8, Parliament-street, Westminster, 1st April, 1857. | DEAR SIR CHARLES,-I have not been able to trace the man who told me about the use of my diving apparatus at Navarino. I cannot find out where he is now, but there must have been some mistake, as I find that the apparatus I sent out would have worked securely in 300 feet water, and an apparatus fit for working in 300 feet I could now supply.

The pipes were half-inch in diameter, and made of many folds of cloth and caoutchouc, very strong and fit to resist an internal pressure of 150lb. to the square inch.

I perceive that the plan about to be used by the Americans for raising the Russian ships at Sebastopol, is the same as I patented in 1835. Yours faithfully, JOHN BETHELL.

NATURE PRINTING.

SIR,-I must beg to intrude a few remarks further on the subject of Mr. Dresser's New System of Nature Printing. In his reply to my observations upon his paper last Wednesday week, he reiterates emphatically the nature of his claim, viz., that of printing from the leaf on stone and metallic surfaces, and so enabling the impressions to be multiplied at pleasure. Now, in the first place, Mr. Dresser has been over and over again superseded in his idea of transferring such objects to such surfaces. And, in the second place, Mr. Dresser should be well aware that he cannot practicably carry out that which he advances as his claim. Mr. Dresser must know full well that, with regard to metallic surfaces especially, his idea is a mere toy-process. He cannot obtain and I say it with confidence-by such modes as he adopts, a printing surface from which impressions can be printed in a practical manner. With respect to his producing-experimentally, even-impressions of such objects with all their natural excellence, it is a mere matter of words. He does not do it-and he cannot do it.

ART TREASURES EXHIBITION. SIR,-As the time for opening the Exhibition of ArtTreasures at Manchester is approaching, permit me, through the medium of your Journal, to suggest to the managers the propriety of admitting thereto at a reduced charge-say half-price-the members of the Mechanics' and similar Institutions throughout the kingdom, or at least of those in the vicinity of Manchester. Such a boon would, I believe, be highly appreciated by all to whom it might be extended, and would be productive of much good feeling. The concession, however small, would, moreover, tend to allure some who might not otherwise be disposed to visit the Exhibition, and thus the managers would sustain little or no pecuniary loss by this graceful act of liberality. I am, &c.,

Hanley, Staffordshire.

Proceedings of Institutions.

E. B.

PIMLICO. At the Literary, Scientific, and Mechanics' Institution on Monday, the 30th ult., Mr. E. G. HolIf Mr. Dresser had paid due attention to my paper land, an American gentleman, gave an interesting lecture upon the subject, he would have remembered that I ex- on "The Romance Writers of the New World." Mr. pressly stated that so-called Nature Printing had its Holland said that America was not only the country of limits, and that care would be required to confine its a varied material enterprise, but of a new and vigorous process within its capabilities. That its capabilities literature; that the national motto of "going a-head," -as practised by the Imperial Printing-office at Vienna, had evidently now a place in its literature; that it must and afterwards by myself-are of a practical nature, henceforth abound with the same creativeness, perseverthere can be no doubt, and the most eminent botanists ance, and energy, that have hitherto been displayed in of the present day have expressed most favourable other pursuits. The lecturer then spoke of the romance, opinions provided a proper choice of subjects is made. or story, as the most captivating and successful method If the Hortus siccus be valuable, the possible and of teaching; that the novelist reflects human life both as practicable results of Nature Printing (by the Austrian | it is, and as it ought to be. He then spoke of James mode) must be doubly so, for its product yields even more than is observable in the Hortus siccus itself.

