Various

“ As transport pays better than farming, we hear on all sides of farms thrown out of cultivation; and in the neighbourhood of Maritzburg it is esteemed a favour to let you have either milk or butter at exorbitant prices and of most inferior quality. When one looks round at these countless acres of splendid grazing-land, making a sort of natural park on either hand, it seems like a bad dream to know that we have constantly to use preserved milk and potted meat, as being cheaper and easier to procure than fresh.’
Durban is a picturesque town, but the sand and the dust are overpowering. ”

“ Here is a statement which will no doubt in a few years be looked back upon with wonder by the author herself, and read with self-gratulatory retrospective compassion by settlers in Natal under the railway regime: ‘The country’ (between Maritzburg and Durban) ‘is beautiful; but except for a scattered homestead here and there, not a sign of a human dwelling is there on its green and fertile slopes. All along the road, shrill bugle-blasts warned the trailing ox-wagons, with their naked “forelooper,” at their head, to creep aside out of the way of the open brake in which we travelled. ”

“ A Kaffir servant usually gets a pound a month, his clothes, and food. The clothes consist of a shirt and trousers of coarse check cotton, and a soldier’s cast-off greatcoat for winter—all the old uniforms of Europe find their way to South Africa; and the food is plenty of ‘mealies’—or maize meal for ‘scoff,’ the native name for a mixture which probably resembles porridge. If a servant be worth making comfortable, one gives him a trifle every week to buy meat. The only effectual punishment and the sole restraint which can be placed on the Kaffir propensity to break things, is a system of fines. ”

“ Mr Wood reminds us that though the march of Science has destroyed much of our belief in the sweet old tales of fairyland, yet she has given us ample compensation, inasmuch as the ‘fairy tales of science’ are in reality more full of grace and poetry than any of the myths that delighted our childhood. ”

“ Countless inventions have been made by man without his having any knowledge of the fact that the machine which in its first idea sprang from a single brain, and was afterwards, during the progress of time, slowly improved and perfected perhaps by many successive generations of{78} inventors, had been in use in nature in a more perfect form than art could accomplish, for ages before man existed on the earth. ”

“ The Driver-ants, also found in Africa, are so sensitive to the fierce heat of the sun, that when on their marches they are obliged to cross open ground, ‘they construct as they go on, a slight gallery which looks very much like the lining of a tunnel stripped of the surrounding earth;’ and if they come to thick grass which makes a shelter for them, they take advantage of it, and only resume the tunnel when they emerge on the other side. Not less wonderful than any of these are the Trap-door spiders, of which mention has been before made in this Journal. ”

“ What with the reading-boy, the first reader, and the second reader, we see that there are many possible responsibilities for misprints besides those due to the author, the copyist or amanuensis, and the compositor. An impartial distribution of blame is hence desirable so far as it can be done.
NATURE’S TEACHINGS.
In a curious and instructive book which we have just read, entitled Nature’s Teachings, by Mr Wood, we are shewn that scientific inventions, no matter how original and ingenious they may appear to be, have each and all been anticipated in the world of nature. ”

“ The principle of the diving-bell and air-tube exists in varieties of insects; birds make beds and hammocks and even sew, and the bower-bird emulates us in the construction of ornamental bowers and gardens. Graceful fans exist in plants and insects, cisterns in the traveller’s tree and the camel’s stomach, and natural examples of the balloon and parachute.
In other varieties of art, Nature has stolen a march on man; certain insects make paper of different textures; the art known as ‘nature-printing’ was anticipated in the coal measures. ”

“ In 1876 about thirty children were clothed by this Society, each child being provided with a shirt, a pair of good leather boots, a pair of woollen stockings, a warm dress, and a pocket-handkerchief. In addition to this, a large well-decorated Christmas-tree is given for their entertainment, and each child is sent home with a good supply of fruit and sweetmeats. Altogether more than two hundred poor orphan children have been clothed by this Society simply by the proceeds of such small things as cigar-ends. ”

