tending with the cloth, and care is taken by successive | lessening, than in aggravating, human misery; and applications to draw the impediment out: but all mecha- although strict in enforcing obedience-unrelenting in nical inventions hitherto made use of offer resistance to the punishment of hardened offenders-and capable of the knot; and, instead of yielding and breaking as the turning a deaf ear, even to a well-told tale, that has not teazle does, resist and tear it out, making a hole, or in- a good cause in its support yet, the indiscriminate juring the surface. The dressing of a piece of cloth line of treatment now pursued towards all Crown priconsumes a great multitude of teazles, it requiring from soners is rather attributed to others, in whose hands the 1500 to 2000 heads to accomplish the work properly. | governor is a mere instrument, than to himself. In They are used repeatedly in the different stages of the many respects, however, the regulations that have been process; but a piece of fine cloth generally breaks this adopted are very excellent, and have had the best and number before it is finished, or it may be said that there most wholesome effect, not only on the convict popu is a consumption answering to the proposed fineness-lation generally, but on many of the free inhabitants. pieces of the best kinds requiring one hundred and fifty or two hundred runnings up, according to circumstances. Abridged from the Journal of a Naturalist.

CONDITION OF CONVICTS IN VAN DIEMEN'S

LAND.

The state of persons who are sent hither for their offences should be one of punishment. They have no right to expect otherwise; nor would it be advisable that which is misery to one man, is thought nothing of by they should ever be led to think differently; yet that another; and it is the indiscriminating, undeviating VAN DIEMEN'S LAND being a penal station for the recourse that is now pursued, not the system itself, that ception of offenders from Great Britain, it may perhaps is thought not to belong to Colonel Arthur. It is easy be expected that a portion of these pages should be enough for people, sixteen thousand miles distant, to allotted to a subject which is very imperfectly under- legislate; but a discretion, and a great one too, should stood at home, although of very considerable impor- always be vested in the hands of the local authorities. tance. It may be well, therefore, to devote a small With regard to the second part of this subject, or space towards making known a few of the leading the indulgences that are open to prisoners of the Crown, principles under which the convict population are as a reward for good conduct, they are principallygoverned. There are two leading heads connected tickets of leave, by which the holder is free from comwith this subject-the one, the general state or con- | pulsory labour-and emancipations, which restore freedition of Crown prisoners; and the other, the incen- dom, so far as regards the Colony, but do not permit tives to good conduct which are presented to them, by the individual to leave it. But there are other interthe indulgences to which they are admissible. Upon mediate steps which may be considered to partake of the first point, it may be remarked, that all persons who the nature of indulgences, such as situations in the are transported hither, without reference to any previous police, &c., that are only conferred upon persons of circumstances whatever, are either placed in the public good character, but which open the road, at the end of service, or are assigned to private individuals immediately upon landing, according to their several qualifi- The fixed rule with regard to indulgence is, undeviating a given period, to certain and considerable advantages. cations. Those who belong to the first class, are good conduct, and length of service. Persons who are compelled to devote the whole of their time to such transported for seven years, must have resided four in occupations as are allotted them; and in return, are the Colony, before they are admissible to a ticket of fed, clothed, and lodged at the expense of the Crown. leave-for fourteen, six-for life, eight. EmancipaAll mechanics and labourers reside in barracks, built tions may be hoped for, by fourteen years' men, at the expressly for the occasion; but those who are employed end of two-thirds of their sentence; by those who are as clerks in any of the public offices, are permitted to for life, after having been here twelve years; but one live elsewhere, and receive an annual pittance, varying single act that shall have brought the individual before from 10% to 187. per annum, together with a small suin a magistrate, so as to have a record of misbehaviour for clothing. The regulations in force with respect to against his name, no matter how slight its nature, the whole body, and many of which are elsewhere given, throws him back there is no saying how long, and the effectually render their condition one of unvarying claim he might fancy he had, according to the rule now punishment; for they are not allowed the exercise laid down, becomes altogether forfeited. either of time or talents for their own advantage, nor are they suffered to possess property, even if they have friends who would place such at their disposal. Those who are assigned to private individuals, must be bona fide in the service of their masters. They are not allowed to live away from his roof-must not be paid wages – not work for themselves– can go nowhere without a pass-in fact, although possessing a sort of comparative liberty, are still under the closest control imaginable. The Colonial laws against harbouring prisoners are extremely severe, visiting with heavy fines all transgressors; and to which persons may very innoPITCH SPRINGS. cently render themselves liable, so various and compre- IN different parts of the world we find the phenomenon hensive are the enactments. It is only within the last of a kind of natural unctuous and inflammable subthree or four years, that the transportation system, so far stance oozing from the earth, which, under the various as regards this Colony and New South Wales, has names of natural pitch, earth pitch, naphtha, petroassumed that stern and rigid character by which it is leum (or rock oil), and bitumen, is very well known as now marked; since, formerly, there were many channels to its general properties. The naphtha is the purest open, by which much of its severity was capable of state of this substance, which by a certain exposure to being mitigated. Although it has been under Colonel the air somewhat changes its quality, and becomes Arthur's government that the restrictions and regula. | petroleum; and finally, after still longer exposure, be tions now in force have been introduced, it is generally believed that "orders from home," rather than his own natural disposition, have been the cause; for he has generally been remarked to have greater pleasure in

