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The fresh-water mussels and snails and the crayfish burrow deep into the mud and silt at the bottom of ponds and streams where they lie motionless during the winter. The land snails, in late autumn, crawl beneath logs, and, burrowing deep into the soft mould, they withdraw far into their shells. Then each one forms with a mucous secretion two thin transparent membranes, one across the opening of the shell and one a little farther within, thus making the interior of the shell perfectly air-tight. There for five or six months he sleeps, free from the pangs of hunger and the blasts of winter, and when the balmy breezes of spring blow up from the south he breaks down and devours the protecting membrane and goes forth with his home on his back to seek fresh leaves for food and to find for himself a mate.

I have met with no traces of the Virgin during the years between her Presentation in the Temple and her becoming head girl at Temple College. These years, we may be assured, can hardly have been other than eventful; but incidents, or bits of life, are like living forms--it is only here and here, as by rare chance, that one of them gets arrested and fossilised; the greater number disappear like the greater number of antediluvian molluscs, and no one can say why one of these flies, as it were, of life should get preserved in amber more than another. Talk, indeed, about luck and cunning; what a grain of sand as against a hundredweight is cunning's share here as against luck's. What moment could be more humdrum and unworthy of special record than the one chosen by the artist for the chapel we are considering? Why should this one get arrested in its flight and made immortal when so many worthier ones have perished? Yet preserved it assuredly is; it is as though some fairy's wand had struck the medieval Miss Pinkerton, Amelia Sedley, and others who do duty instead of the Hebrew originals. It has locked them up as sleeping beauties, whose charms all may look upon. Surely the hours are like the women grinding at the mill--the one is taken and the other left, and none can give the reason more than he can say why Gallio should have won immortality by caring for none of "these things."

~Anthracite~ or ~Culm~ is a kind of coal containing 90 per cent. or more of carbon. It gives off no inflammable gas. It is denser, and takes longer in burning, than charcoal. Its reducing effect is little inferior to that of charcoal. Almost any organic substance can be used as a reducing agent, but it is well not to select one which melts, swells up, or gives off much water and gas when heated in the furnace. ~Potassic Cyanide~ is an easily fusible and somewhat volatile salt, which, when fused, readily removes oxygen and sulphur from metallic compounds, and forms potassic cyanate or sulphocyanate as the case may be. Commercial samples vary much in purity; some contain less than 50 per cent. of the salt. For assaying, only the better qualities should be used. ~Iron~ is a de-sulphurising rather than a de-oxidising agent. Iron is used in the form of rods, 1/2-inch in diameter, or of nails, or of hoop iron. In the last case it should be thin enough to be bent without difficulty. Wrought iron crucibles are very useful in the processes required for making galena assays.

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