paper, and moving faithfully, more or less, as the wind blows harder or softer. And thus the "gentle zephyr" and the fresh breeze, and the heavy gale, and, when it comes, the furious hurricane, are made to note down their character and force. The sheet of paper on which the uncertain element, the wind, is bearing witness against itself, is fixed upon a frame moved by clock-work. Steady as the progress of time, this ingenious mechanism draws the paper under the suspended pencils. Thus each minute and each hour has its written record, without human help or inspection. Once a day only, an assistant comes to put a new blank sheet in the place of that which has been covered by the moving pencils, and the latter is taken away to be bound up in a volume. The book might with truth be lettered, "The History of the Wind; written by Itself"-an Eolian autobiography. Close by is another contrivance for registering in decimals of an inch the quantity of rain that falls. The drops are caught, and passing down a tube, a permanent mark is made by which the quantity is determined. The eastern turret is devoted to the Time Ball and its mechanism. Far out at sea-away from all sources of information but those to be asked of the planets, his compass, his quadrant, his chronometer, and his almanack, the mariner feels the value of time in a way which the landsman can scarcely conceive. If his chronometer is right, he may feel safe; let him have reason to doubt its accuracy, and he knows how the perils surrounding him are increased. An error of a few seconds in his time may place him in danger-an error of a few minutes may lead him to steer blindly to his certain wreck. Hence his desire when he is leaving port to have his time-pieces right to a second; and hence the expenditure of thought, and labor, and money, at the Greenwich Observatory, to afford the shipping of the great port of London, and the English navy, the exact time-true to the tenth of a second, or six hundredth of a minute—and to afford them also a book, the Nautical Almanack, containing a mass of astronomical facts, on which they may base their calculations, with full reliance as to their accuracy. Every day for the last seventeen years, at five minutes before one o'clock, the black ball five feet across and stuffed with cork, is raised halfway up its shaft above the eastern turret of the observatory -at two-and-a-half minutes before that hour, it rises to the top. Telescopes from many a point, both up and down the river, are now pointed to this dark spot above the Greenwich trees, and many an anxious mariner has his time-pieces beside him, that their indications may be made true. Watch the ball as you stand in the Park. It is now just raised. You must wait two minutes and a half, and as you do so, you feel what a minute may be. It seems a long, palpable, appreciable time, indeed. In the turret below, stands a clock telling the true time, gained by a laborious watching of the clock-stars; and beside the clock, is a man with a practiced hand upon a trigger, and a practiced eye upon the face of the dial. One minute-two minutes pass. Thirty seconds more, and the trigger has released the Ball. As it leaves the top of the shaft, it is one o'clock to the tenth of a second. By the time it has reached the bottom it is some five seconds later. Leaving the Ball Turret, and the old building which it surmounts, the new Observatory, where the chief work of the establishment is done, claims our notice. This attention would scarcely be given to its outward appearnace for it is a long, low building, scarcely seen beyond its own boundaries. The Greenwich Observatory is not a show place, but an eminently practical establishment. St. Petersburg and other cities have much more gorgeous buildings devoted to astronomical purposes, and Russia and other countries spend much more money on astronomy than England does, yet the Greenwich Tables have a world-wide reputation, and some of them are used as the groundwork for calculations in all Observatories at home and abroad. The astronomer does not want marble halls or grand saloons for his work. Galileo used a bell-tower at Venice, and Kepler stood on the bridge at Prague to watch the stars. The men, not the buildings, do the work. No disappointment need be felt, then, to find the modern Observatory a range of unadorned buildings running east and west, with slits in the roof, and in some of the walls. Within these simple buildings are the instruments now used, displaying almost the perfection of mechanical skill in their construction and finish-beautifully adapted to the object they have to fulfill, and in perfect order. They are fixed on solid piers of masonry, deeply imbedded in the earth, to secure freedom from vibration-a quality better obtained when the foundations are on sand or gravel than when on rock. To describe the instruments by their technical names, and to go into any particulars of the instruments they have superseded, would take space, only to do the work of a scientific treatise. Enough, therefore, to say, that there are the telescopes best adapted to the chief duty of the place, which is, watching the moon whenever she is visible; watching the clock-stars, by which the true time is calculated more exactly than it could be from observations of the sun alone; and watching other planetary bodies as they pass the meridian. Eclipses, occultations, and other phenomena, of course, have their share of attention, and add to the burden of the observer's duties. The staff of the Observatory includes a chief astronomer, Mr. Airy, with a salary of £800 a year; and six assistants who are paid, £470, £290, £240, £150, £130, and £130, respectively. This does not include