368 Mr. E, Beckett Deniso)t, [March 6, 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, 



Friday, March 6. 



Sir Charles Fellows, Vice-President, in the Chair. 



Edmund Beckett Denison, Esq. M.A. Q.C. M.R.I. 

 On the Great Bell of Westminster. 



I WISH it to be understood that I have nothing that can be called 

 a scientific theory of bell-founding to propound. I do not even 

 profess to give the reasons why any particular form of bell is better 

 than others ; nor have I been abl,e to find any one, among the best 

 mathematicians of my acquaintance, who knows how to deal with 

 the question mathematically. I have no doubt that the long- 

 established form of church bells was arrived at gradually by suc- 

 cessive deviations from some much simpler form, such as the hemi- 

 spherical, or hemispheroidal, or conical ; especially as bells of these 

 forms, and of uniform thickness, always strike every body at first 

 as very superior to the common bell, by reason of their having a 

 deeper and more imposing tone at a short distance. 



Neither have I anything to say of the history of bells. The 

 only part of their history that I am concerned with is, that in old 

 times people knew how to make bells of a full, rich, and sweet 

 sound ; and that the art of making such bells has been sinking 

 lower and lower, until we have seen no less than three peals in 

 succession made by two of the only three makers of large bells in 

 England for the Royal Exchange, and the chimes not yet allowed 

 to play, because a perfect peal has not yet been produced. At 

 the same time, it must not be supposed that all old bells are 

 superior to all modern ones. It would be difficult to find a worse 

 bell of any age than Great Tom of Oxford, which was cast nearly 

 two centuries ago, and might be recast into a more powerful bell, 

 with the weight so much reduced as to pay its own expenses ; and 

 I have seen much smaller bells of the same age as the Oxford 

 bell, as unsoundly cast as the second peal at the Exchange, in 

 which some of the bells were full of holes, distinctly visible on the 

 surface. 



And further, I wish to observe that we have nothing to do at 

 present with any question of musical nptes, inasmuch as the subject 