There are those in England who conceive that transportation is a state of ease and advantage. Let them but reside in Van Diemen's Land for one twelvemonth, and their opinions will be changed. In it, as in all other conditions of life, those who behave well are better off, in many respects, than others who show no signs of reformation; and God forbid it should ever be otherwise! but even these have daily reason to find that their degree of punishment is ample.

From the Van Diemen's Land Almanac for 1832.

comes what we call bitumen.

These phenomena are found in various parts of the world, but that which we are going briefly to notice is in the southern part of Zante (the ancient Zacyn

thus), one of the islands of the Ionian Confederation, | of state in a red scabbard, studded with golden fleurs-de-lis, or, as we sometimes term it, the Ionian Republic. This natural exudation is found in the southern part of Zante, near the coast, and has been described by several modern travellers. When Dr. Chandler visited the place, the pitch was collected and put up in barrels as an article of commercial value. (Chandler's Greece, ii. p. 302.) It is always a matter of curiosity to determine how long such natural phenomena have been in operation, and in this instance we know that the pitch-springs of Zante were as productive 2300 years ago as they are now. Herodotus in his travels visited this spot, of which he gives the following account in his fourth book, (chap. 195): "In Zacynthus I saw pitch brought up out of the water of a pond. Indeed there are several of these ponds, but the largest of them is about seventy feet square, and twelve feet deep. The mode of procuring the pitch is the following. They take a pole, and push it into the water with a myrtle branch at the end, and on pulling it up they find the pitch adhering to it, which in smell is like asphaltus, but of a better quality than the common pine pitch. They collect this pitch in a kind of vat or receptacle which they have dug near the pond, and when the quantity is considerable they put it in large jars or barrels. If any pitch drops from the branch into the pond, it goes under the ground and appears again in the sea, which is about half a mile.(four stadia) from the pond."

the point upwards; next came the Queen, in the fifty-sixth year of her age, (as we were told,) very majestic; her face. oblong, fair, but wrinkled; her eyes small, yet black and teeth black, (a defect the English seem subject to, from pleasant; her nose a little hooked, her lips narrow, and her their too great use of sugar); she had in her ears two very rich pearls with drops; she wore false hair, and that red; upon her head she had a small crown, reported to have been made of some of the gold of the celebrated Lunebourg table; her bosom was uncovered, as all the English ladies have it till they marry; and she had on a necklace of exceeding fine jewels; her hands were small, her fingers long, and her stature neither tall nor low; her air was stately, her manner of speaking mild and obliging. That day she was dressed in white silk, bordered with pearls of the size of beans, and over it a mantle of black silk shot with silver threads; her train was very long, the end of it borne by a Marchioness; instead of a chain, she had an oblong collar of gold and jewels. As she went along in all this state and magnificence, she spoke very graciously, first to one, then to another, (whether foreign ministers, or those who attend for besides being well skilled in Greek and Latin, and the landifferent reasons,) in English, French, and Italian; for guages I have mentioned, she is mistress of Spanish, Scotch, and Dutch. Whoever speaks to her it is kneeling; now and then she raises some with her hand. While we were there, William Slawator, a Bohemian baron, had letters to present to her, and she, after pulling off her glove, gave him her right hand to kiss, sparkling with rings and jewels, a mark of particular favour. Wherever she turned her face as she was going along, everybody fell down on their This pitch rises naturally to the surface, being speci- knees. The ladies of the court followed next to her, very fically lighter than water. Herodotus appears merely handsome and well-shaped, and for the most part dressed in to be describing the mode of procuring it in greater white. She was guarded on each side by the Gentlemen quantities by bringing it up from the bottom, where it Pensioners, fifty in number, with gilt battle-axes. In the might possibly collect for some time before it rises. ante-chamber next the hall, where we were, petitions were The ponds are described as being now of smaller di- presented to her, and she received them most graciously, mensions than those which Herodotus states, and also which occasioned the exclamation of "God save the Queen nearer the sea. In an island so subject to the distur-Elizabeth!" she answered it with," I thancke youe myne bances of earthquakes, it is possible that many physical good peupel." changes may have taken place since the Greek traveller saw the pitch fished up from the ponds of Zante.

