566 General Notices. 



gether, made into cakes, and dried in the sun ; and in certain parts, particularly 

 on the Continent, powdered charcoal and loam are made into bricks, and 

 found to make an excellent slow-burning fuel. Lately, however, a patent has 

 been taken out for mixing tar, blue or yellow clay, road stuff or pond mud, 

 and small coal, and making the whole into bricks, and drying them ; and the 

 fuel so produced is said to give out a more intense heat than the best New- 

 castle coal. The proportions, according to the specification of the patent in 

 the Repertory of Patent Inventions for August, 1839 (vol. xii. p. 101.), are as 

 follow : — Clay 7, tar 2, small coal broken, so as to be in pieces not larger 

 than J of an inch in diameter 8, road scrapings 3, in all 20. There is scarcely 

 a gentleman's seat in which there is not a good deal of small coal wasted, and 

 here is a hint by which it may be turned to excellent account. — Cond. 



Preservation of Kitchen-Garden Vegetables through the Winter. — At'Bretby 

 Hall, in Derbyshire (see p. 449.), an abundant supply of healthy cabbage 

 cauliflower, and lettuce plants was preserved through the severe winter 

 of 1813-14, by the following means, related by Mr. Blaikie in the Farmer's 

 Journal, January 31. 1814, and quoted by our esteemed correspondent, Mr. 

 Samuel Taylor, in the British Farmer's Magazine, new series, vol. ii. p. 396. 

 " His Lordship's gardener (Mr. Groves) has made it a practice, when the 

 young winter and spring vegetable plants grow over-luxuriant in autumn, to 

 pull them up and expose their roots to the vicissitudes of the weather for a 

 day or two ; he afterwards replants them in their former places, and, in some 

 instances, when the weather has been very mild late in the season, he has 

 repeated the operation a second, and even a third time ; this practice stagnates 

 the growth of the plant, hardens it, and invariably enables it better to withstand 

 the severity of the following winter. To this practice, which was followed last 

 autumn, Mr. Groves attributes his wonderful success in preserving the before- 

 mentioned vegetables, while very few have survived in the gardens in the 

 neighbourhood. {Brit. Farm. Mag., vol ii. p. 396.) 



Choice of Seed Corn. — The following facts show that the seeds of the cereal 

 grasses may be plump, solid, weighty, and abundantly farinaceous, and yet the 

 vital principle in a great measure destroyed, or the embryo wanting or defective. 

 A respectable and intelligent farmer, seven miles south-west of Edinburgh, at 

 an altitude of about 700 It., soil and locality dry, informs us that his oats were 

 well filled, but not cut, before the frost set in last autumn ; were ultimately 

 well carried, and produced a fair sample, weighing 17 stones, and, after paying 

 mill dues, left 14^ pecks of meal. Five weeks ago, he put 24 grains, the 

 growth of two different fields, into two separate pots, and placed them in a 

 favourable situation for germinating. The result was, that one of the pots 

 brairded 5 out of the 12 grains, the other seven, which is exactly one half of 

 the grains sown. Previously to this trial, the gentleman intended sowing part 

 of his farm with its own growth, which is his usual practice, but has now 

 purchased all his seed oats from a more favourable climate. (Scotsman, 

 April 3. 1839.) 



Electricity. — All the phenomena of electricity, according to Mr. C.V.Walker, 

 are contained in two propositions : " electricity attracts matter ;" " electricity 

 repels electricity." With these, in order to explain the mutual repulsion of 

 two negatively electrised bodies, some have been induced to unite a third, viz. 

 " matter repels matter." This third proposition Mr. Walker does not admit ; 

 he conceives matter to be so inert, that but for some cause, extraneous to 

 itself, were any portion placed in any spot in the universe, in that spot would 

 it remain for ever motionless and changeless ; and he doubts not that future 

 enquiries will enable us to conclude that this inertia of matter, in its fullest 

 and most extended sense, pervades the universe ; and that all the varied 

 changes of place in the planetary system, and all the admirable mechanism 

 which regulates the whole, owe their existence to the electric fluid alone, 

 to that fluid which seems to him, as far as we yet know, to be repulsive of its 

 own particles, and attractive of all else. With this view, on this basis, and in 

 the true spirit of generalisation, tracing all the phenomena of nature as 



