HANSTEEN'S TRAVELS IN SIBERIA. is supposed to dwell in a forest. To him they sacrifice young colts, lambs, and other animals, for their divinity requires blood. These sacrifices take place in an inclosed plain, surrounded by trees, having three entrances the west for those who sacrifice, one towards the east for the victims, and the third, to the south, for the water-bearers. This inclosure bears the name of their deity, and its entrance is interdicted to women. Friday is the day they set apart for taking a bath, preparatory to approaching it. All fields. These work is then suspended. The oblations to the good spirit are flowers, offered out in the open people have the appearance of being good and honest, and are distinguished from the other villagers by having a darker skin and glossy black hair. They speak a dialect somewhat resembling the Finnish. God in their language is called "Juma; " in Finnish, "Jumal." They are clad in a long caftan of coarse cloth, descending to the very ground, a scarf round their loins, and cloth trousers underneath, like the Russians. The women are distinguished from the men only by a thick plait of jet-black hair floating over their shoulders, and their complexion is even Cleanliness is not darker than that of the men. especially regarded by them. A caravan of many Amongst other places we were shown the prison The To facilitate our journey, Prince Davidoff, Director- empire; in fact, to attend to us in every way. A DVORNIK, OR LICENSED PORTER. added, "It will cost you absolutely nothing." Such a postilion produces more effect during a journey than open letters. He is a living evidence of the protection of the Director-General of Posts. This over The fertility of the environs of Kazan is attributed to the inundations of the Volga, which are as regular as those of the Nile, and for five or six weeks transform these districts for a distance of two geographical miles into an uninterrupted sea. the Viatka, Kama, Kinel, and Irgis-leaves the flowing of the Volga, and the other large riversground covered with thick slime or mud, which contridation continues, two-masted vessels, carrying from butes to the growth of vegetation. Whilst the inunsix to ten small guns, convey as many as a hundred passengers across plains and valleys to adjacent when the river returns to its bed, marshes of stagtowns situated on the heights. In the lowest parts, nant water remain, which in the hot months of July and August produce intermittent fever of three or fevers in the North, inasmuch as the patient feels no four months' duration; contradistinguished from our sensation of cold, but excessive pain in the spinal region, followed by extreme heat in the limbs, with irregular pulse. The common people superstitiously believe that a malignant female evil spirit, called Lichoratka, causes this disease. IN AUTOMATA. BY JOHN NEVIL MASKELYNE. III. N the last paper I had occasion to name much that creation runs: "Mr. Droz happening once to be sent was purely legendary in the way of automatons. for in a great hurry to wait upon some considerable We now approach a period when the accounts of personage at the west-end of the town, left me in their performances are not so liable to be overlaid possession of the keys which opened the recesses of by rodomontade, though the epoch we enter makes all his machinery. He opened the drawing-master a fair start in that direction with the "puff" of a con- himself, wound it up, explained its leading parts, jurer, Penetti, who exhibited a life-size rope-dancer and taught me how to make it obey my requirings in England about 1785. We know nothing of this as it obeyed his own. Mr. Droz then went away. figure beyond the modest man's own account of it in After the first card was finished the figure rested. I his advertisement, which out-Barnums Barnum. It put a second, and so on, to five cards, all different subjects, but five or six was the extent of its delineating powers. The first card contained, I may truly say, elegant portraits and likenesses of the king and queen, facing each other, and it was curious to observe with what precision the figure lifted up his pencil, in the transition of it from one point of the draft to another, without making the least slur whatever; for instance, in passing from the forehead to the eye, nose, and chin; or from the waving curls of the hair to the ear, etc." runs: "The new, truly most superb, majestic, amazing, and also seemingly incredible grand spectacle of the VENETIAN BEAUTIFUL FAIR, which mechanical figure being attired in character, and holding the balance in hands, dances and exhibits upon the tight-rope with unparalleled dexterity and agility, and in a manner far superior to any exhibited by the most capital professors, all the most difficult and prodigious feats of activity, leaps, attitudes, equilibriums, antics, etc., etc." Even without the etceteras here was surely enough to render Penetti's Venetian Beautiful Fair celebrated through all time, but, strange to say, only the professor's wondrous wealth of adjectives remains to tell the story of his handiwork. Of M. Le Droz, the elder, I have already written. The younger of that