“ At Durban there is a funny little railway between the town and the ‘Point;’ ‘a railway,’ says Lady{72} Barker, ‘so calm and stately in its method of progression, that it is not at all unusual to see a passenger step deliberately out when it is at its fullest speed of crawl, and wave his hand to his companions as he disappears down the by-path leading to his little home. ”

“ But both Blanche and Lucy willingly accounted for the baronet’s restlessness on the ground of the revival of early associations, acting on the nerves of one whose health was no longer robust.
‘Let her only come here and quietly drop into her place among us,’ said the elder sister to the younger; ‘and depend upon it, papa will find her presence at Carbery as unexciting as though she were a supplementary daughter returning “for good,” as the girls call it, from a boarding-school.’
Jasper could, had it so pleased him, have considerably enlightened the ignorance of his unsuspecting sisters. ”

“ A great, indeed an inexhaustible, charm of the country is the wonderful profusion and variety of flowers which grow everywhere; precious things only to be seen here in stately glass houses and per favour of scientific head-gardeners, growing in wild abundance, hiding the ugliness of buildings, delighting the eyes and cheering the heart of the colonist. ”

“ And it is known that some of our most eminent authors, whose veritable words are regarded as more important than those of other men, are great sinners in this respect; they torment the compositor with specimens of the art of penmanship almost hopelessly unintelligible. Our readers will find this part of the subject—that is the misprints that are due wholly to the bad writing of the author or amanuensis, and not to carelessness shewn by the compositor or the corrector—fully illustrated by examples in the article ‘Wretched Writers’ in this Journal for March 14, 1874. ”

“ But why, in the name of common-sense, a man of the world should never forget the loss of a chit in the nursery—that is, if it was all on the square—but then, again, the motive!’ And the captain’s arching eyebrows and the compression of his thin lips were very expressive of his readiness to believe the very worst that could be believed as to his nearest and dearest, if only a plausible reason for such villainy could be alleged. ”

“ In the arts of peace, we must look to the animal world for the most perfect specimens of tools for digging, cutting, or boring. No spade is equal to the foot of the mole; and our hammers and pincers look clumsy indeed beside the woodpecker’s beak or the lobster’s claw. ”

“ The spider immediately descended, attached another thread, and hauled it up as before. In a day or two, when the tempestuous weather had ceased, the spider voluntarily cut the thread and allowed the then useless stick to drop.’ The plan here adopted by the spider is frequently followed by fishermen who during stormy weather at sea, ride out the gale by attaching the boat to their yielding nets.
It is natural to expect that in the arts of war and self-defence Nature should shew us an infinite variety; and man has not been slow in using his powers to adapt the same principles to his own use. ”

“ Many errors consist in the omission of a single letter in a single word, altering the sense most materially. Thus, an omission of the letter t, in a work by Dr Watts, made immortal into immoral; and other grotesque instances of this kind of error could be given. The heedless substitution of one letter for another, without exceeding or falling short of the proper number of letters in the word, is a very frequent form of blunder. ”

“ The cells are not ranged in regular alphabetical order, but in such manner that those containing the letters most wanted shall be grouped together near the compositor’s hand, leaving such letters as j, k, q, x, z, &c. to occupy cells near the margin of the case. May not some types fall out of an overfilled cell into the one just below it; or may not the filling of a pair of cases with new type be so carelessly managed that a few fall over into the wrong cells; or may the compositor, in distributing the type after printing, now and then drop a type into a wrong cell? ”

“ The orphan had proved herself a patient and intelligent sight-seer, willing to be pleased, thankful for the kind desire of her entertainers that she should be pleased, and discriminating in her admiration. ”

“ The red soil is very destructive to clothing, but it adds to the beauty of the landscape. ‘Green things,’ says the author, describing a Natal garden, ‘which we are accustomed to see in England in small pots, shoot up here to the height of laurel bushes. In shady places grow many varieties of fern and blue hydrangea, and verbena of every shade flourish. But the great feature of this garden is roses, of at least a hundred different sorts, which grow untrained, unpruned, in enormous bushes covered by magnificent blossoms ”

