HARD WICKE ' S S CIENCE- G SSIP. 



the elixir of life, and the universal solvent ; the 

 latter being required to make gold drinkable and 

 thus endue the body with its characteristic imperish- 

 ability ; drinkable gold — aurum potabilc — being the 

 theoretical composition of the elixir of life. 



Modern chemistry has done no more than alchemy 

 towards revealing the first two arcana, but has 

 accomplished the third. The universal solvent has 

 been long known, but not until lately separated, 

 and now cannot be retained simply because it attacks 

 everything ; nothing can hold that which dissolves 

 or destroys everything. This fury of the chemical 

 world is the element fluorine ; it exists peacefully in 

 company with calcium in fiuor spar and also in a 

 few other compounds, but when isolated, as it 

 recently has been by M. Henri Moissan, is a rabid 

 gas that nothing can resist. It combines with all the 

 metals, explosively with some, or if they are already 

 combined with some other non-metallic element, it 

 tears them from it and takes them to itself. 



In uniting with sodium, potassium, calcium, 

 magnesium and aluminium, the metals become heated 

 even to redness by the fervour of its embrace. Iron 

 filings, slightly warmed, burst into brilliant 

 scintillations when exposed to it, manganese the 

 same. Even the noble metals, which even at a melting 

 heat proudly resist the fascinations of oxygen, 

 succumb to this chemical siren at moderate tempera- 

 tures. Glass is devoured at once, and water ceases 

 to be water by contact with this gas, which combining 

 with its hydrogen, at the same moment forms the 

 acrid glass-dissolving hydro-fluoric acid, and liberates 

 ozone. 



Oyster Cultivation. — The victim of an ill-spent 

 life, whose remorse on the remembrance of neglected 

 opportunities, was lately pictured in "Punch," 

 may yet find some consolation and opportunities of 

 amendment. Though he may still regret that he did 

 not eat more oysters in the irrevocable past when 

 they ^were eightpence a dozen, the future is bright 

 and hopeful. Oyster cultivation has been eminently 

 successful in France. The exports in 1885 were 30 

 millions, and in 1887 they reached to about 52 millions, 

 and the imports from Portugal to France have 

 declined from 154,657 kilogrammes in 1S83 to 1500 

 kilogrammes in 1887. In Tasmania, Mr. Saville 

 Kent is equally successful. In his report for 1886, 

 presented to the Tasmanian parliament, he shows 

 good reason for concluding that, by extending the 

 system he has adopted in the government reserves, 

 and by its adoption by private enterprise, the colony 

 may ere long establish a lucrative oyster trade. Of 

 course we may do the same in Britain, the classic 

 fatherland of oysters, provided the enterprise is 

 placed in the hands of such a man as Mr. Saville 

 Kent, i.e. a naturalist who is not too much inflated 

 with professional or other official dignity, nor endowed 

 with too large a salary to work practically himself. 



A savant with a salary of ^1000 to ,£1250 per annum 

 cannot descend to menial work ; one with three or 

 four hundred is more likely to work for his bread, 

 even though the work demands daily wading waist- 

 deep, in salt water. Even the plodding Chinaman 

 has beaten us in this branch of industry. He culti- 

 vates oysters successfully, abundantly, and cheaply. 



Science in China. — The irresistible march of 

 science is striding over even the ultra conservatism 

 of China. Imperial sanction has been given to a 

 profound innovation, to the introduction of mathe- 

 matics and modern physics, also of civil and military 

 engineering, and still more startling, of international 

 law and the history of the outer barbarians. All of 

 these have now become subjects of Chinese National 

 Education in all the provinces of the empire, and 

 of the examinations upon the results of which the 

 social status and the whole career of the best men 

 of the empire depend. If this is fully carried 

 out, some of the weary, useless, and degrading rote 

 work connected with the old-established examina- 

 tions in the ancient Chinese classics, the exercises in 

 prose and poetical composition, Chinese history, 

 &c, must be pushed aside. When the thin 

 end of this education wedge is fairly inserted, we may 

 hope that the rotten old system will soon be reft 

 asunder. On a people who have already acknow- 

 ledged so fully the supremacy of the intellect ; whose 

 old-established aristocracy is so largely built on the 

 basis of intellectual competition, the effect of such 

 reform must be enormous. It may even occur in the 

 course of another generation that educational mission- 

 aries from China will visit Oxford and Cambridge to 

 promote the modernisation of our ancient Universities, 

 basing their advocacy on the splendid results of the 

 pioneer efforts successfully carried forward in the 

 Celestial Empire. 



Science on Mont Blanc. — Some of the older 

 accounts of electric displays on the summits of high 

 mountains have been rather discredited of late ; even 

 those of de Saussure have been treated rather dis- 

 respectfully, chiefly, I suppose, because modern 

 Alpine climbers have not confirmed them. My own 

 experience among such climbers, especially in 

 making an ascent of Mont Blanc so far back as the 

 autumn of 1842, explains the negative results. The 

 whole business of such climbing consists in reaching 

 a certain peak, resting thereon for a few minutes to 

 drink champagne or Kirschwasser, and take breath, 

 then galloping and glissading down with helter- 

 skelter pell-mell rapidity. Deliberate observation of 

 anything beyond the reading of a barometer is out 

 of the question in such expeditions. Last summer, 

 however, MM. J. Vallot and Richard did some 

 genuine work on the summit of Mont Blanc, where 

 they erected a tent and remained for three days and 

 three nights with the ability and appliances for 

 making meteorological and other observations. One 



