1857.] on the Great Bell of Westminster. 371 



Up to 7 or 8 inches, these bells do very well for house clocks, to be 

 heard at a little distance ; but nothing, in my opinion, can be worse 

 than the bells of this shape, 2 or 3 feet in diameter, which people 

 seem to be so fond of buying for the new fashioned cemeteries : 

 whether from ignorance that they will sound very differently on the 

 top of a chapel and in the bellfounder's shop, or because they 

 think a melancholy and unpleasant sound appropriate, or because 

 they want to buy their noise as cheap as possible, I do not pretend 

 to say. These bells, and thin bells of any shape, bear the same 

 kind of relation to thick ones, as the spiral striking wires of the 

 American clocks bear to the common hemispherical clock bells ; 

 i.e. they have a deeper but a weaker sound, and, are only fit to 

 be heard very near. A gong is another instrument in which a deep 

 note, and a very loud noise at a small distance, may be got with a 

 small weight of metal ; but it is quite unfit for a clock to strike 

 upon, not merely from the character of its sound, but because it 

 can only be roused into full vibration by an accumulation of soft 

 blows. Gongs are made of malleable bell-metal, about 4 of copper 

 to 1 of tin, which is malleable when cooled suddenly. 



The Chinese bells, some of which are very large, may be con- 

 sidered the next approximation towards the established form ; for 

 they are (speaking roughly) a prolate hemispheroid, but with the 

 lip thickened ; whereby the sound is made higher in pitch but 

 stronger, and better adapted for sounding at a distance when struck 

 with a heavy enough hammer. But still the shape of the Chinese 

 bells is very bad for producing sound of a pleasing quality ; and 

 generally it may be said, at least I have thought so ever since I 

 began bell-ringing twenty-four years ago, that all bells of which 

 the slant side is not hollowed out considerably, are deficient in 

 musical tone. The Chinese bells are not concave but convex in 

 the slant side. None of the European bells are so bad as that ; 

 but all the French bells that I have seen, or seen pictures of, and 

 the great bell of St. Peter's at liome, of which a^model is exhibited, 

 are straighter in the side than ours. According to my observa- 

 tion, no bell is likely to be a good one unless you could put a stick 

 as thick as ^V^^ ^^ ^^ diameter between the side or waist of the 

 bell and a straight edge laid against the top and the bottom. There 

 was a very marked difference between two of our experimental 

 bells, which were alike in all other respects, except that one 

 was straighter in the waist than the other, and that was decidedly 

 the worst. This condition is generally satisfied by the English 

 bells : indeed I think the fault of their shape is rather the contrary, 

 and that they open out the mouth too much, as if the bell had been 

 jumped down on a great anvil while it was soft, and so the mouth 

 spread suddenly outwards. The shape which we adopted, after 

 various experiments in both directions, is something between the 

 shape of the great bell of Notre Dame, at Paris, (of which a 

 figured section was sent over last year by the present architect 