name, born at Geneva in 1752, was the inventor of the piping bullfinch, which he exhibited at the Vatican, before the pope and the cardinals. It was contained in an oval, gold snuffbox, four and a half inches long by three broad, and one and a half inches thick. The box had a horizontal partition; in the lower compartment was the snuff, in the upper the bird, three-quarters of an inch long from its beak to the extremity of the tail. When the lid was raised (just as "when the pie was opened," in the nursery rhyme), "the bird began to sing," and, with the sheen of its green enamelled gold, its bill of white enamelled ditto, the sly waggery of its tail, and its clear and ringing melody, it was surely a snuff-box to set before a king, and one he might not despise at a pinch. Le Droz also made a figure which played upon a harpsichord. This he introduced to the Parisian public in 1774, but it was not a success, though it seems to have been a more genuine effort to obtain the music by mechanical means than was that of M. Raisin, an organist of Troyes, who, about the year 1700, exhibited an Automaton Harpsichord " before the French court. The king, being endowed with the passion that proved so fatal to some of Blue Beard's wives, insisted upon a strict examination of the mechanism, when a clever little musician of some six years of age was found concealed within the instrument. M. Le Droz, junior, as I have mentioned in my first paper, constructed a clever drawing and writing automaton. This was the life-size figure of a man holding a metal style in his right hand, beneath which a piece of Dutch vellum was placed. Mr. Collinson's well-known description of this ingenious Early in the present century M. Maillardet, a Swiss mechanician, introduced several automatons to the English public in Spring Gardens. One was a female figure, seated at a pianoforte, which played eighteen airs, and gave itself numerous additional ones. Its "bosom heaved with many a sigh;" it "made eyes" at the spectators, and at the conclusion of each piece gently inclined its head in recognition of their applause. Imitations of this mechanical figure are by no means rare now; their interior economy is similar to that of ordinary street organs, projections on the barrel coming in contact with levers attached to the fingers, which in turn press the keys of the instrument. Maillardet's most beautiful achievement was his famous humming-bird, enclosed in an oval box three inches long. When a spring was released the lid flew open, and a tiny warbler rose, fluttered its wings, and sang for some four minutes; then it darted back to its nest, and the lid closed. In this minute piece of mechanism only one tube was used, and the musical sounds were varied by the shortening or lengthening of a piston. Maillardet also made an automaton tumbler, a few inches high only, but progenitor of all mechanical Leotards ever since. The apparatus to which the figure was attached was fixed to the top of a musical-box, and within the_rod grasped by the tumbler levers were brought to bear upon the figure, and set in motion by the action of the barrel. But a much more ambitious and elaborate effort of this copyist of Le Droz, the younger, was Maillardet's drawing boy. This was a kneeling figure; and when a pen, dipped in ink, was placed in its hand and drawing-paper stretched over a brass tablet in front, it wrote four sentences in French and English, and drew three sketches-always the same, occupying about one hour in their execution. This machine, like its counterpart, the drawing-master of Le Droz, was actuated by clockwork, and the outlines effected by combinations of levers and ellipses traversing the circumference of metal plates. The only original creation of Maillardet's was his ingenious magician. This was a figure, seated by a wall, with a wand in one hand and a book in the other. Upon a number of brass elliptical medallions questions were engraved, and any one of these being placed in a drawer, the soothsayer rose, raised his wand, and struck the folding doors above his head, which straightway flew open and displayed an answer. Thus, to the interrogation, "What is it that last deserts mankind?" the reply was, "Hope;" and to "What is the most universal passion?" the obvious answer "Love was received. This curious effect was obtained by aid of the medallions, which, though apparently alike, differed from each other in a minute particular. There were indentations round the medallions, but one of these, filled up, pressed upon a pin, which caused clock-work to raise the pre-arranged answer. Mr. W. Snoxell, of Charterhouse Square, whose collection of mechanical curiosities is quite unique, has a clock upon a similar principle. In this the magician rises from his chair when the visitor places a tablet with a question upon it in a drawer at the base of the clock. The wise man shakes his head sagely, consults his book, and waves his tiny wand; whereupon two cherubs rise, disclosing an appropriate answer. After the lapse of a moment or two they fall back into the original position, and are ready to give a reply to the next question. These answers are quite as pithy as