56 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC NOTICES. A VARNISH, to preserve fresco paintings from the effects of air, has, it is stated, been discovered at Naples, by an Artist named Celestino. The third volume of the works of Canova, on Sculpture and Modelling, engraved in outline by Henry Moses, has been for some time in preparation. It will consist of six double Parts, each containing ten engravings, with descriptions from the Italian of Countess Alfrizzi. The first part is announced to appear in January, and a part regularly on every succeeding month, until completed. Two volumes of the History of Printing in Italy, from the period of the revival of the fine arts, to the end of the eighteenth century, translated from the original Italian of the Abbate Langi Lanzi, by Thomas Roscoe, Esq. will be speedily published; and five volumes, demy 8vo. will complete the work. SILK WORMS.-The decrease of the duties on the importation into this country of foreign silk goods, seems to have given a stimulus to the manufacture on the Continent. At Berlin, M. Bolzani, an Italian, has undertaken, with much apparant success to revive the culture of silk worms in Prussia, where it has been abandoned since the reign of Frederick II. The king has granted him a portion of the Hospital of Invalids; and he has, besides, obtained, on payment of a certain rent, the privilege of availing himself of the mulberry trees in the garden of that establishment. Mr. Bolzani has induced a number of female silk spinners to emigrate from Italy to Prussia; and is very well satisfied with the progress which he has made in the present year. It is with considerable pleasure we learn, that the Specimens of Ancient Mexican Sculpture, which were lately exhibited at the Egyptian Hall, have been recently transferred to British Museum: where they form a curious addition to the remains of the ancient Sculpture of Egypt, Greece, Italy, and India, there deposited. It is reported that it was the intention of Lord Grenville, had they not been obtained for the National Museum, to have become the purchaser, for the purpose of presenting them to the University of Oxford. Mr. Cook has put forth the first part of a work, entitled the Beauties of Claude Lorraine, from the Liber Veritatis. The selection is from a unique copy of Earlour's Engravings, in the possession of his Grace the Duke of Bedford, which copy was originally presented to the late Paul Sandby, and contains the earliest impressions of the work. The present selection has been carefully and beautifully executed on steel, by artists fully competent to the task, viz. T. Lupton, J. Bromely, G. H. Phillips, G. H. Every. The work will be completed in two Parts, each containing twelve plates; the Part under notice is got up in the usual tasteful and splendid way in which Mr Cook's publications are sent into the world. The accompanying biographical sketch of the life of Claude, is from the pen of Mrs. Hofland, and does great credit to her talents in this style of writing. Sir Thomas Lawrence, we are informed, is painting a portrait of the infant Duke of Bourdeaux, which His Majesty has requested from the king of France, Gerrard's picture of the same has been sent to St. Petersburgh. A new Irish Quarterly Magazine is announced for publication by Mr. Bolster, a Bookseller of Cork, to commence with the new year. Among his contributors, he states, are many of the most distinguished writers in the leading Magazines of the day. Mr. Walter, one of the Librarians of the British Museum, is preparing for publication, a Translation of G. B. Niebuler's History of Rome. TUSCULUM. The king of Sardinia has ordered the excavations on the site of ancient Tusculum to be carried on with assiduity, and some very interesting remains have been discovered, and on which are columns, mosaics, inscriptions, sculpture, and paintings. LONDON: SHACKELL, ARROWSMITH, AND HODGES, JOHNSON'S-COURT, FLEET-STREET. THE London JOURNAL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. No. LXIV. Recent Patents To JOSEPH CROWDER, of New Radford, in the County of Nottingham, Lace Net Manufacturer, for his Invention of certain Improvements on the Pusher Bobbin Net Machine. [Sealed 31st May, 1825.] IN our Xth Vol. pages 180 and 225, will be found the specifications of Lingford's and Mosley's patents for improvements in machinery for manufacturing bobbin net lace, where we have taken occasion to mention the variety of principles upon which machinery has been constructed for making that article. The present invention is not a new kind of machine for the production of bobbin net lace, but certain improvements consisting of alteration in the arrangement of old parts, and the introduction of new ones, applied to that particular description of mąchine called the pusher, by which the mechanism is con siderably simplified, and the work produced with greater rapidity, than by the pusher machines already in use. The patentee says his improvements on the pusher bobbin net machine are designed for the purpose of reducing the number of motions of the mechanism, requisite to the formation of the hole or mesh of the net in that particular kind of machinery. In the ordinary pusher machine (commonly called Crowder and Day's improved pusher, first introduced in the year 1820), fourteen general motions of the mechanism are requisite to complete the twists of the threads in the formation of one hole or mesh, but in the present improved pusher, only ten motions are requisite to effect that object, by which time and labour is economized in the proportion of five to seven, and the expence of the workmanship is necessarily reduced about one quarter. These improvements may be divided into three principal heads; 1st, the employment of two series of pushers on each side of the machine; which are attached to two distinct bars in the front of the machine; and to two distinct bars in the back of the machine; these are termed the upper and lower front pusher bars, and the upper and lower back pusher bars; 2ndly, in the employment of a single bar, carrying a series of guides for conducting the whole series of warp threads, in place of the two bars heretofore used in a pusher machine for the same purpose; to which is to be adapted certain cam wheels, (or what is commonly called Dawson's wheels) to effect that sliding or lateral movement of these bars, which is usually termed shogging; 3rdly, the introduction into a pusher machine of two bars which are called locker bars or fetchers, similar to bars of the same denomination employed in a Levers' bobbin net machine: these bars are for the purpose of drawing away the bobbins and car riages through the warp threads after they have been projected by the pushers, from the opposite side of the machine; and also the mechanism necessary for actuating these locker or fetcher bars. - In order to render these improvements evident, a vertical section taken across the machine, near the middle, is shewn in Plate III. at fig. 1, and a horizontal view partly in section, of one end of the machine, is represented at fig. 2; in which figures the situations and actions of the above mentioned improved parts are shewn, and are referred to by similar letters in both. It should, however, be here premised, that a pusher machine upon the principle called Crowder and Day's improved pusher, being well understood by competent workmen in the trade, and not claimed under the present patent, the patentee has thought it sufficient merely to shew and describe the general construction of such a machine, in order to point out clearly the manner of adopting, and the use of the several newly introduced parts, constituting the present improvements when attached to, or combined with, the principal parts of the mechanism of a machine constructed upon the pusher principles. There are in these kind of machines for twisting or weaving the threads together to make lace, a series of threads called the warp threads, passing perpendicularly from the beam or roller, a, through guides, c, to the beam, or roller, e, which threads are ranged along the whole extent of the machine; there are also a series of bobbins and carriages, g, answering the purpose of shuttles in looms, which conduct the weft threads through between the warp threads. These bobbins are moved to and fro, by what are called pushers, h, i, j, k, and by fetchers, 7, and m, and the movements of the mechanism shifting the guides or the bobbins laterally, cause the threads, as the course |