THE TECHNOLOGIST. [Nov. 1, 1864. 



192 REVIEWS. 



for small cash payments in India than even in Africa, and are used for 

 ornamenting elephant trappings. 



The conch shell, yielding the pink cameo, is looked upon as an 

 inferior material for cutting, because the colour is uniform and fades ; 

 and the helmet shells are not sometimes, but always, preferred, as 

 they yield several layers of colour. Dr. Phipson is not aware that 

 cameos are cut on the Cypreas, although bracelets and studs of 

 them are very common in the jewellers' shops in Fleet street and the 

 Strand. We should scarcely have thought that knife-handles and 

 pen-holders were made of the clamp shell (Tridacna). Its texture is so 

 hard, that even the feat of cutting a cameo on it is difficult. The diver's 

 helmet and the diving bell have been tried in the pearl fisheries and 

 failed. 



The chapter on Infusoria and other animalculse is more diffuse than 

 requisite, as their industrial utility, with the exception of the edible 

 " mountain meal," is almost nil. The section on Sponges might have 

 been much amplified, considering the materials available in our own 

 pages. Our criticisms are directed in a friendly spirit, and more with 

 a desire to see future editions of this useful Little work rendered more 

 valuable. We hail with satisfaction every effort to diffuse scientific 

 and practical information of a technical nature, and no one is more 

 competent than Dr. Phipson to do this, if he but gives himself carefully 

 and steadily to the task. 



Our Grenada files by the last packet announce the death of Robert 

 Kennedy, Esq., at the advanced age of eighty- three. He was the last sur- 

 vivor of the nine original founders of the Grenada Agricultural and 

 Horticultural Society, of which he was ever an active, intelligent, and enter- 

 prising member and officer. Botany and horticulture formed his delight, 

 and during his long and busy life he had gathered around his picturesque 

 home the leafy treasures and vegetable wonders of all parts of the world. 

 In the year 1837, the Agricultural Society presented Mr. Kennedy with 

 a handsome silver cup, in testimony of his successful exertions in intro- 

 ducing the nutmeg — a product that is now so extensively and profitably 

 cultivated in Grenada as to be one of its chief staples ; and his nutmegs 

 from Bellevue carried off the medal at the Great Exhibition of 1851, as 

 the best in the world. Meteorology also is indebted to him for an un- 

 interrupted record, throughout many years, of the fall of rain at Bellevue, 

 which is situated at an elevation of about 800 feet above the sea, on the 

 windward side of our island. 