Maillardet's, and the ideas a little more advanced. When we ask, "What is the real balance of power?" we do not receive a solution of the old-standing Eastern difficulty, but a reply pregnant with meaning, in "A balance at your banker's." The answers also become amusing and cynical in turns, as in reply to "How to print, and not publish," we receive the hint, "Kiss, and don't tell;" and to "What is half the world doing?" the shocking rejoinder, "Cheating the other half." Such a clock may well beguile the hours it records of tediousness. In Mr. Snoxell's collection there are also two female figures, somewhat after the model of Maillardet's pianoforte-player. One, life-size, in Spanish costume, plays upon an organ, the fingers pressing the keyboard of the instrument, and the head and eyes moving; the other, of smaller stature, but alike in all respects save height and attire. Mr. Snoxell's museum is also adorned by his own original automatic organ-grinder, which plays a number of airs. This figure is as much above its living Italian compeer in the matter of dress as of music, and, sniffing a nosegay, is surely the crême-de-la-crême of itinerant musicians. In the year 1845 Mr. John Clark, of Bridgewater, constructed a machine which puts Babbage's calculator quite in the shade. This was "A Latin Versifier," and is thus described by the ingenious and ingenuous Mr. Clark himself: "The machine contains letters in alphabetical arrangement. Out of these, through the medium of numbers, rendered tangible by being expressed by indentures on wheel-work, the instrument selects such as are requisite to form the verse conceived, the components of words suited to form hexameters being alone previously calculated, the harmonious combination of which will be found to be practically interminable." Can this be the origin of all the machine-made verse we too often have inflicted upon us? About the same year that this novel attempt at versification dawned upon mankind, a French conjurer of Alais, near Nismes, named Philippe Talon, came to London with a miniature harlequin, which jumped out of a box, whistled in time with the orchestra, smoked a pipe, and blew out a candle, besides going through a variety of amusing antics. Philippe-the "professional name" adopted by the wizard-had also two dolls, which brought from a toy confectioner's cakes, wines, etc., as requested by the audience. Jean Eugène Robert, better known as RobertHoudin, a contemporary of Talon, was a versatile genius, and can still be remembered by many who are not yet exactly of the old school. Remarkably successful as a conjurer, he also displayed talent in mechanical invention. In his autobiography, he mentions that his attention was first called to the subject of automata by a clever bit of work, by some unknown artist, which was brought to his father (a watchmaker at Blois) to repair. This, he says, was "a snuff-box, on the top of which a small piece of mechanism attracted my entire attention. The top of the box represented a landscape. On pressing a spring a hare made its appearance, and went towards a tuft of grass, which it began to crop; soon after a sportsman emerged from a thicket, accompanied by a pointer. The miniature Nimrod stopped at the sight of the game, shouldered his gun, and fired; a noise indicative of the explosion of the firearm was heard, and the hare, apparently wounded, disappeared in the thicket, pursued by the dog." There is, doubtless a vein of romance in all this, as there is in everything Houdin wrote; but it must have been a pretty toy and one likely to arrest the attention of the young mechanician. Houdin subsequently purchased a performing harlequin-such as Philippe afterwards introduced to the English public-from a Dutch artist named Opré, and it will be seen that he availed himself of the knowledge gained in the dissection of these "subjects" to construct automatons of his own much after their models. Houdin's ability to cure the ills that automatic machinery is heir to let him into many secrets. Thus, as we have seen, he repaired Vaucanson's duck, and so exploded the "digestion by solution" theory; and he also rehabilitated the Prussian Koppen's componium, a mechanical orchestra, first exhibited at Paris in 1829. This played a selection of operatic overtures with great precision. It was always asserted that the machine could improviso melodies, and that it was incapable of repeating itself; and there were, doubtless, charming variations even if improvisation was absent. Houdin, setting his fingers and his wits to work upon his own account, soon completed a pastrycook's establishment, where figures were seen rolling out the paste, or setting it in the oven, and from which a toy man-a most courteous assistant-brought various cakes for the spectators. Likewise-on the lines of Opré's harlequin-he constructed two small androids, and gave to them the names of the well-known clowns of the cirque in the Champs Elysées, Auriol and De Bureau. The first named of these seems to have been the most accomplished and agile performer, as he smoked a pipe, led the orchestra upon a flageolet, and went through a series of acrobatic feats upon a