the officers of the Meteorological branch of the establishment, to be spoken of hereafter; and which consists of Mr. Glaisher, with £240 a year, one assistant at £120, and two additional computers. At times, when these scientific laborers have collected more observations than | jotting-book with a metallic pencil the second, they are able to work out; additional help is summoned, in shape of the body of scientific clerks before spoken of; who, seated at desks, cast up the accounts the planetary bodies, including such regular old friends as the moon and fixed stars, but not forgetting those wandering celestial existences that rush, from time to time, over the meridian, and may be fairly called the chance customers of the astronomer. and the second only, of his observation, with such a fraction of a second as corresponds, in his judgment, to the interval of time between the passage of the star, and the beat of the clock which preceded such passage." An experienced observer will never commit an error in this mental calculation, exceeding the tenth of a second, or six hundredth of a minute. When the star has been thus watched over the seven cobweb lines (or wires), the observer jots down the hour and minute, in addition te the second, and the task is done. Stars, not very near the sun, may be seen in broad daylight, but, at night, it is requisite to direct a ray of light from a lamp, so far to enlighten the field of the telescope, as to permit the spider lines to be seen running across the brighter ground on which the expected star is to be visible. The adjustment of the instruments is a task of great nicety. If they are out of trim only a shadow of a shade of a hair's-breadth, the desired accuracy is interfered with, and they have to be re-adjusted. Temperature is of course an important element in their condition, and a slight sensibility may do mischief. The warmth of the observer's body, when approaching the instruments, has been known to affect their accuracy; and to avoid such sources of error, instruments have at times been cased in flannel, that the non-conducting powers of that homely fabric might screen the too-sensitive metal. Though the interior of the Observatory seems so still, the life of those employed there has its excitements. Looking through telescopes forms a small part only of their duty-and that duty can not be done when the weather is unfavorable. On cloudy days the observer is idle; in bright weather he is busy; and a long continuance of clear days and nights gives him more employment than he can well complete. Summer, therefore, is his time of labor; winter his time of rest. It appears that in our climate the nights, on the whole, are clearer than the days, and evenings less cloudy than mornings. Every assistant takes his turn as an observer, and a chain of duty is kept up night and day; at other periods, the busiest portion of the twenty-four hours at the Observatory, is between nine in the morning and two in the afternoon. During this time they work in silence, the task being to complete the records of the observations made, by filling in the requisite columns of figures upon printed forms, and then adding and subtracting them as the case requires. While thus engaged, the assistant who has charge of an instrument looks, from time to time, at his star-servatory, for then, except when any extraordiregulated clock, and when it warns him that his expected planet is nearly due, he leaves his companions, and quietly repairs to the room where the telescope is ready. The adjustment of this has previously been arranged with the greatest nicety. The shutter is moved from the slit in the roof, the astronomer sits upon an easy chair with a movable back. If the object he seeks is high in the heavens, this chair-back is lowered till its occupant almost lies down; if the star is lower, the chair-back is raised in proportion. He has his note-book and metallic pencil in hand. Across the eye-piece of the telescope are stretched seven lines of spiderweb, dividing the field of view. If his seat requires change, the least motion arranges it to his satisfaction, for it rests upon a railway of its own. Beside him is one of the star-clocks, and as the moment approaches for the appearance of the planet, the excitement of the moment increases. "The tremble of impatience for the entrance of the star on the field of view," says an Edinburgh Reviewer, "is like that of a sportsman whose dog has just made a full point, and who awaits the rising of the game. When a star appears, the observer, in technical language, takes a second from the clock face; that is, he reads the second with his eye, and counts on by the ear the succeeding beats of the clock, naming the seconds mentally. As the star passes each wire of the transit, he marks down in his Sunday is a comparative holiday at the Ob nary phenomena are expected, the only duty done is to drop the Time Ball, and observe the moon's place. The moon is never neglected, and her motions have been here watched, during the last hundred and seventy years, with the most pertinacious care-to the great service of astronomy, and the great benefit of navigation. The library should not pass unnoticed. It is small; but being devoted to works upon astronomy, and the kindred sciences, there is ample room for all that has hitherto been written on the subject, or that can, for many generations, be produced. The observations of a lifetime spent in watching the stars may be printed in marvelously few pages. A glance through the Greenwich Astronomical Library gives a rough general idea of what the world has done and is doing for the promotion of this science. Russia contributes large, imperial-looking tomes, that tell