Fenimore Cooper, as the Columbus, or first explorer of American romance; the first to use those threefold Were Mr. Dresser a practical man, he would have materials of interest, the magnificent scenes of nature, the known that the present mode of Nature Printing is the wild life and poetic legends of the aboriginal races, and combined result of a multitude of experiments, spread- the amusements and modes of life common to the early ing over a long space of time, and made by an infinite white settlements in his own great state, the state of New number of hands. However he may please himself with York. The lecturer then examined his numerous works, his isolated process, I would beg to inform him, that saying that it was the "Spy" that created his fame and among the number of previous experiments his own was made him known to the world; that the "Pioneers," taken up and rejected. I, myself, with the best possible" The Last of the Mohicans," " Pilot," "Prairie," "Red appliances up to the present time at my command, have||Rover," "Pathfinder," and "Two Admirals," may be tried over and over again to establish both lithographic taken as his best productions; that Cooper was a man of and typographic processes in connection with the art, great decision, strong personal courage, thorough honesty, but certain requirements for successful and practical and seriousness of purpose. Mr. Holland then spoke results interposed-such requirements being as essential of Washington Irving, of Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawto Mr. Dresser's own experiments for success as to my thorne, and Mrs. Stowe, analyzing their works and disown. That improvements will ultimately be effected criminating the peculiarities of genius in each. The over the Austrian process is certain-but they will emanate from quite a different mode of operation.

Whilst upon the question, I will just enumerate, for the better comprehension of the general reader, results already effected by the Austrian mode. For the short time that the process has been in operation they are somewhat remarkable. Austria has produced three practical results — Henfler's Mosses,* Ettinghausen and "Specimen Flora Cryptogama Vallis Arpasch Carpatal Fransibrani:" Conscripsit Ludovicus Eques de Henfler. Seven folio plates. Vienna, 1853.

"Physiotypía Plantarum Austriacarum: Mit besonderer Berüchsichtigunz der Nervation in den Flächendrganen der Pflanzen." Von Professoren Dr. Constanten von Ettinghausen und Dr. Alois Pokorny. 500 folio plates. Vienna, 1856.

t Die Algen der Dalmatischen Küste mit hinzufugung der von Kützing im Adriatischen Meere Uberhaupt Aufgefuhrten Arten." Von George Frauenfeld. Twenty-four quarto plates. Vienna, 1855.

"The Ferns of Great Britain and Ireland." By Thomas Moore, F. L.S. Edited by John Lindley, Ph.D., F.K.S. Imperial folio. Fifty-one plates. London, 1853.

WEEKLY LIST OF PATENTS SEALED.
April 3rd.

2316. John Hall, junr.
2323. James Allen.
2340. Oglethorpe Wakelin Bar-

2342. Smith Bottomley and James
William Crossley.

2346. Joseph Bunnett.
2351. James Chiosso.
2357. Thomas Dugdale, junr.

781. Charles Weiss and Henry Listef, Huddersfield-Improvements
in the means, machinery, or apparatus employed in the
finishing of mohair and other textile fabrics.
783. John Parker, East Markham, near Tuxford, Nottingham-2436. John Smith.
Improvements in apparatus for separating corn and other
grain and seeds from dust, chaff, and other matters.
785. John P. Jourda, New York-Raising sunken vessels.
787. George William Sayer, Cognac, France-Improved machinery
for stopping or retarding railway carriages.

789. William Johnson, 47, Lincoln's-inn-fields-Improvements in
steam boilers and furnaces, and in apparatus connected
therewith. (A communication.)

2445. Joseph George.
2464. Charles Briqueler.
2492. John Walley.

2764. Samuel Russell.

64. Julius Goodman, Abraham
Myers,and Louis Goodman.
71. Thomas Ball and John Wil-
kins.

114. Sir James Murray, Knt.
and M.D.

148. Robert Reeves and John 2451. Sir Francis Chas. Knowles.

157. Edwin Clark.

159. Edwin Clark.

175. Henry Chamberlin, junr.

ing both which you have several times honoured me by your favourable attention, it has been my habit to examine, value, and repair buildings at their birth, prime, and decay; thus I have seen that old houses survive generations of new ones; that new houses are generally ugly; and when pretty are frequently not worth in the market what they cost.

