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THE EDINBURGH JOURNAL OF NATURAL HISTORY. 



This forms a saponaceous fluitl, which is to be temperetl with water until the acid has 

 the usual strength of vinei(ar. He grinds each ounce of this fluid with from eight to 

 ten {grains of the best lamp black, and one and a half grain of indigo. The advantasres 

 of this ink are: — 1. It is formed of cht'ap materials; 2. is easily made; 3. has a good 

 colour ; 4. flows freely from the pen ; 5. dries quickly ; 6. when dry is not removable 

 by friction ; 7 is not afffcied by soaking in water. Lastly, slips of paper written on 

 by this ink have remained immersed in solutions of various chemical agents, capable of 

 immediately effacing or impairing common ink, for seventy-two hours, without change, 

 unless the solutions be so (toncentrated as to injure the texture of the paper. 



Dr Traill offeis this composition as a writing ink, to be used on paper, for the 

 drawing out of bills, deeds, wills, or wherever it is important to prevent the alteration 

 of sums or signatures, as well as for handing down to posterity public records, in a 

 less perishable material than common ink. 



OBITUARY. 



On the 1 1th of May, in the 80th year of his an;e, died in London, Thomas Andrew 

 Kniffht, Esq., of Downton Castle, in Horeford^^hire, the President of the Hor- 

 ticultural Society of London. A correspondent in the AthentEvm gives the following 

 account of his life. 



Mr Knight was born at Wornsley Grange, near Hereford, on the l*"tth of October 

 1758. He was the youngest son of the Rev. Thomas Knight, a clergyman of the 

 Church of England, whose father had amassed a large fortune as an iron-master, at 

 the time when iron -works were first established at Colebrook Dale. When Mr 

 Knight was three years old, he lost his father, and his education was in consequence 

 so much neglected, that at the age of nine years he was unable to write, and scarcely 

 able to read. He was then sent to school at Ludlow, whence he was removed to 

 Chiswick, and afterwards entered at laliol College, Oxford. It was in the idle days 

 of his childhood, when he could derive no assistance from books, that his active mind 

 was first directed to the contemplation of the phenomena of vegetable life ; and he 

 then acquired that fixed habit of thinking and judging for himself, which laid the 

 foundation of his reputation as an original observer and experimentalist. He used to 

 relate an anecdote of his childhood, which marks the strong original tendency of his 

 mind to observation and reflection. Seeing the gardener one day planting beans in 

 the ground, he asked him why he buried those bits of wood. Being told that they 

 would grow into bean plants and bear other beans, he watched the event, and finding 

 that it happened as the gardener had foretold, he determined to plant his pocket knife, 

 in the expectation of its also growing and bearing other knives. When he saw that 

 this did not take place, he set himself to consider the cause of the difference in the 

 two cases, and thus was led to occupy his earliest thoughts with those attempts at 

 tracing the vital phenomena of plants to their causes, upon which he eventually con- 

 structed so brilliant a reputation. 



It was about the year 1795 that Mr Knight began to be publicly known as a ve- 

 getable physiologist. In that year he laid before the Royal Society his celebrated 

 paper upon the inheritance of disease among fruit-trees, and the propagation of de- 

 bility by grafting. This was succeeded by accounts of experimental researches into 

 vegetable fecundation, the ascent and descent of sap in trees, the phenomena of germi- 

 nation, the influence of light upon leaves, and a great variety of similar subjects. In 

 all these researches, the oiiginality of the experiments was very remarkable, and the 

 care with which the results were given was so great, that the most captious of sub- 

 sequent writers have admitted the accuracy of the facts produced by Mr Knight, 

 however much they may have diifered from him in the conclusions which they draw 

 from them. 