of extended observations made under the munificent patronage of a despot; Germany sends from different points a variety of smaller, cheaper-looking, yet valuable contributions ; France gives proofs of her genius and her discoveries; but her forte is not in observation. The French are bad observers. They have no such proofs of unremitting, patient toil in search of facts, as those afforded in the records of the Greenwich Tables of the Moon. Indeed, Greenwich, as we have already said, is a working Observatory; and those who go into its library, and its fire-proof manuscript-room, and see how its volumes of observations have been growing from the small beginnings of the days of Flamstead and Halley, to those of our later and more, liberal times, will have good reason to acknowledge that the money devoted to this establishment has been well employed. One other spot must be noticed as among the notable things in this astronomical sanctum. It is the Chronometer-room, to which, during the first three Mondays in the year, the chief watchmakers of London send in their choicest instruments for examination and trial. The watches remain for a good portion of a year; their rates being noted, day by day, by two persons; and then the makers of the best receive prizes, and their instruments are purchased for the navy. Other competitors obtain certificates of excellence, which bring customers from the merchant service; while others pass unrewarded. To enter the room where these admirable instruments are kept, suggests the idea of going into a Brobdingnag watch-factory. Round the place are ranged shelves, on which the large watches are placed, all ticking in the most distinct and formidable way one against another. When they first arrive, in January, they are left to the ordinary atmospheric temperature for some months. Their rates being taken under these circumstances, a large stove in the center of the apartment is lighted, and heat got up to a sort of artificial East India or Gold Coast point. Tried under these influences, they are placed in an iron tray over the stove, like so many watchpies in a baker's dish, and the fire being encouraged, they are literally kept baking, to see how their metal will stand that style of treatment. While thus hot, their rates are once more taken; and then, after this fiery ordeal, such of them as their owners like to trust to an opposite test, are put into freezing mixtures! Yet, so beautifully made are these triumphs of human ingenuity-so well is their mechanism 'corrected' for compensating the expansion caused by the heat, and the contraction induced by the cold-that an even rate of going is established, so nearly, that its variation under opposite circumstances becomes a matter of close and certain estimate. The rates of chronometers on trial for purchase by the Board of Admirality, at the Observatory, are posted up and printed in an official form. Upon looking to the document for last year, we find a statement of their performances during six months of 1849, with memoranda of the exact weeks during which the chronometers were exposed to the open air at a north window; the weeks the Chronometerroom was heated by a stove, the chronometers being dispersed on the surrounding shelves; and the weeks during which they were placed in the tray above the stove. The rate given during the first week of trial is in every case omitted; like newly entered schoolboys their early vagaries are not taken into account; but after that, The Royal Observatory, according to a superstition not wholly extinct, is the head-quarters, not only of Astronomy, but of Astrology. The structure is awfully regarded, by a small section of the community which ignorance has still left among us, as a manufactory of horoscopes, and a repository for magic mirrors and divining-rods. Not long ago a well-dressed woman called at the Observatory gate to request a hint as to the means of recovering a lost sum of money; and recently, somebody at Brighton dispatched the liberal sum of five shillings in a post-office order to the same place, with a request to have his nativity cast in return! Another, only last year, wrote as follows: "I have been informed that there are persons at the Observatory who will, by my inclosing a remittance and the hour of my birth, give me to understand who is to be my wife? An early answer, stating all particulars, will oblige," &c. This sketch descriptive of its real duties and uses are not necessary to relieve the Greenwich Observatory from the charge of being an abode of sorcerers and astrologers. A few only of the most ignorant can yet entertain such notions of its character; but they are not wholly unfounded. Magicians, whose symbols are the Arabic numerals, and whose arcana are mathematical computations, daily foretell events in that building with unerring certainty. They pre-discover the future of the stars down to their minutest evolution and eccentricity. From data furnished from the Royal Observatory, is compiled an extraordinary prophetic Almanack from which all other almanacks are copied. It foretells to a second when and where each of the planets may be seen in the heavens at any minute for the next three years. The current number of the Nautical Almanack is for the Year of Grace 1853. In this quiet sanctuary, then, the winds are made to register their own course and force, and the rain to gauge its own quantity as it falls; the planets are watched to help the mariner to steer more safely over the seas; and the heavens themselves are investigated for materials from which their future as well as their past history may be written. colony upon the continent. At Plymouth he tions in that part of the world. They, in a great