The Times has called upon its readers to compare old London-bridge, faulty enough in design, but living for six hundred years, with Westminster-bridge, 1750, and Blackfriars-bridge, 1760, both now supported on crutches. The first of them is waiting to be swept away as a nuisance some day; the other may remain an invalid until the crutches rot and the fabric falls under the weight of a man, a horse, and an empty cart. This weight is fixed as the fatal one, because it has once been enough to break down a railway-bridge. There was no deodand, I believe, on the human body, but the cost of the other animal and the cart must have been paid by somebody. The same comparison may be made with regard to houses. A work by the late Mr. Hudson Turner, which is still new, and called Some Account of Domestic Architecture," is filled with descriptions of houses built at the same time as Old London Bridge, or earlier, and of houses built from that time to the year 1500, which are still standing. We need not recapitulate his list, but, acknowledging the beauty of nearly all his examples, we will take up the subject at the beginning of the sixteenth century, when brick was a fashionable material.

We shall find that a large number of the timber and of the brick houses that were built between 1509 and 1649, still remain, and command what may be termed a fancy price. There is actually no saying when they will perish; some in ruins like Tattershall are as good as many a new house of the present day. If we visit London just on the skirts of the great fire, we see houses that need not be pulled down, which is more than can be said of the London that has been built since 1800. To say nothing of almshouses dating between 1550-1650, we shall find that houses built before 1600 in the Strand, Little Moorfields, Cross-street, (Islington), Holywell-street, Gray's-inn-lane, Bishopsgate-street, were, till lately, or are now, existing. These are certainly not in very good condition, but we shall find houses 162030 in Lincoln's-inn-fields and Great Queen-street, 1637 in Chandos-street, Covent garden, 1640-62 in Claremarket; 1657 in Middle Temple-lane, and 1660 in Hattongarden.

were built, as 1700 Red Lion-square, Bolton-street, Devonshire-street Queen-square, and Great Smith-street; 1707-8 King-street Golden-square, Queen-square Westminster, and Great Ormond-street; 1716 New Bond-street, Conduit-street, and Hanover-square; 1718 Rathboneplace; 1720, Bedford-row; before 1725, King-street Covent-garden; 1727, May Fair; 1730, Oxford-market, Half Moon-street, and South Audley-street; and 1737, Crown Office-row, in the Temple.

The age of these houses is clearly marked by the fact, that after 1708 the window sashes in London and Westminster were placed in reveals by order of a Building Act; fifty years afterwards a new Building Act was necessary from the great increase of buildings, and the order for reveals extended to some outlying parishes; in 1766, Parliament again met the great increase of buildings by a new act; and in 1774, came the stringent act called the Black Act.

About 1765, Berners-street and Grosvenor-place; 1770, Great Russell-street and Salisbury-street; 1775, Mansfield-street and Stratford-place; 1778, Portman-square, Portland-place, and the Adelphi were built. Many of these streets built 1760-1780, under vigorous legislation, and leases for 90 years, have houses that although oldfashioned, are handsome, convenient, and far too good to be pulled down. The very foundations of this Society's house are shown to foreigners, though perhaps few of my audience know that such a sight exists; except to those engaged in building it is an unpleasant and useless visit. But with the year 1790, we have Lisle-street; 1795, the New-road; 1800, Alfred-place Gower-street, and Bakerstreet; 1805, Great Surrey-street, Wade-street, and Russellsquare; 1810, Bryanston-square; 1815, Park-crescent; 1820, Regents-park, Burton-crescent, and Regent-street, or their neighbourhoods. Regent-street rubbish was a term well understood by the workmen employed on it, and Regent-street rubbish, for a great wonder, it remains. I counted upwards of 30 cracks in one wall of a house there. But bad as that is, it is not really so bad as much that has been since built,-it stands.

The public would seem to have a belief that a low rent and a good house, in a good situation, are likely to be put before it under the present system of competition. When the landlord was the builder, and covered four or five acres with houses, it was his interest to build all equally well-he could get his rent-but when he let that ground to four or more builders, they cut down the cost of construction, in order to compete with each other for profit out of the rents, which their own competition made lower than their landlord would have asked, and this system of competition is part of the secret of our present bad houses. The other part of the secret is the folly of people in renting or buying anything in the shape of a house, without knowing, or endeavouring to know, anything about it; yet the public will not hire or buy a piano in the same way.