chair, which his brother automaton merryman, De Bureau, held in the air for him. Houdin also contrived a small flour-mill, which, when the sails were in full swing, would change their direction-going in the teeth of the wind like the phantom ship of Vanderdecken-at the command of the audience. This seemed remarkable, as the mill was apparently too small to contain any human being to direct the movements, but the fact was that Houdin's little boy, carefully stowed away, was the jolly miller who set the sails. Undoubtedly the most perfect of Houdin's creations was his nightingale. This flapped its wings, and leaped from branch to branch before the gushing melody for which the bird is noted broke forth. He found, he says, the most striking musical phrases by which the nightingale composes its melody to be tiou-tiou-tiou, ut-ut-ut-ut-ut, tchitchou, tchitchou, tchit-tchit, r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-ouit, etc. He analysed the strange sounds, the numberless chirps, the impossible r-r-r-r-r-ouits, and recomposed them by a musical process. To imitate the flexibility of throat, and the bird's harmonious modulations, he had a copper tube, about the size and length of an ordinary quill, with a steel piston moving freely within it. Clock-work set the bellows in motion, and opened or closed the valve to produce twittering, modulation, or sliding notes; and it likewise guided the piston according to the speed and depth required. Houdin also produced a writing and drawing automaton which he showed, with other of his work, at the Paris Exposition of 1844. This gained him a silver medal, of which he was very proud, and it attracted the attention of Louis Philippe, another distinction he greatly prized. The figure indited some six short sentences, and drew a few pictures. In answer to the question, "What may be volatile without a crime?" it wrote, "A butterfly; " and as a reply to "What is the emblem of fidelity?" it drew a greyhound. A trapeze performer; an orange-tree, upon which flowers blossomed and fruit grew at the command of the audience; and an electrical dial (apparently nothing but a sheet of glass with figures painted upon it), the hands of which pointed to any hour requested, whereupon the number was struck upon a crystal bell: these complete the record of Houdin's principal achievements. the importation of cargoes of grain. In fact, the agriculture of Europe and America was so far behind, that occasionally our limited consumption of breadstuffs enabled us to spare some for our neighbours, and there actually at one time existed a bounty on exportation. But, as a rule, hostile fleets made the great highway of nations a mare clausum for us, and we were face to face with the necessity of feeding ourselves. Millions of acres were called into cultivation. Prior to the war rent was so low that a young Scotch squire in West Lothian, who had taken a fancy to his tenant's horse, demised to him the fee simple of his farm in exchange for it, and the tenant's wife asked her husband how he came to part with the mare, when she could always pay the rent "with the hen and the birds." Enclosure Acts everywhere multiplied; and, notwithstanding all that may with some justice be said about robbing the poor of their commons, what belongs to everybody is of little value to anybody. "Make a man," said Arthur Young, "tenant at will of Paradise, and he will leave it a desert; give him the freehold of a barren rock, and he will convert it into a fruitful Eden." private appropriation of public wastes has been greatly to the advantage of society, and created a profitable demand for labour that has in wages more than amply compensated the dispossessed squatters of the commons. The As the war went on, and the price of grain_rose, men who had leases rapidly made fortunes. Farms formerly let at 10s. per acre were, when the tack, or lease, came to be renewed, readily re-taken at £3 108., and one which at this day yields the latter sum, was once profitably held for nineteen years at £1,000 for a hundred acres, used purely for the growing of cereals. Mr. George Brodie, the Historiographer Royal of Scotland, inherited from his father a long lease in East Lothian, which the landlord bought back from him at the price of £30,000. Many tenants became far wealthier than their landlords; kept their carriages, hunters, and open house. Wheat several times touched £6 per quarter, and once reached, in January, 1801, the enormous figure of £9. In the county of Middlesex growers of peas again and again sent to market produce for which they received as much in one season as the fee simple of the land on which the crop was raised. The quartern THE BRITISH FARMER THEN AND NOW, loaf rose to 18. 