The great object which Mr Knight set before himself, and which he pursued 

 through his long life with undeviating steadiness of purpose, wcs utility. Mere curi- 

 ous speculations seem to have engaged his attention but little ; it was only when facts 

 had some great practical bearing that he applied seriously to investigate the pheno- 

 mena connected with them. For this reason, to improve the races of domesticated 

 plants, to establish important points of cultivation upon sound physiological reasoning, 

 to increase the amount of food which may be procured from a given space of land, all 

 of them subjects closely connected with the welfare of his country, are more especially 

 the topic of the numerous papers communicated by him to various societies, especially 

 the Horticultural, in the chair of which he succeeded his friend Sir Joseph Banks. 

 Whoever calls to mind what gardens were only twenty years ago, and what they now 

 are, must be sensible <if the extraordinary improvement which has taken place in the 

 art of horticulture during that period. Tnis change is unquestionably traceable in a 

 more evident manner to the practice and writings of Mr Knight, than to all other 

 causes combined. Alterations first suggested by himself, or by the principles which 

 he explained in a popular manner, small at first, increasing by degrees, have insensibly 

 led, in the art of gardening, to the most extensive improvements, the real orio-in of 

 which has already, as always happens in such cases, been forgotten, except by those 

 who are familiar with the career of Mr Knight, and who know that it is to him that 

 they are owing. Of domesticated fruits or culinary vegetables there is not a race 

 that has not been ameliorated under his direction, or immediate and personal superin- 

 tendence ; and if henceforward the English yeoman can command the garden luxuries 

 that were once confined to the great and wealthy, it is to Mr Knight, far more than 

 to any other person, that the gratitude of the country is due. 



The feelings thus evinced in the tendency oi his scientific pursuits were extended 

 to the offices of private life. Never was there a man possessed of greater kindness 

 and benevolence, and w'hose loss has been more severely felt, not only by his immedi- 

 ate family, but by his numerous tenantry and dependants. And yet, notwithstanding 

 the tenderness of his affections ibr those around him, when it pleased Heaven to visit 

 him, some years since, with the heaviest calamity that could befall a fathi r, in the 

 sudden death of an only and routh-loved son, Mr Knight's philosophy \^as fully equal 

 to sustain him in his trial. 



Mr Knight's political opinions were as free from prejudices as his scientific views 5 

 his whole heart was with the liberal party, of which he was all his life a strenuous 

 supporter. It is no exaggeration to add, that great as is the loss sustained by his 

 country and his friends, it will be equally difficult to fill his vacancy in science. No 

 living man now before the world can be said to rank with him in that particular 

 branch of science to which his life was devoted. 



Died, at his house in Ridley Place, Newcastle, on the 5th of May, a^ed 69 Na- 

 thaniel John Winch, Esq., greatly respected. Mr Winch was well known as an ex- 

 cellent botanist. He was author of an " Essay on the Geographical Diitribution of 

 Plants through the Counties of Northumberland, Cumberland, and Durham," which 

 has passed through two editions; also of " Observations on the Geology of North- 

 umberland and Durham, 4to, 1814 ;" and of a very elaborate " Flora of Northum- 

 berland and Durham," printed in the Transactions of the Natural History Society of 

 Northumberland, Durham, and Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He has bequeathed the 

 whole of his very extensive HerbariunT and his Library of Natural History to the 

 Linnaean Society, of which he was a member, and has left a legacv of L.200 to the 

 Newcastle Infirmary, to which he acted as secrctarv for 21 vears. 



MISCELLANEOUS. 



Makgasese Mine at Grandholm, near Aberdeen — We are informed, says 

 the Editor of the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, by Dr Fleming, that the 

 ore occurs in a rook of mica-slate, which stretches in a northerly direction, and has 

 an easterly dip, varying from 30° to 60" and upwards. In some places it is thin, 

 slaty, even, or waved, while at other parts thin beds of gneiss and granite make their 

 appearance. When the mine was opened upwards of twenty years ago, an excava- 

 tion, or opencast, was made across the stretch of the strala, at the eastern termination 

 of which a mass of felspar porphyry makes its appearance, the relations of which are 

 not seen at present. The ore, whjch is the Grey Manganese ore, or Hydrous 

 Binoxide of Manganese, occurs in ifregular thin beds, rounded concretions, or an- 

 astomosing films in the rock, accompanied by small quantities of sulphate of barytes. 