Near Kerkook, about forty miles east of the banks of the Tigris (lat. 35° 30') "there is a great number of naphtha pits, which yield an inexhaustible supply of that useful commodity. Many of the pits are in the bed of a small stream, which forces a passage through the rocks: they emit a disagreeable smell, are about three feet in diameter, and some of them eight or ten feet in depth. The naphtha is here in a liquid state and perfectly black; it is conveyed from the bottom to the top in leathern buckets, then put into earthen jars, and sent all over the neighbouring country.*"

DESCRIPTION OF QUEEN ELIZABETH. [From the Travels of Paul Hentzer, a German, who visited England in 1598.] We arrived next at the Royal Palace at Greenwich, reported to have been originally built by Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, and to have received very magnificent additions from Henry VIII. It was here Elizabeth, the present Queen, was born, and here she generally resides, particularly in summer, for the delightfulness of the situation. We were admitted, by an order Mr. Rogers had procured from the Lord Chamberlain, into the presence chamber, hung with rich tapestry, and the floor, after the English fashion, strewed with hay (query rushes), through which the Queen commonly passes in her way to the chapel. At the door stood a gentleman dressed in velvet, with a gold chain, whose office was to introduce to the Queen any person of distinction that came to wait on her; it was Sunday, when there is usually the greatest attendance of nobility. In the same hall were the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, a great many counsellors of state, officers of the crown, and gentlemen, who waited the Queen's coming out, which she did from her own apartment, when it was time to go to prayers, attended in the following manner :—

First went Gentlemen, Barons, Earls, Knights of the Garter, all richly dressed and bare-headed; next came the Chancellor, bearing the seals in a silk purse, between two, one of which carried the royal sceptre, the other the sword

⚫ Kinneir's M

THE EDDYSTONE LIGHTHOUSE. THERE is scarcely one of our readers, probably, who has not heard of the Eddystone Lighthouse. It is erected on one of the rocks of that name, which lie in the English Channel about fourteen miles S. S.W. from Plymouth. The nearest land to the Eddystone rocks is the point to the west of Plymouth called the Ram Head, from which they are about ten miles almost directly south. As these rocks (called the Eddystone, in all probability, from the whirl or eddy which is occasioned by the waters striking against them) were not very much elevated above the sea at any time, and at high water were quite covered by it, they formed a most dangerous obstacle to navigation, and several vessels were every season lost upon them. Many a gallant ship which had voy aged in safety across the whole breadth of the Atlantic was shattered to pieces on this hidden source of destruction as it was nearing port, and went down with its crew in sight of their native shores. It was therefore very desirable that the spot should, if possible, be pointed out by a warning light. But the same circumstances which made the Eddystone rocks so formidable to the mariner, rendered the attempt to erect a lighthouse upon them a peculiarly difficult enterprise. The task, how ever, was at last undertaken by a Mr. Henry Winstanley, of Littlebury in Essex, a gentleman of some property, and not a regularly-bred engineer or architect, but only a person with a natural turn for mechanical invention, and fond of amusing himself with ingenious experiments. His house at Littlebury was fitted up with a multitude of strange contrivances, with which he surprised and amused his guests; and he also had an exhibition of water-works at Hyde-Park Corner, which appears from a notice in the Tatler to have been in existence in September, 1709. He began to erect his lighthouse on the Eddystone rocks in 1696, and it was finished about four years after. From the best information which can now be obtained it appears to have been