“ The hinges are most exactly fitted, and the spider has an extraordinary power of closing his door from the inside, and resisting all intrusion.
It is curious that as we advance in the scale of creation these wonderful dwellings cease. Strange to say, the creature which roams at will through the forest, and has no settled resting-place, is higher in the scale of life—according to the recognised scheme of naturalists—than the animal that is mechanically capable of constructing the most perfect abode! ”

“ The compositor makes all the corrections suggested by this ‘first reader,’ and for common cheap kinds of printing this is enough; but for better work, a ‘second reader’ is employed to correct not merely the compositor but to advise even the author in regard to badly chosen words or badly arranged sentences—an intellectual revision, in fact, often performed by men who sometimes themselves afterwards rise to distinction as authors. The perplexities that beset the printer’s reader were pretty fully set forth thirteen years ago in the Journal ”

“ There is a bird in South Africa, the Sociable Weaver-bird, which may be looked upon as a dweller in cities, each pair, up to the number of perhaps three hundred, building its own nest; while the whole community unite to form a common roof or covering of thatch made from a coarse kind of grass, to protect their habitations from the heavy tropical rains. ”

“ There is in Berlin a society called the ‘Verein der Sammler von Cigarren Abschnitten,’ or the Society of Collectors of Cigar-cuttings, which has been in existence some ten years, and has done much good. Every Christmas the proceeds of the cigar-ends collected by this Society and its friends are applied to the purchase of clothes for some poor orphan children. ”

“ Women roughly scratch the earth with crooked hoes to form a mealy-ground. Cows and mealies are all the Kaffirs require, except blankets and tobacco. The latter is smoked out of a cow’s horn. ‘They seem a very gay and cheerful people,’ says the author, ‘to judge by the laughter and jests I hear from the groups returning to their kraals every day by the road just outside our fence. Sometimes one of the party carries an umbrella; and the effect of a tall Kaffir clad in nothing at all, and carefully guarding his bare head with a tattered “Gamp,” is very ridiculous. ”

“ The alternations of heat and cold are very trying; the rains are sudden and violent; and thunder-storms are of almost daily occurrence and great severity. After one very grand storm she found a multitude of beautiful butterflies dead on the garden paths; their plumage was not dimmed nor their wings broken; they might have been ready prepared for a collection, quite dead and stiff.
Amongst the fauna of Natal, birds, reptiles, and insects abound. The natives suffer much from snake-bites, and white new-comers from mosquitos; all classes from ‘ticks,’ which also persecute the dogs and horses. ”

“ It was the eyes, and the eyes alone, that lent a marked peculiarity to the countenance of Sir Sykes’s ward. Look at them, and the verdict that Miss Willis was charming would have been pronounced by many women and most men. Confine the scrutiny to the other features, and the judgment that the Indian orphan was a plain, pale little creature, would as inevitably have resulted. She looked young, quite a girl. The delicate smoothness of her cheek suggested that her age might be under twenty ”

“ No man, except he be a white settler’s servant, ever carries a burden. When an ‘induna’ or chief is ‘on the track,’ he rides a sorry nag, resting only the point of his great toe in the stirrup, like the Abyssinians. ”

“ If man has armed himself with spears or daggers, if he has dug pitfalls or set traps in hunting, his most deadly contrivances are but feeble adaptations of the weapons, offensive and defensive, with which Nature has endowed her offspring. ”

“ The Eskimo snow-house is an exact copy of the dwelling the seal builds for her tender young; the wasp’s nest is composed of several stories supported on numerous pillars. The well-known instance of the building of the Crystal Palace on a ‘new principle,’ by Sir Joseph Paxton, is mentioned by the author, and is one of the many cases where man has confessedly copied nature in art ”

“ To insure the success of this institution, it will be absolutely necessary for all to unite and work together; each one must not leave it for his neighbour, thinking that one more or less can make no difference. To shew, however, what might be accomplished by a thorough unity in this matter, let us say that there are at least some ten millions of smokers in Germany; or to be very much within the mark, we will take only five million smokers who will give themselves the trouble, if such it is, of saving up their cigar-ends ”