Keeping generally westward with fashion we find 1678 King's Bench Walk, Essex-court, and Farrar's-buildings in the Temple, Arundel-street, Exeter-street, and Sackville-street, 1680 the Old Jewry, King-street, St. James's, Crown-street, Wardour-street, and Soho-square; Paperbuildings in the Temple, which Bagford says were so called from the slightness of their construction, 1685, were not rebuilt till 1848. So that actually houses built in what was then considered a slight manner, have The usual way of starting a street is to let the land to lasted 160 years; indeed, it was lately stated at an inquest that anomalous being, a speculative builder. He need that a house was only 200 years old, and therefore could not be a builder, or a tradesman in any branch of buildnot have been supposed to be in danger; in fact, ought ing-indeed the persons whom I have known succeed not to have fallen. This is a remarkable proof of the best, were a sailor, who had succeeded to some proextreme difference between the old and the new houses; perty, and built two houses for £7,000, which he sold if we reflect that a glance through the journals of the immediately, in the most careless, openhanded way, for last fifteen years will show the fall of about as many as much each-a chandler's shopkeeper, who built a row houses before they were finished, as of the old houses. of forty houses for £300 each, and sold nearly all of Yet Neve, in 1703, says, "the greatest objection against them, but none for less than £600-and a footman, who London houses (being for the most part brick) is their built a street in such a style that at last the tradesmen slightness, occasioned by the fines (or ground rents) actually refused to work any longer for him, but who exacted by the landlords, so that few houses, at the com-complacently said, in the court of law to which he sum mon rate of building, last longer than the ground lease, about 50 or 60 years, and this way of building is very beneficial to trades relating to it, for they never want work in so great a city, where houses are always repairing or building." And probably much of his observations applied only to houses on the outskirts of the then city, for we find that about that time good houses

3.e.,

moned them, tenants would occupy anything he put up. Between 1760 and 1810 many streets were built on a system which no longer prevails; it was called blood for blood; because if a plumber took a piece of ground, he arranged with a bricklayer, carpenter, joiner, and painter to put their work over the ground, each taking one of more houses finished with his plumbing in payment.

Of course his lead was thin; the brickwork was poor; the rafters and joists were weak; and the glass and painting discreditable.

From 1800 to 1825 there was a different system; builders who gave themselves up to the business of building streets on speculation, borrowed of their friends and tradesmen, and paid their debts according to the sale of their houses; this system dropped when the lenders found unfinished houses left on their hands. Since 1815 the timber merchants, &c., have lent money to the speculative builders, and of course the quality of the materials they supplied could not be disputed; but these persons, especially the timber merchants, have apparently had reason to suspect collusion between speculative builders and ground landlords; and are now more wary; indeed, the real speculator is often the landlord who lets ground and advances money, in the hope that the speculative builders would put a good deal more money of their own or other peoples in the shape of carcasses on his ground, and by failing would allow him as mortgagee to foreclose and get, at a cheap rate, carcasses to be finished scampishly and sold at an apparently reasonable price.

We see houses built before 1700, actually still too good to be pulled down when 170 years old, and most of them are considered good for another 40 years at least; we see many houses only intended to last for 100 years, new fronted, and these also are considered good for at least another 40 years; and we see many houses that were built before 1800, that are now being tinkered in order to last that time. But we also see whole quarters of London consisting of houses built since 1790, which the tenants quit from absolute fear; rows exist where the representatives of the builders would be too happy to get rid of their prospective burdens, and sell their interest or rather burdens in their leases, for a mere song.