sees the tombs of the first pilgrims, who came measure, changed the language and ideas of the out in the Mayflower. Some of the houses East. The Gospel was written in Greek; and which they built of brick brought from Holland, the law of Moses, the writings of the Hebrew are still remaining, with their low rooms and prophets, were translated into Greek on the paneled walls. In some private houses he saw banks of the Nile. A Greek kingdom was even many venerated heir-looms, kept as relics of the able to maintain itself for a long period of time first settlers; among others, an antique chair on the very confines of Tartary; and specimens of carved wood, which came over in the May- of the Græco-Bactrian coinage are even to this flower, and which still retains the marks of the day abundant in that part of the world. All staples which fixed it to the floor of the cabin. this, however, passed away, and has not left He also saw a chest, or cabinet, which had be- any very obvious traces on the present state of longed to Peregrine White, the first child born things. The second event was the establishment in the colony. Part of the rock upon which the of the Roman empire. Strongly as we are dispilgrim fathers landed has been removed to the posed to maintain that, on a general view of centre of the town, and, with the names of forty- human affairs, every thing happens for the best, two of their number inscribed upon it, inclosed yet we may say of the Roman empire that it within an iron railing. This is the American was in many respects a giant evil. No man of Roll of Battle Abbey. But to return to Pere- great original genius ever spoke the Roman grine White, the first child born in the colony language; in the sense in which many Greeks, Colonel Perkins, the munificent founder of the and among ourselves Bacon, Shakspeare, and asylum for the blind, where we found our friend Newton, were men of original genius. There Laura Bridgman, informed Sir Charles Lyell, in was a time when there were men of spirit and 1846, "that there was but one link wanting in ability in every Greek city: there was a time the chain of personal communication between when the Roman empire governed the world, himself and Peregrine White." White was and there was not one great man from Britain known to a man of the name of Cobb, whom to the Euphrates. Having fulfilled its destiny Colonel Perkins visited, in 1807, with some which seems to have been the introduction friends, who still survive. This Cobb remem- into the Western World of the ideas of unity, bered when there were many Indians near Ply-law, and order, though unintentionally on its mouth; the inhabitants of the town frequently part, for it was nothing but a military despotism firing a cannon to frighten them, to which can-it perished as it deserved, and its language is non the Indians gave the name of "Old Speak- now nowhere spoken. um." So that, in this case, one link is sufficient to connect men now alive with the first whites born in New England, and with the time when Indians were in the neighborhood of the first town that was settled. The third event was the irruption of the Bar. barians. That a higher civilization followed this every body knows; but how many centuries did it take to civilize the Barbarians? Now these, the three great events of past As a pendant to this, we may mention some-history, are all dwarfed very much when comthing connected with the originals of that other continent which our race is peopling at the antipodes. A few weeks ago, we were dining at the table of a naval officer, well known in the scientific and literary world, upon which occasion he mentioned, that being off the infant town of Sydney, in New South Wales, in the year 1806, he ate some of the first home-bred bullock which was killed in the colony. The son of the first governor having just returned from the colony, which he had now made his home, happening to be of our party, added, that "since that time their progress had been so rapid, that this year they were to melt down two million sheep for their tallow." There are three events in the history of the world which will bear comparison with this rapid extension of the English race. The first -and this has always appeared to us to be the most striking occurrence in history-is the marvelous manner in which a handful of Greeks, under Alexander and his successors, overran and held for a long period the whole of the East. The wonder is increased when we consider the difficulty of maintaining communica pared with what we are now doing. We are sending out every year, literally, hundreds of thousands of civilized men to people two continents in opposite hemispheres, and on opposite sides of the globe. In North America there are already twenty millions of our race. This population doubles every twenty-two years. Australia will inevitably become "the Queen of the South." Now that literature has given permanency to language, no other tongue than ours will ever be spoken upon these continents. We can see no limit to the spread of our laws, literature, and language. Greek and Roman greatness are really, in comparison, nothing to this. And, compared with the millions of civilized men which we have sent and are sending to occupy so large a portion of the earth's surface, how insignificant becomes the irruption of some savage, or half-savage hordes, into Italy, France, Spain, and England! At a time when civilization is at a standstill, if not retrograding, upon the continent of Europe, it is very delightful, particularly to an Englishman, to have such a picture to contemplate.Frazer's Magazine. [From the London Times.] LORD COKE AND LORD BACON. of the Chief Justices of England to the biography