom deep in the still waters, the moving fire takes its darksome way, until it emerges on some foreign shore, once more to commence afresh its rapid and useful career over the wide expanse of the Continent." therance of this object, Brunel proposed to continue it to Bristol as soon as the line was opened. Here again the folly and blindness of railway proprietors threw obstacles in the way, which, however, led to an unlooked-for application of its powers to public purposes; for it is well to bear in mind that in England telegraphs are of two descriptions, viz., the commercial and the railway. The latter are used for the purpose of sending communications relative to railway matters, while the commercial are employed for transmission of public or private messages at fixed rates or charges. They are mostly built near the railways, and in some cases a railway company will construct a line and give the use of it to a telegraph company, and as an equivalent the latter lends its aid to expedite their business. But sometimes the telegraph is laid down at the expense of the telegraph company, and that too at an expenditure The function of this central office is to which is only another instance of that receive and re-distribute communications. economy, well understood in England, Of the manner in which these ends are acwhich knows how to make sacrifices bor-complished little or nothing can be gained dering almost on prodigality in order to reap afterwards with usury the fruits of its advances. At a general meeting of the proprietors of the Great Western Railway, in Bristol, a Mr. Hayward of Manchester, got up and denounced the invention as "a new-fangled scheme," and managed to pass a resolution repudiating the agreement entered into with the patentees. Thus, within a few years, we find the telegraph rejected by two of the most powerful railway companies, the persons who, above all others, ought to have welcomed it with acclamation. To keep the wires on the ground Mr. Cooke proposed to maintain it at his own expense, and was permitted by the directors to do so, on condition of sending their railway signals free of charge, and of extending the line to Slough. In return he was allowed to transmit the messages of the public; and here commences the first popular use of the telegraph in England or in any other country. By the end of the year 1845, lines, exceeding five hundred miles in extent were in operation in England, working Messrs. Wheatstone and Cooke's patents, and in the following year the powerful Electric and International Telegraph Company sprang into existence. "Jammed in between lofty houses at the bottom of a narrow court in Lothbury, we see before us a stuccoed wall ornamented with an electric illuminated clock. Who would think that behind this narrow forehead lay the great brain-if we may so term it-of the nervous from a glance round the instrument rooms. You see no wires coming in, or emerging from them: you ask for a solution of the mystery, and one of the clerks leads you to the staircase and opens the door of what looks like a long wooden shoot placed perpendicularly against the wall. This is the great spinal cord of the establishment, consisting of a vast bundle of wires, insulated from each other by gutta percha. One set of these conveys the gathered up streams of intelligence from the remote ends of the Continent and the farthest shores of Britain, conducts them through London by the street lines underneath the thronging footsteps of the multitude, and ascends with its invisible despatches directly to the different instruments. Another set is composed of the wires that descend into the battery chamber. It is barely possible to realise the fact, by merely gazing upon this brown and dusty bundle of threads, that we are by them put into communication with no less than four thousand four hundred and nine miles of telegraph in England alone. It must be remembered that, although we have only spoken of the Electric and International Telegraph Company, there are several other companies in the United Kingdom working different patents: and if it is a source of wonder to our readers that one company should virtually possess the monopoly of telegraphic communication in this country, it must not be forgotten that it was the first to enter the field, that it came forward with a large capital, speedily secured to itself the different lines of railway, and bought up, one after another, most of the patents that stood any chance of competing with its own. From December, 1852, to the same month of the following year, no less than three hundred and fifty thousand five hundred messages were forwarded or received by this company, the receipts of which were £84,184 16s. 4d., thus paying the company dividends at the rate of seven per cent. per annum. The telegraph company between London and Liverpool receives, or did receive a few years ago, a thousand pounds a year for doing the business of this railway company. The "Times" pays the same sum per annum for the transmission of a certain amount of daily news, paying in addition for all extra communications of importance. The rate at which a commercial message is charged is a penny a mile for the first fifty miles, and a quarter of this charge for any distance under a hundred miles: some lines, the South-Eastern for instance, are even higher than this in their rates of charges. There are two kinds of telegraph worked by the company, viz. the Needle Telegraph, which is preferable for all ordinary transactions, because it transmits its messages with the greatest rapidity, and Morse's Recording Telegraph. The latter instrument strikes the spectator more, perhaps, than the nimble working needle apparatus; but its action is equally simple, strips of variable length, representing letters, being punched upon a long strip of paper, called the message strip, which is placed between a revolving cylinder and a toothed spring. Such is the celerity with which the notation is transmitted by this method, that in an experiment performed by M. Le Verrier and Dr. Lardner before Committees of the Institute and the Legislative Assembly at Paris, despatches were sent one thousand miles at the rate of nearly twenty thousand words an hour. In ordinary practice, however, the speed is limited to the rate at which an expert clerk can punch out the holes, which is not above a hundred a minute. Where the object is to forward long documents, such as a speech, a number of persons can be employed simultaneously in punching different portions of the message, and thus the message strips can be supplied as fast as the machine can work. The speed with which the attendants upon these instruments read off the signals made by the needles on the needle telegraph is really marvellous: they do not, in some cases, even wait to spell the words letter by letter, but jump at the sentence before it is concluded; and they have learned by practice, as Sir Francis Head says in "Stokers and Pokers," to recognise immediately who is telegraphing to them, by the peculiar expression of the needles, the long drawn wires thus forming a kind of human antennæ by which individual peculiarities of touch are projected to an infinite distance! We had the pleasure of visiting the Electric and International Telegraph Office the other day, and rejoiced with a great rejoicing at the fact that the whole of the large and important business is carried on by women, with the exception of that part which belongs to the receipt of the messages, and the transmission of the same by the well known intelligent-faced messengers. The history of the introduction of young women into this office is most instructive and interesting. It appears that about six years ago Mr. Ricardo, M.P., the then chairman of the company, heard of a young girl, the daughter of one of the railway station-masters, who had for three years carried on day by day the whole of the electric telegraph business for her father, and that too with great intelligence and correctness. The idea then suggested itself of training and employing women as clerks for the telegraph company, and on its being proposed to the committee, the proposition was warmly advocated by General Wylde, who has proved a most untiring friend to the cause. Opposition was of course naturally enough shown by the clerks of the establishment, but the experiment was permitted to proceed, and Mrs. Craig, the present intelligent matron, appointed to instruct in her own room eight pupils on two instruments. At first, the instruments in one room were worked by young men, and the instruments in the other by young women, and it seemed as though the directors were pitting them against each other, establishing a kind of industrial tournament, to see which description of laborer was worthiest. With what tact, perseverance, and success, Mrs. Craig and her pupils worked, may be gathered from the fact that at Founders' Court alone upwards of ninety young women are now in active employment, the whole of the actual working of the instruments having fallen into their hands. The committee are now perfectly satisfied that the girls are not only more teachable, more attentive, and quickereyed than the men clerks formerly em |