CRITICAL NOTICES OF NEW PUBLICATIONS. 1 I'd 



mountain to mountain, seemed to crash on some distant headland, 

 only to make new echoes and to multiply the storm. The lightning 

 leaped, and streamed, and quivered between each bellowing of the 

 thunder, and seemed to threaten the stoutest rock and loftiest tree 

 in the surrounding forests. The deep and feai-ful gloom left by the 

 vanishing lightning was not so awful as the effect produced by its 

 returning momentary splendour, which showed for an instant the 

 dark abyss and dreadful chasms before us and by the side of us 

 where none had been suspected. As if to impress us with the tre- 

 mendous depths of these gulphs, the lightning would often, in zig- 

 zag lines, run along their sides, or, like the hissing snake, unfold its 

 coils to slide the more quickly down the bare rock. The whole 

 scene was awfully sublime ; and the distant, scattered, broad drops 

 which pattered down, driven in all directions by the many gushes of 

 wind that came sweeping through every mountain gully, left us no 

 repose. Torrents of sheeted rain at last seemed by their diluvial 

 power to silence the roaring of the gale and to quench the light- 

 ning's fire. Before the dawn of day Nature had once more lapsed 

 into her solemn attitude of rest." 



Gastein is seated on the highest pinnacle of one of the mountain- 

 ranges which slope towards the valley of the Salza, nearly three 

 thousand feet above the level of the ^lediterranean sea. Dr. G. re- 

 presents this as a very wonderful village, with its gigantic moun- 

 tains, its roaring river, its majestic waterfall, and its mighty cata- 

 ract, which descends, for 650 feet, nearly vertically from a shelving 

 rock. Here he caught a patriarchal physician eating his noon-day 

 dinner, eti demie chemise with part of the viands lying on his knee, 

 and part of them on a piece of furniture. This sedate personage 

 welcomed the stranger to Gastein, and " hastened to resume his coat 

 and waistcoat, smiling with an ineffable grin of black-teeth demon- 

 stration." The traveller protests, however, that his worthy enter- 

 tainer had a much better furnished cranium than was expected; but 

 the good man had one fault, he had become a proselyte to the dan- 

 gerous heresy of Iiifinilesimophysicalism, as it stands in Dr. Gran- 

 ville's neological vocabular}' ! 



From the precipitous rocks of Gastein five different springs pour 

 out thermal water, at 116°, F., of temperature. This water issues 

 without the smallest noise, and without forming any air-bubbles: it 

 is as bright and as pure as the finest distilled water, and it almost 

 surpasses this in transparency. In the baths or reservoirs it never 

 deposits the smallest trace of sediment, nor does it acquire any dis- 

 agreeable smell. It is all but tasteless ; smell it has none : " yet," 

 says Dr. G., " on entering the deep caverns of the two principal 

 sources, I was sensible of a certain peculiar odour, not unlike that 

 which a hard-boiled //es/t and sweet ecg gives out when the shell is 

 removed. By testing and analysis, Chemistry has detected no 

 fewer than twelve distinct saline ingredients in this nearly insipid 

 water ; these altogether amount to three grains in the j)int, and of 

 these the irlauber salt makes up the largest proportion. It is chiefly 



VOL. VII., No. XXI. r 