of Sir Edward Coke. The theme is worthy of the space afforded it. Independently of the professional renown of this great man, there are circumstances connected with his career that render it, perhaps, more deeply interesting than that of any other legal functionary. He began the world with the immortal Bacon; the two were rivals during life; they fought together for distinction, and were even competitors in love. Both were devoured by a raging desire for wealth and honors, both gained the objects of their fiery ambition, and neither found happiness when they were acquired. If Bacon was more unscrupulous than Coke in the ignoble race, his fall also was more fatal and ignominious. Both represent to our minds distinct forms of undoubted greatness. The Body of the Common Law of England is the type that speaks for Coke. The glory of human wisdom shines forever around the drooping head of Bacon. Both teach posterity how much intellectual grandeur may co-exist with the most glaring moral turpitude; both pay homage to virtue by seeking refuge in disgrace in the tranquil pursuits that have since immortalized them. Bacon, with a genius only less than angelic, condescends to paltry crime, and dies branded. Coke, with a profound contempt for the arts that Bacon loved, enraged by disappointment, takes revenge for neglect, and dies a patriot. In the days of Coke there would seem to have been a general understanding on the part of royal sycophants to mislead the monarch, and all became his sycophants who received his favors. Coke is no exception to the rule. It is true enough that to him we are mainly indebted for the movement which, beginning on the 30th of January, 1621, ended that very day eight-and-twenty years with the decapitation of the king; but it is likewise undeniable that the nation's difficulties would have waited some time longer for solution had not the defender of the people's rights been inoculated with a love of liberty by the sudden application of the royal lancet, whose sharp edge his judicious self-love would never have provoked. Coke was born in what a Royalist of the days of Charles the First might well have called "the good old times," when Queens were gentle despots and Parliaments the most devoted of self-constituted slaves; when Mr. Speaker "upon his allegiance was commanded, if a certain bill be exhibited, not to read it," and when "Mr. Vice-Chamberlain, to the great comfort of the Speaker and the House, brought answer of Her Majesty's acceptance of the submission" of legislators who had presumed to speak of matters "not proper and pertinent for the house to deal in." Elizabeth was on her splendid throne when Coke, having quitted the University of Cambridge without a degree, was working like a horse at Clifford's-inn. Stony-hearted and stony-minded, he loved neither poetry nor pleasure. From the moment he began the appointed task of his life, he dreamed of nothing sterling recompense it brings. Friendships not convertible to cash, Coke resolutely foreswore at the commencement of his career, and he was blessed with none at the close of it. Spenser yielded him no delight, Shakspeare no seduction. The study of law began at three in the morning, and, with short intervals of rest, ceased at nine in the evening, at which hour the indefatigable student at last took repose. Fortified by such discipline, and brim full of law, Coke was called to the bar in the year 1578, being then twentyseven years of age, and he rose in his profession as rapidly as he had all along resolved to rise. In pursuance of his design Coke married well in 1582; the lady was young, beautiful, and accomplished; virtues thrown, as it were, into the bargain, since the lawyer had been well satisfied with the ampie fortune by which they were accompanied. Before he was thirty years old the desperate money-seeker had made himself master of manor upon manor, and laid the foundation of the enormous possessions which at length alarmed the Crown, lest they should prove too magnificent for a subject. In 1585 he was elected Recorder of Coventry, in 1586 of Norwich, and in 1592 of London itself. In the last-named year he was also appointed Reader in the Inner Temple by the Benchers, and in 1592, being in his fortyfirst year, by the influence of Burleigh, he was made Solicitor-General to the Queen. The solicitorship secured the Speakership of the House of Commons, according to custom. Coke in his address to the Queen upon his appointment compared himself to a star in the heavens, 'which is but opacum corpus until it receiveth light from the sun." Her Majesty in answer graciously condescended to accept the metaphor, for she informed her humble Speaker that liberty of speech was granted him, "but you must know what privilege you have; not to speak every one what he listeth, or what cometh in his brain to utter, but your privilege is ay or no; wherefore, Mr. Speaker, Her Majesty's pleasure is, that if you perceive any idle heads which will meddle with reforming the church and transforming the commonwealth, and do exhibit bills to such purpose, you receive them not until they be viewed and considered by those who it is fitter should consider of such things, and can better judge of them." The times were sweetly Arcadian. Elizabeth should be painted a shepherdess, and her faithful Parliament a meek and timid flock about her. 66 The obsequiousness of Coke to his Royal mistress was in perfect keeping with his character. Nothing exceeds his abject servility while in the sunshine, save his fixed malignity when dismissed to the shade. In 1594 the office of Attorney-General became vacant; Coke regarded the prize as his own until he found one ready to dispute it with him. Bacon, eager |