*• 



52 Transactions of tee American Institute. 



and kerosene chandeliers, clock cases, lamps, pedestals, brackets, 

 and statuettes, which will bear all the tests in use to criticise the 

 finest bronzes in France. I have not the sliffhtest doubt that 

 within a few years, when the services of a staff of artistically 

 trained modelers have been retained by the Tucker Company, 

 statuettes and statues, not only of all the personages famous in 

 American story, but groups and figures illustrative of the best 

 epochs in ancient, mediaeval, and modern art will pour from their 

 fouudery. In colored iron, substitutes for bronze can be sold at 

 wonderfully cheap prices; but the success of the enterprise may 

 lead to the manufacture of bronze as genuine as any that was made 

 in old Rome. For the present, as I have said, the dulce cedes to 

 the utile, and the call for imitation chandeliers, lamps, and clock- 

 cases has reached beyond the States, and extended to Berlin, St. 

 Petersburg, and London. No higher compliment could be paid to 

 the Tucker Company than that recently vouchsafed by King Wil- 

 liam, of Prussia, who, after a long and attentive examination of the 

 works in colored iron, in Mr. Hiram Tucker's exhibit, ordered a 

 chandelier and other articles for the Library of the Royal Palace 

 at Berlin. King William, as a true Berliner, knows what can be 

 artistically done with iron; and Berlin ai't-work in iron, wonder- 

 fully' as it is wrought, presents precisely the same disadvantage — 

 repulsiveness in color — which the Tucker Company have so suc- 

 cessfully surmounted." 



A NEW FLUORESCENT SUBSTANCE. 



Mr. Goppelscroeder has extracted from Cuba wood (the best 

 kind of Monis tinctona), a substance intensely brilliant, with a 

 green light, which is therefore important in the theoretical study 

 of the phenomena of fluorescence. > 



MINERAL WEALTH OF YESSO. 



Mr. Gower, a British Consul in Japan, gives a glowing account 

 of the remarkable deposits of lead, iron, and coal in the Lsland of 

 Yesso. In one place coal forms the sea clifls; in another, he 

 walked four miles over an iron land containing over sixty per cent 

 of metal. 



IODIDE OF POTASSIL'M AND CADMIUM. 



Marm6 has found that this substance is an excellent reagent for 

 vegetable alkaloids. It precipitates nearly all of them. Morphia, 

 for instance, is thrown down in the state of a glutinous mass, from 

 Btrong solijtions, while from weak ones it is precipitated in rcla- 