a polygonal (or many-cornered) building of stone, and, | dles in the lantern, found the place full of smoke, from when it had received its last additions, of about a hun- the midst of which, as soon as he opened the door, a dred feet in height. Still the sea in stormy weather flame burst forth. A spark from some of the twentyascended far above this elevation, so much so that per- four candles, which were kept constantly burning, had sons acquainted with the place used to remark, after the probably ignited the wood-work, or the flakes of soot erection of Winstanley's building, that it was very pos- hanging from the roof. The man instantly alarmed his sible for a six-oared boat to be lifted up upon a wave companions; but being in bed and asleep, it was some and to be carried through the open gallery by which it time before they arrived to his assistance. In the mean was surmounted. The architect himself, it is said, felt time he did his utmost to effect the extinction of the so confident in the strength of the structure that he fre- fire by heaving water up to it (it was burning four yards quently declared his only wish was to be in it during above him) from a tubful which always stood in the the greatest storm that ever blew under the face of the place. The other two, when they came, brought up heavens, that he might see what would be the effect. more water from below, but as they had to go down and But these words were perhaps merely ascribed to return a height of seventy feet for this purpose, their him after the event. On the 26th November, 1703, endeavours were of little avail. At last a quantity of he was in the lighthouse superintending some repairs, the lead on the roof having melted, came down in a when there came on the most terrible tempest which was torrent upon the head and shoulders of the man who ever known in England. Next morning not a vestige remained above. He was an old man of ninety-four, of of the building was to be seen. It had been swept into the name of Henry Hall, but still full of strength and the deep, as was afterwards found, from the foundation, activity. This accident, together with the rapid increase not a stone, or beam, or iron-bar remaining on the rock. of the fire, notwithstanding their most desperate exerThe single thing left was a piece of iron chain, which tions, extinguished their last hopes, and making scarcely had got so wedged into a deep cleft that it stuck there any further efforts to arrest the progress of the destroytill it was cut out more than fifty years afterwards. ing element, they descended before it from room to room, till they came to the lowest floor. Driven from this also, they then sought refuge in a hole or cave on the eastern side of the rock, it being fortunately by this time low water. Meanwhile the conflagration had been observed by some fishermen, who immediately returned to shore and gave information of it. Boats of course were immediately sent out. They arrived at the lighthouse about ten o'clock, and with the utmost difficulty a landing was effected, and the three men, who were by this time almost in a state of stupefaction, were dragged through the water into one of the boats. One of them, as soon as he was brought on shore, as if struck with some panic, took flight, and was never more heard of. As for old Hall, he was immediately placed under medical care; but although he took his food tolerably well, and seemed for some time likely to recover, he always persisted in saying that the doctors would never bring hin round, unless they could remove from his stomach the lead which he maintained had run down his throat when it fell upon him from the roof of the lantern. Nobody could believe that this notion was anything more than an imagination of the old man; but on the twelfth day after the fire, having been suddenly seized with cold sweats and spasms, he expired; and when his body was opened there was actually found in his stomach, to the coat of which it had partly adhered, a flat oval piece of lead of the weight of seven ounces five drachms. An account of this extraordinary case is to be found in the 49th volume of the Philosophical Transactions.

Such was the end of the first Eddystone Lighthouse. Soon after, the Winchelsea, homeward-bound from Virginia, was lost on the rocks, when the greater part of her crew perished. An Act of Parliament was then passed for the building of a new lighthouse, on a lease granted to a Captain Lovet, or Lovell, for ninety-nine years. It so turned out that on this occasion again the person employed to erect the structure was not a builder by profession. The individual whom Lovet made choice of for this purpose was a Mr. John Rudyerd, a silk-mercer on Ludgate-hill, whose recommendation appears to have been merely his general sagacity, and perhaps some genius which he was supposed to possess for mechanics. He began the building of his lighthouse in July, 1706; it was so far advanced that a light was put up about two years from that time; and in 1709 it was completed in all its parts. It differed from its predecessor in two important respects; being not of stone, but of wood, and not angular, but perfectly round. Its entire height was ninety-two feet

AN

As there was still more than half a century of their lease unexpired, the proprietors, who by this time had become numerous, felt that it was not their interest to lose a moment in setting about the re-building of the lighthouse. One of them, a Mr. Weston, in whom the others placed much confidence, made application to Lord Macclesfield, the President of the Royal Society, to recommend to them the person whom he considered most fit to be engaged. His lordship immediately named and most strongly recommended Mr. Smeaton, who had recently left the business of mathematical instrument maker, which he had practised for some years in London, and taken up that of a civil engineer, for which his genius admirably fitted him. Once more, therefore, the Eddystone Lighthouse was destined to have a self-educated architect for its builder. Mr. Smeaton has himself recorded the history of his lighthouse, in a This building, notwithstanding some severe storms very magnificent publication, from which we have dewhich it encountered, particularly one on the 26th of Sep-rived the particulars regarding the preceding structember, 1744, stood till the 2nd December, 1755. About tures. When it was first proposed that the work two o'clock on that morning, one of the three men who should be put into his hands, he was in Northumberland, had the charge of it, having gone up to snuff the can- but he arrived in London on the 23d of February,

A

B

A. Winstanley's, and B. Rudyerd's Lighthouses.