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placed in jars over a slow fire, the metal rising in the form of vapour in a distilling apparatus, and being afterwards condensed in water. It is sufficiently malleable to be converted into boxes, dishes, and various household utensils. The most singular application of this metal, however, is to the manufacture of certain teapots, which are formed in a very puzzling manner over an earthen vessel of the same shape, which appears as an interior lining. The handle and spout are commonly of the stone called jade, to which the Chinese give the name of yu. The outsides of these teapots are generally cut with inscriptions and devices on the metal, and a specimen of one is given below.

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The highly sonorous nature of their gongs arises from the large proportion of tin in combination with copper. In the most considerable Budhist temples is always suspended a great cylindrical bell, which, however, is not rung like our bells, by swinging with a clapper, but struck on the outside with a large wooden mallet. The great bell of Peking, measured by one of the Jesuits, was fourteen feet, and a half in height, and nearly thirteen

feet in diameter. kind, is very ancient; and with such antique specimens we may include the vases and tripods of bronze and other metals, on which the Chinese place great store, but which are generally rather too clumsy to possess much elegance. Another of their antiques in metal is the circular mirror, the speculum of which is formed apparently of a mixture of copper and tin, with perhaps a portion of silver. Some of the round metal mirrors sold in Mr. Salt's collection of Egyptian antiquities, and now in the British Museum, are surprisingly like these.

This, as well as most others of the

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But there is a puzzling property in many of the Chinese mirrors which deserves particular notice, and we may give it together with the solution furnished by Sir David Brewster :- "The mirror has a knob in the centre of the back, by which it can be held, and on the rest of the back are stamped in relief certain circles with a kind of Grecian border. Its polished surface has that degree of convexity which gives an image of the face half its natural size; and its remarkable property is, that, when you reflect the rays of the sun from the polished surface, the image of the ornamental border, and circles stamped upon the back, is seen distinctly reflected on the wall," or on a sheet of paper. "The metal of which the mirror is made appears to be what is called Chinese silver, a composition of tin and copper, like the metal for the specula of reflecting telescopes. The metal is very sonorous. The mirror has a rim (at the back) of about 1-4th or 1-6th of an inch broad, and the inner part, upon which the figures are stamped, is considerably thinner.

"Like all other conjurors (says Sir David Brewster), the artist has contrived to make the observer deceive himself. The stamped figures on the back are used for this purpose. The spectrum in the luminous area is not an

image of the figures on the back. The figures are a copy of the picture which the artist has drawn on the face of the mirror, and so concealed by polishing, that it is invisible in ordinary lights, and can be brought out only in the sun's rays. Let it be required, for example, to produce the dragon as exhibited by one of the Chinese mirrors. When the surface of the mirror is ready for polishing, the figure of the dragon may be delineated upon it in extremely shallow lines, or it may be eaten out by an acid much diluted, so as to remove the smallest possible portion of the metal. The surface must then be highly polished, not upon pitch, like glass and specula, because this would polish away the figure, but upon cloth, in the way that lenses are sometimes polished. In this way the sunk part of the shallow lines will be as highly polished as the rest, and the figure will only be visible in very strong lights, by reflecting the sun's rays from the metallic surface."

Metallic mirrors are now very much superseded among the Chinese by the use of glass ones. Their lookingglasses, however, being extremely thin, and the surfaces not ground and polished, like our plate-glass, are very imperfect. They are coated at the back, like ours, with an amalgam of mercury. The glass at Canton is partly obtained by remelting what is broken after it comes from Europe but it is certain that the Chinese import our flints chiefly for the glass manufacture.*

The last embassy observed that there were no glass windows near Peking, the universal substitute being a strong semi-transparent paper which comes from Corea. The Chinese explain this by saying that no glass window has ever been found to be proof against such wide extremes of heat and cold as exist in the north of China. * The materials are fused in a small reverberating furnace.

At Canton it has sometimes been found that an unusual change of temperature has broken the panes ; but this must have arisen from the pressure of the half-seasoned and ill-constructed window-frames on the glass. In their table utensils the Chinese adhere to the use of porcelain in preference to glass or any other material.

In the ornamental processes of carving wood and ivory, and other substances, they greatly excel the rest of the world. Those ivory balls, containing sometimes as many as seven or eight others in the interior, have long excited the surprise of Europeans, and even led to the supposition that some deception must be exercised in joining the exterior balls after the others have been inserted. They are, however, really cut one within the other, by means of sharp crooked instruments working through the numerous round holes with which the balls are perforated, and which enable the workman to cut away the substance between, and thus to detach the balls from one another, after which the surfaces are carved. Their skill and industry are not less shown in cutting the hardest materials, as exemplified in their snuff-bottles of agate and rock crystal, which are hollowed into perfect bottles of about two inches in length, through openings in the neck not a quarter of an inch in diameter: but more than this, the crystal bottles are inscribed on the inside with minute characters so as to be read through the transparent substance.

The peculiar fashion of the Chinese tools in most cases proves their originality. Their carpenter's saw is formed of a very thin plate of steel, which for this reason is kept straight by a light frame of bamboo at the back, which serves at the same time as a handle.* In appearance this has a heavy and clumsy look, but the lightness of the

* This sort of saw has been very generally adopted in America.

bamboo prevents it being so in reality. Carpenters work their awls with a thong, whose two extremities are attached to the two ends of a stick. The thong being quite slack, a single turn of it is taken round the handle of the awl, which is then worked backwards and forwards with great velocity. Some of the articles of furniture made for the English at Canton could not often, in point of neatness, be surpassed in this country, and in respect to solidity are sometimes superior. The anvil of the Chinese blacksmith, instead of having a flat surface, is slightly convex or rounded. The iron that is worked upon it thus extends more easily under the hammer on all sides, but the metal probably loses something in solidity. The bellows consist of a hollow cylinder, the piston of which is so contrived that the blast shall be continuous.

But we have yet to say something of the two principal manufactures of China, those of silk and porcelain, the originality of which was never contested, as the introduction of both into Europe is perfectly well ascertained; and could the Chinese urge no other claims to praise on account of their ingenuity, these two alone might serve to give them a high rank among the nations of the world. D'Herbelot justly considers that, as Rome obtained the silk manufacture from Greece, and Greece from Persia, so the last was indebted for it, according to the best Oriental authors, to China. The tradition, indeed, of the invention is there carried back into the mythological periods, and dates with the origin of agriculture. These two pursuits or professions, namely, husbandry and the silk manufacture, the chief sources of food and clothing, form the subject of one of the sixteen discourses to the people which have been before noticed. It is there observed, that "from ancient times the Son of Heaven himself directed the plough: the Empress planted the

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