The palladium wire, which originally measured 609 144 millimètres, thus suffered, by four successive chargings and dischargings of hydrogen, an ultimate contraction of 23.99 millimètres, or a reduction of its original length to the extent of nearly 4 per cent., each increment of contraction below the original length usually exceeding the previous increment of elongation above the original length of the wire. The alternate expansion and contraction of palladium by its occlusion and evolution of hydrogen is ingeniously shown by a contrivance of Mr. Roberts', in which a slip of palladium foil, varnished on one side, is made to curl and uncurl itself, as it becomes alternately the negative and positive electrode of a battery, or is alternately charged and discharged of hydrogen on its free surface.

That hydrogen is the vapour of a highly volatile metal has frequently been maintained on chemical grounds; and from a consideration of the physical properties of his hydrogenized palladium, Mr. Graham was led to regard it as a true alloy of palladium with hydrogen, or rather hydrogenium, in which the volatility of the latter metal was restrained by the fixity of the former, and of which the metallic aspect was equally due to both of its constituents. Although, indeed, the occlusion of upwards of 900 times its volume of hydrogen was found to lower the tenacity and electric conductivity of palladium appreciably, still the hydrogenized palladium remained possessed of a most characteristically metallic tenacity and conductivity. Thus, the tenacity of the original wire being taken as 100, the tenacity of the fully charged wire was found to be 81 29; and the electric conductivity of the original wire being 8 10, that of the hydrogenized wire was found to be 5.99. In further support of the conclusion arrived at by Mr. Graham, as to the metallic condition of the hydrogen occluded in palladium, he adduced his singular discovery of its being possessed of magnetic properties, more decided than those of palladium itself, a metal which Mr. Faraday had shown to be "feebly but truly magnetic." Operating with an electromagnet of very moderate strength, Mr. Graham found that while an oblong fragment of electrolytically deposited palladium was deflected from the equatorial by 10° only, the same fragment of metal, charged with 604 6 times its volume of hydrogen, was deflected through 48°. Thus did Mr. Graham supplement the idea of hydrogen as an invisible incondensable gas, by the idea of hydrogen as an opaque, lustrous, white metal, having a specific gravity between 0.7 and 0.8, a well-marked tenacity and conductivity, and a very decided magnetism.

[W. O.]

WEEKLY EVENING MEETING,

Friday, February 4, 1870.

WILLIAM SPOTTISWOODE, Esq. M.A. F.R.S. Treasurer and
Vice-President, in the Chair.

JOHN RUSKIN, Esq. F.R.S. M.R.I.

SLADE PROFESSOR OF FINE ARTS, OXFORD,

A Talk respecting Verona and its Rivers.

THE discourse began with a description of the scenery of the eastern approach to Verona, with special remarks upon its magnificent fortifications, consisting of a steep ditch, some thirty feet deep by sixty or eighty wide, cut out of the solid rock, and the precipice-like wall above, with towers crested with forked battlements set along it at due intervals. The rock is a soft and crumbling limestone, containing "fossil creatures still so like the creatures they were once, that there it first occurred to the human brain to imagine that the buried shapes were not mockeries of life, but had indeed once lived; and, under those white banks by the road-side was born, like a poor Italian gipsy, the modern science of geology-".. "The wall was chiefly built, the moat entirely excavated, by Can Grande della Scala; and it represents typically the form of defence which rendered it possible for the life and the arts of citizens to be preserved and practised in an age of habitual war. Not only so, but it is the wall of the actual city which headed the great Lombard league, which was the beginner of personal and independent power in the Italian nation, and the first bannerbearer, therefore, of all that has been vitally independent in religion and in art throughout the entire Christian world to this day." At the upper angle of the wall, looking down the northern descent, is seen a great round tower at the foot of it, not forked in battlements, but with embrasures for guns. "The battlemented wall was the cradle of civic life. That low circular tower is the cradle of modern war and of all its desolation. It is the first European tower for artillery; the beginning of fortification against gunpowder-the beginning, that is to say, of the end of all fortification."

After noticing the beautiful vegetation of the district, Mr. Ruskin described the view from the promontory or spur, about ten miles long, of which the last rock dies into the plain at the eastern gate of Verona. "This promontory," he said, "is one of the sides of the great gate out of Germany into Italy, through which the Goths always entered; eloven up to Innspruck by the Inn, and down to Verona by the

Adige. And by this gate not only the Gothic armies came, but after the Italian nation is formed the current of northern life enters still into its heart through the mountain artery, as constantly and strongly as the cold waves of the Adige itself." "The rock of this promontory hardens as we trace it back to the Alps, first into a limestone having knots of splendid brown jasper in it as our chalk has flints, and in a few miles more into true marble, coloured by iron into a glowing orange or pale warm red-the peach-blossom marble, of which Verona is chiefly built-and then as you advance farther into the hills into variegated marbles very rich and grotesque in their veinings."

After dilating on the magnificent landscape viewed from the top of this promontory, embracing the blue plain of Lombardy and its cities, Mr. Ruskin said:

"I do not think that there is any other rock in all the world from which the places and monuments of so complex and deep a fragment of the history of its ages can be visible as from this piece of crag with its blue and prickly weeds. For you have thus beneath you at once the birthplaces of Virgil and of Livy - the homes of Dante and Petrarch, and the source of the most sweet and pathetic inspiration to your own Shakspeare-the spot where the civilization of the Gothic kingdoms was founded on the throne of Theodoric; and there, whatever was strongest in the Italian race redeemed itself into life by its league against Barbarossa; the beginning of the revival of natural science and medicine in the schools of Padua; the centre of Italian chivalry, in the power of the Scaligers; of Italian cruelty, in that of Ezzelin; and, lastly, the birthplace of the highest art; for among those hills, or by this very Adige bank, were born Mantegna, Titian, Correggio, and Veronese."