passed into a pretty, though small, garden, (I should say that no carriage except for an invalid entered,) which separated the front and back dwellings. In compliance with continental customs most of these were large enough to have a family or two on each floor, but I visited where only one family occupied the pretty little house. There the porter is answerable for your house; you put the key on your hook in his lodge, and the whole family can leave for the best part of a summer's day, week, or month, with safety. The convenience of this system to men living in chambers in London is so obvious, that it is surprising that families have not adopted it. The cost of one servant is at least saved, and nearly one-half of another is quite saved. The dust and noise of the streets does not affect the back house, and by letting the front one for business, the rental of the ground is much increased. There ought to be a stop put to the barbarous system of using basement floors as sleeping rooms, and for ovens. There is no occasion for the great part of our bread to be prepared in underground holes, where the baker's men can see nothing except by candlelight, and which are subject to all the dirt and effluvia-but I need say no more on that point. In the best houses in certain parts of Lendon, the female servants are made to sleep in the basement. It was my business to survey a house near Russell-square the other day, and I found under the entrance passage, with a window looking (it would not open) into the enclosed shed under the steps, and a chimney place blocked up, a closet in which two servants were said to sleep. The fœtid odour was such as the mistress of the house apparently thought accidental, and she was good enough to explain to me that it arose, she thought, from the fact that her neighbour's cistern always kept overflowing and made one side of this little bed-room rather damp, so damp indeed that the plastering could not be said to stand upon the wall. To find sinkstones with the holes corked up is nothing new at home. Perhaps one of the greatest improvements in London houses of all sizes, would be to have the drains laid so near the surface, and so covered by boards in their line, that they could be examined or cleaned without trouble; at present there is nothing which embarrasses me so much on surveying a house. If the floors are taken up and the drains are clear, there is great wrath at the trouble and expense; if reliance is placed on the assertion that the drains are clean, it by no means follows that they are either clear or sound, and many a drain has been allowed to leak its contents away into the kitchen floor and the foundations, from which cause alone there are many damp walls in London.

Why our dwelling houses in London are built after one plan, viz., an entrance passage, a front room, a smaller back room, and a staircase by its side, is a mystery to many besides myself. The plan is no doubt a very good and healthy one, where it provides a thorough draft every time the back or front door is opened, but it has a great tendency to make the chimnies smoke, and to keep the house very cool in winter. Why, also, the kitchens should be placed in the basement is not clear; the open doors in summer carry all sorts of scents up the stairs. Indeed, in this respect the very small houses, like those in Camden-town, which have no basements, but have kitchens in the yard, might be usefully followed in larger houses, and the servants' rooms might be above each other at the back I shall say nothing about a backwardness in adopting of the house, and all the way up. Some good third-patent sash-fastenings, calculated to render the labour of rate houses have the staircase in front, and gain a cleaning the windows less dangerous; or sensible designs handsome back room, at little expense to that in front, for stove grates; or speaking tubes; or ventilating glass but this plan is rarely followed. It is also curious in the windows; or self-fitting lock handles; or small that speculative builders never will put a ventilator to rooms fitted up for a bath or baths, where children might the top of the staircase, and so the whole heated and upset the bath without injury to the house as is frequently damaged atmosphere of the house is poured into the provided abroad, especially in the north of Europe; or top rooms, which also happen to be the apartments the possibility of making a house so nearly fireproof, even for the invalid and the nursery. if it be an old one, that lives should not be lost in case of There is hardly a house fit for an invalid in London, fire; or of better shutters, than the ugly contrivances yet almost every second house in a street contains, on an now in use; or of lifts, or of several other things average, one invalid in a year, and all the year round. equally useful and valuable; yet these are all matters Perhaps this is one reason why so many invalids live which are neglected in our houses, of the common as abroad, where all their home is on one floor, and where well as of the better sort; and I am inclined to think that there is only one staircase, and that a very easy one to it is because an architect is not employed. Perhaps wo descend, in order to get into the garden or the street. might go further, and say that if an architect is said to Back Houses, too, are quite gone out of fashion, as if our be of no use except to increase the cost of a house by the families had nothing to do but to sit at the front windows amount of his commission, at all events an amateur, or a to see the passing vehicles. I was much struck, in several speculative builder would certainly be sure to do better. of the Belgian and French towns, with the system-of You know that the new streets of London are filled with which traces may still be seen in the city, viz.,-of houses that have little or no real convenience in them, having a carriage entrance, in which a porter lives that and that the speculative builder does not seem to care a stops all incomers to know their business. He and his jot for the sanitary and social improvements of the day; wife act as servants, on occasion, to the inmates of the but you probably do not know the sort of faults comfront and back houses. Through the carriage entrance Imitted by those men who, loftily saying,

66

we can do