 As the working has but recently commenced, little more than a dozen of tons of the 

 ore have been obtained ; but as the undertaking is in hands possessing abundance of 

 capital and enterprise, Messrs Cookson, of Newcastle, the mine will have a fair trial, 

 and it is hoped that a new branch of trade will thus be added to those already so suc- 

 cessfully carried on at Aberdeen. 



Phosphorescence of the Ocean — The naturalists of iaSoHi'ia, in her late voy- 

 age round the globe, have made many observations respecting m.irine phosphorescence, 

 which are thus reported to the French Academy of Sciences. Numerous observa- 

 tions made upon phosphorescent water, by means of reagents, of filtration, boilinn-, 

 simple examination, and with the help of the micfoscope, have led us to the fidlowint' 

 conclusions : — The phosphorescent property of sea-water is not inherent in the na- 

 ture of thii liquid, but is essentially owing to the presence of organized beings. 

 The animals which produce the phosphorescence belong to different classes. In the 

 first rank we find the minute species of Crustacea which swarm in the sea, but espe- 

 cially a very small species having two valves, which possess this remarkable pro- 

 perty in the highest degree. All these species have been collected, and are care- 

 fully preserved in alcohol. Many moUusca, principally small Pelagic Cephalopoda, 

 Biphora, &c., also many zoophytes, among which we remark Diphyes, Medusse, 

 &c., possess the phosphorescent properly. Lastly, in certain locahties we also find, 

 on the surface of the ocean, very small yellowish bodies, which are, nevertheless, ex- 

 tremely phosphorescent. We encountered these small bodies in immense abundance, 

 when landing at the Sandw ich Isles, and in crossing from that archipelago to the Mari- 

 anne Islands. We met with them in such vast quantities in the Straits of Malacca and 

 on the coasts of Palo Penang, that the whole surface over a great extent seemed as j 



if covered by a thick yellowish dust. These small bodies have been examined with the ' 



microscope ; but although they have been for a long time submitted to our notice, 

 we have never been able to detect the slightest movements connected w;th them. 

 At the same time, the experiments we have made on them, through the means of 

 various reagents, lead us to the conclusion that they are organized and livimf bodies. 

 They appeared somewhat different as taken at the Sandwich Islands, and in the Straits 

 of Malacca. The former were globular and transparent, with a yellowish point in the 

 centre, the latter were rather oval, with a depression in the centre, so that they were 

 somewhat kidney-shaped ; they also were entirely yellowish. 



In all the animals which possess phosphorescence, the property has appeared to us 

 to depend upon a particular principle,, probably a secretion. Some of them, as the 

 small phosphorescent Crustacea, can distinctly emit it in streams, especially when irri- 

 tated. Others did not appear to possess the power of emitting this matter, and in 

 them it was developed only in certain circumstances, as when they struck a body, or 

 were irritated. In others again, as in the Cep'alopoda, and in some Pteropoda, the 

 phenomenon showed itself in a nearly passive way : the phosphorescent matter in their 

 nucleus, or other parts of their bodies, shone constantly and uniformly as long as the 

 animal was in the enjoyment of life, and along with this disappeared their light. 

 Lastly, in the yellowish corpuscles above described, the phosphorescent matter shines 

 almost uniformly, but if brought into contact with any reagent, their lustre is first in- 

 creased, and then insensibly vanishes away. The phosphorescent matter which we col- 

 lected on the sides of the vessel was yellowish, slightly viscous, and very soluble in 

 the water, which it rendered luminous at the moment it was projected by the animal. 

 — Comptcs Rendus, 5 Avril. Ed. New PliU'os. Jour7iaL 



Edinburgh: Published for the Proprietor, at the Office, No, 13, Jlill Street. 

 London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 65, CornhiU. Glasgow ajid the West of 

 Scotland: John Smith and Son; and John Macleod. Dublin. Georck 

 Young. Paris: J. B. Balliere, Rucde I'Ecole de Medecine, ^'o. 13 bis. 



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