General Notices. 619 



become sufficiently hard to answer every purpose of building. If the latter fluid 

 be used, it will, moreover, insure that venerable sable hue treated of in the pre- 

 ceding hint. Any kind of mortar may be rendered very hard and durable by 

 these means, and furnish an excellent arched coping for a wall. The broth 

 from the great boilings of horses for dogs' meat might be very advantageously 

 employed, by mixing it with mortar, plaster, &c, or to wash walls with. 



" In a public walk at Naples, the ground of which is principally composed 

 of broken tuffa, containing alumine and silex, a few drops of oil have oc- 

 casionally fallen from the lamps, or been spilt by the lamplighters. This small 

 quantity of oil occasioned so great an induration, and the garden being regu- 

 larly swept, that in process of time little hemispherical hillocks were formed 

 under each lamp, of such consistency as to resist the spade and the pickaxe. 

 Some of them, quite hard enough for building, I saw taken out, like corns as it 

 were, by digging around and under them. 



" About a year ago I poured a quantity of coal tar upon a heap of road 

 scrapings, which, when removed six months after, was much harder than a 

 mass of solid chalk. A walk made of gravel and road scrapings, to which I 

 also applied coal tar, became as hard as a rock." (Mech. Mag., vol. iv. 

 p. 364, 365.) 



The important Influence of the Mr ive breathe on the general System, we 

 do not believe to be at all understood, or duly impressed, either on those who 

 build houses, or those who live in them. We know, experimentally, the as- 

 tonishing difference on our health and spirits, between breathing the air of a 

 low humid situation, or one pent up by trees and bushes, and that of another 

 situation, high, dry, open, and airy ; as well as the difference between breathing 

 in a small, close, or crowded, and a large and well aired, room ; and we are 

 anxious to induce our readers to reflect on the subject. To those who have 

 leisure and means, we would recommend Clark On the Influence of Climate in 

 the Prevention and Cure of Chronic Diseases ; and Holland's Experimental En- 

 quiry into the Laws of Animal Life. The latter author considers air as life. 

 In an excellent notice of the work in the Scotsinan (Aug. 12.), it is stated : 

 " In our author's opinion, the mind has only one way of communicating its 

 influence to the body, namely, through the function of respiration. He holds 

 that breathing, or something similar to it, is the primary source of the con- 

 tinuance of existence in the whole animal and vegetable creation ; that what 

 excites or depresses the respiratory function, excites or depresses the whole 

 system ; that the great object attained by respiration, and especially by the 

 expiratory part of the operation, is the due oxygenation of the blood, on 

 which its healthy and complete circulation depends ; that vitality is in the 

 blood, and dependent on the preservation of certain qualities or combinations 

 in its constituent parts, which again depend upon respiration." — Cond. 



Pecuniary Charity. — A high estimate of pecuniary charity in the scale of 

 virtues is the result of incivilisation, and a testimony of the barbarity of the 

 governments where it prevails. Where the people are well governed and pros- 

 perous, the field for the exercise of this virtue is necessarily limited ; but 

 wherever great and terrible inequalities in human condition subsist, charity is 

 a necessary supplement to the defective institutions out of which they arise. 

 In the Christian world, where pecuniary liberality is dignified as a theological 

 virtue, charity stands in the place of many more serviceable and important 

 duties ; and much of that energy which should be given to the improvement 

 of the political and statistic condition of the country is wasted in a vain at- 

 tempt to bolster up bad systems, and to avert by eleemosynary efforts the 

 miseries and vices accumulated by misrule. The high and influential classes 

 are especially prone to fall into this error. Too moral and too religious to be 

 satisfied with the wretchedness by which they are surrounded, yet too selfish, 

 perverse, or indolent, to attempt a thorough removal of its causes, they satisfy 

 their consciences by attempting to relieve in detail the sufferings which their 

 privileges and pretensions produce in the gross; and when they have be- 



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