10d. Bread became so dear and WITH OTHER CONTRASTS OF THE PRESENT T is a very startling fact that although France and England, at the end of the last and beginning of the present century, did their best to ruin and destroy each other, they came-both of them-out of the struggle greatly richer and stronger than when they went in. The death grapple energised them, called forth all their latent resources, summoned them out of the slough of many lazy abuses, and nerved them to exertion in peaceful industry as well as in "horrid war." It was an illustration of how good may be educed from evil, and how God makes the wrath of man to praise Him. The effect of those thirty years of waste, debt, and slaughter upon the farming interests was especially noteworthy. When every merchant ship required a frigate or ship of the line as a convoy-was, indeed, prohibited from sailing without an armed protectorit may be imagined there was small opportunity for scarce that the Sovereign showed an example in the royal household of the economical use of it; and hair-powder was saved from the head that it might be spared for the mouth. Decent people above the rank of labourers sometimes silently pined in slow starvation. Meal mobs were chronic in Scotland. Bread riots occurred in England. Bad seasons so reduced the quality of the flour, that loaves, utterly uneatable, were thrown at the baker's head, and stuck on the wall behind the counter. The Red Lion Inn, of Brentford, was built by bricklayers who received just 28. 6d. a day, and laid from 800 to 1,000 bricks (or nearly double the present average) for that wage. Their labourers put up with 18. 3d. a day. Farmers' men were paid from 78. 6d. to 98. per week when the loaf was currently 10d. or 18. Animal food was entirely out of the questionexcept occasionally a rasher of bacon-for the unskilled labourer. There is now a current notion among consumers that everything is dearer than it used to be, and THE BRITISH FARMER. this is made the excuse for spending at a higher Still more extraordinary is the contrast of the means of female field-hands from 10d. to 18. 6d. per day. In each case the hours of work and its efficiency have decreased as the price has risen. It is satisfactory to couple with that fact the consideration that pauperism seems to have steadily diminished-the total of all classes relieved in 1877 being fewer by 206,000 than in 1849, in the face of a large increase in the general population. It would be still more satisfactory to reflect that, as the cost of food during these years has materially fallen, the union charges had also diminished. That they have increased by £335,001 only shows that a due admixture of liberality with economy extends to every department of the public service. The comparison of the present with the past would be very incomplete were it to stop here. Mr. Tierney, in denouncing Mr. Pitt for his enormous extension of The heaven-born taxation, declared with a sneer he had put a duty on everything but shoe-buckles. minister coolly thanked the honourable gentleman for his suggestion, and straightway included shoe-buckles in his tariff. As has been explained, at the very time wages were so low, and the necessaries of life so dear, the very sources of the employment of labour were heavily burdened. The raw material that skilled industry was to work up was exorbitantly taxed. Wool of all kinds, leather, all the materials of building, horses, carts, free navigation, everything upon. which labour could be employed to profit, had its tithing for the tax-gatherer, while prohibitory duties greatly enhanced the prices of the primary necessaries of life. It is a fact, startling as the consideration of it is, and grateful to every right-hearted Englishman, that in these islands, at this moment, a labouring man may live in substantial comfort without paying one Bread, beef, mutton, farthing to the treasury. He is exempt from the income or any capitation tax. pork, cheese, butter, sugar, all are free. Tea, coffee, and cocoa have little more than a nominal duty, and it is strictly true that there are many families in these islands, amply clothed from head to foot, comfortably housed, fully, wholesomely, and nutritiously fed, who are entirely exempted from taxation. "I can," says honest Jack Sillett, of Kelsale, "hardly express in terms sufficiently strong the pleasure I feel in subsisting on all the necessaries of life, manufactured, as it were, by my own hands, pure, fresh, and I am proud to say I am in free from adulteration. possession of abundance of all the good living that any rational man ought to wish for; I have all the bread, meat, vegetables, milk, butter, etc., that I can desire. As regards drink, I adhere to the golden rules of an eminent physician who says, 'Happy is the man who makes salt his sauce, and water his drink.' I thought if I could see the time when I should be enabled to produce my own food and be content with Adam's pure ale, what a considerable sum I should save in taxes in the year! I have lived to accomplish my purpose to the fullest extent that I can desire." These facts and figures are pregnant with instruction. The whole progress of society, the entire drift of legislation, our fiscal system from beginning to The taxes on knowledge end, are in the direction of the relief, the comfort, the elevation of the masses. have been entirely removed to their especial profit, and society burdens itself to teach their children. The Bible, that once cost the rich man £500, and had to be chained in the cathedral, the poorest may buy 19 will for eightpence. For a halfpenny the "Echo |