Mr. Ruskin then referred to a series of drawings and photographs taken at Verona by himself and his assistants, Mr. Burgess and Mr. Bunney, which he had divided into three series, and of which he had furnished a number of printed catalogues illustrated with notes.

1. "Lombard, extending to the end of the twelfth century, being the expression of the introduction of Christianity into barbaric minds; Christianization.

2. "The Gothic period. Dante's time, from 1200 to 1400 (Dante beginning his poem exactly in the midst of it, in 1300); the period of vital Christianity, and of the development of the laws of chivalry and forms of imagination which are founded on Christianity.

3. "The first period of the revival, in which the arts of Greece and some of its religion return and join themselves to Christianity; not taking away its sincerity or earnestness, but making it poetical instead of practical. In the following period even this poetical Christianity expired; the arts became devoted to the pursuit of pleasure, and in that they persist except where they are saved by a healthy naturalism or domesticity.

1. "The Lombardic period is one of savage but noble life gradually subjected to law. It is the forming of men, not out of clay but wild beasts. And art of this period in all countries, including our own Norman especially, is, in the inner heart of it, the subjection of savage or terrible, or foolish and erring life, to a dominant law. It is government and conquest of fearful dreams. There is in it as yet no germ of true hope-only the conquest of evil, and the waking from darkness and terror. The literature of it is, as in Greece, far in advance of art, and is already full of the most tender and impassioned beauty, while the art is still grotesque and dreadful; but, however wild, it is supreme above all others by its expression of governing law, and here at Verona is the very centre and utmost reach of that expression.

"I know nothing in architecture at once so exquisite and so wild and so strange in the expression of self-conquest achieved almost in a dream. For observe, these barbaric races, educated in violencechiefly in war and in hunting-cannot feel or see clearly as they are gradually civilized whether this element in which they have been brought up is evil or not. They must be good soldiers and hunters— that is their life; yet they know that killing is evil, and they do not expect to find wild beasts in heaven. They have been trained by pain, by violénce, by hunger and cold. They know there is a good in these things as well as evil: they are perpetually hesitating between the one and the other thought of them. But one thing they see clearly, that killing and hunting, and every form of misery, pleasure, and of passion, must somehow at last be subdued by law, which shall bring good out of it all, and which they feel more and more constraining them every hour. Now, if with this sympathy you look at their dragon and wild beast decoration, you will find that it now tells you about these Lombards far more than they could know of themselves. . . . All the actions, and much more the arts, of men tell to others, not only what the worker does not know, but what he never can know of himself-which you can only recognize by being in an element more advanced and wider than his. . . . In deliberate symbolism, the question is always-not what a symbol meant first or meant elsewhere, but what it means now and means here. Now, this dragon symbol of the Lombard is used of course all over the world; it means good here, and evil there; sometimes means nothing; sometimes everything. You have always to ask what the man who here uses it means by it. Whatever is in his mind, that he is sure partly to express by it; nothing else than that can he express by it."

2. In the second period Mr. Ruskin said was to be found "the highest development of Italian character and chivalry, with an entirely believed Christian religion; you get, therefore, joy and courtesy, and hope, and a lovely peace in death. And with these you have two fearful elements of evil. You have first such confidence in the virtue of the creed that men hate and persecute all who do not

accept it. And worse still, you find such confidence in the power of the creed that men not only can do anything that is wrong, and be themselves for a word of faith pardoned, but are even sure that after the wrong is done God is sure to put it all right again for them, or even make things better than they were before. Now, I need not point out to you how the spirit of persecution, as well as of vain hope founded on creed only, is mingled in every line with the lovely moral teaching of the 'Divina Commedia '-nor need I point out to you how, between the persecution of other people's creeds and the absolution of one's own crimes, all Christian error is concluded."

In relation to this Mr. Ruskin referred to the history of the founder of the power of the Scalas, Mastino, a simple citizen, chosen first to be podestà and then captain of Verona, for his justice and sagacity, who, although wise and peaceful in his policy, employed the civil power in the persecution of heresy, burning above two hundred persons; and he also related how Can Signorio della Scala on his deathbed, after giving a pious charge to his children, ordered the murder of his brother-examples of the boundless possibility of self-deception. One of these children killed the other, and was himself driven from the throne: so ending the dynasty of the Scalas. Referring to his illustrations, Mr. Ruskin pointed out the expressions of hope, in the conquest of death, and the rewards of faith, apparent in the art of the time. The Lombard architecture expresses the triumph of law over passion, the Christian, that of hope over sorrow.

Mr. Ruskin concluded his remarks on this period by commenting on the history and the tomb of Can Grande della Scala, a good knight and true, as busy and bright a life as is found in the annals of chivalry.

3. "The period when classical literature and art were again known in Italy, and the painters and sculptors, who had been gaining steadily in power for two hundred years-power not of practice merely, but of race also with every circumstance in their favour around them, received their finally perfect instruction, both in geometrical science, in that of materials, and in the anatomy and action of the human body. Also the people about them-the models of their work—had been perfected in personal beauty by a chivalric war; in imagination by a transcendental philosophy; in practical intellect by stern struggle for civic law; and in commerce, not in falsely made or vile or unclean things, but in lovely things, beautifully and honestly made. And now, therefore, you get out of all the world's long history since it was peopled by men till now-you get just fifty years of perfect work. Perfect. It is a strong word-it is also a true one. The doing of these fifty years is unaccusably Right, as art; what its sentiment may be-whether too great or too little-whether superficial or sincere is another question, but as artists' work it admits no conception of anything better.