of the utmost value, for the reef is very close and the horrible breakers are in all ears.

Anderson himself holds the wheel. He has put the helm up, and soon the great ship with swelling sails breaks out of the current. He feels the change on the instant; the hands know it too. But the danger is not past. Leaving the wheel to another, he runs quickly forward to lean over the weather rail. As he passes through the crowd on the fo'castle, the poor fellows cheer him ringingly. The fine old seaman doffs his cap and makes them a grand, manly bow.

He glances at the reef and then mutters quietly to himself, "She will never clear it, and God forgive me!" Then, wheeling round, he gives a command.

"Let go both anchors! It is our only chance! "

Many hearts sink at the order, but in as few moments as possible the cables are smoking through the hawse-pipes. The anchors touch bottom, and hold. All hands clutch the stanchions or shrouds in anticipation of the shock. It comes. The ship, racing on, is brought up with a round turn of such sudden force as to shake every nail in her limbers. Aloft there is crash upon crash, and the lighter spars come showering on to the deck, bringing along with them ragged remnants of canvas. One man is struck down. The hawsers hum with strenuous vibration. The timbers at the bluff of the bow crack almost vertically, until the ship's nose is well nigh torn out. The tension is too great and the port cable snaps. The starboard one is tougher. But were it never so tough it will not save the ship, for its anchor is dragging. Back she sags, gathered into her doom by the whitening waters; until at length, thus lifted along, her keel rests athwart the bank, and she heels over. Her sailing days are done. As the consecutive seas sweep up the reef, she lifts her head and drops it again and again, like a poor recumbent brute in its death hour. But the wind must sometime cease, and the waves forget their anger. Then will she take a long repose, leaning on her shattered side the very type of a picturesque wreck.

About this time Messrs. Ruin & Ruin were more than usually interested in the shipping news, and one morning they saw, under the heading of Wrecks and Casualties, this:

"MINICOY (MALDIVE ISLANDS).-The frigate Chrysolite, of London, went ashore yesterday night on the southern reefs, and is now a total wreck. All hands saved except John Anderson, master, who was killed by a falling spar."

The result of the whole business had far exceeded the owners' expectations. It had been so neatly done; and the greatest comfort of all was that no one was now left who could tell tales. They did not exactly thank God, in so many words, for the death of their faithful servant. That was very sad, as of course it should be. But they thanked Him in all humility for a certain sum of £3,000, which would have gone elsewhere but for. If he, Anderson, had had wife or children, Messrs. Ruin & Ruin felt almost certain they would have made provision for them. But they thanked God, again, that the captain had never married. All that was necessary to be done now was to send in a claim for the insurance money, and, if well advised, retire into private life.

Messrs. Ruin & Ruin talked the matter over between them, congratulated themselves upon their prosperity, made no end of choice little plans for the future, and finally decided to forsake the commercial profession. And, indeed, they would have done so, but that the evening papers contained an item of intelligence, which, though less expected, and therefore more startling, contained just as lively an interest for them as the report of the wreck. It ran thus :

"It is currently reported that the Jupiter Insurance Company has failed heavily, and is only able to meet its liabilities with a composition of sixpence in the £."

Messrs. Ruin & Ruin still carry on business near Billiter Street, but their offices are now on the top floor in a very back alley.

A CURE FOR LONDON FOGS.

PEAKING some time ago at Edinburgh of the British Constitu

property of the people depend-the Duke of Argyll described it as a code of accepted doctrine which is nowhere recorded or expressed; so that, "like the air we breathe, we are hardly conscious of it until it is disturbed." The simile is suggestive, and it might be a curious inquiry whether the lives, the health, the liberty, and the property or the people are not even less affected by the working of our "glorious constitution" than by the condition of the generally vitiated atmosphere of our towns: whether, in fact, the labours of two Houses of Parliament to engraft improvements upon the laws and constitution of the country might not sometimes be more advantageously applied to the promotion of improvements in the condition of the air we breathe and in the climate of these islands.

Diseases of the respiratory organs-the lungs and their feedersare responsible for a large proportion of the deaths in the United Kingdom; but the hygienic condition of the air, which occasions those diseases, is nowhere "recorded or expressed"; and we hardly know when and to what extent its life-supporting power is vitiated or enfeebled, or how the renewal or renovation of that power can be effected. We recognise that fevers and epidemics are caused by insufficiency of ventilation, or by impurities in drinking water, and yet permit them to spread in all directions until they exhaust themselves; because, forsooth, we have absolutely no machinery for removing large volumes of foul air, or for thoroughly purifying large volumes of drinking water. The disease-germs which they contain being invisible to the naked eye, we hardly concern ourselves about them; but perhaps the day may be at hand when sanitary stations will be established, at which magnified representations of the microbes, and other pollutions floating in the air and in water, will be submitted to public observation. When that is done, and the mass of living organisms that they contain are rendered clearly visible, may we not

hope that it will be followed by the discovery of remedies against the spread of epidemics?

No such characteristic as invisibility can, however, be suggested as an excuse for tolerating London fogs. The detestable abomination effects a disturbance of the air we breathe which is only too visible to its victims, while diffusing gloom and darkness wherever it extends. An all-pervading irritant, it invades the eyes, noses, and throats of unfortunate sufferers, and seriously interferes with the ordinary business of everyday life, causing interruptions to traffic by railway, by wheeled vehicles, or on foot, fatal accidents to the unwary and destruction to property. The Registrar-General's returns show that the general death-rate in London during a prolonged fog, and the following weeks, is nearly doubled, and deaths from phthisis and diseases of the respiratory organs trebled, besides temporary and sometimes permanent injury resulting to a large proportion of the inhabitants. Moreover, the materia! loss which is occasioned by a few days of London fog has been estimated at several millions sterling, and yet we have hitherto made no real effort to rid ourselves of so great and so perpetually recurring an infliction !

This can only be due to the very inaccurate ideas which prevail with respect to the origin and composition of fogs, and it is worth. while to consider these points with some attention. The temperature of the atmosphere varies in every part of the globe, and, at ordinary times, continual changes of temperature keep the air unceasingly in motion, with a constant tendency to absorb gases and vapour wherever it encounters them; but the amount of aqueous vapour which any volume of air can take up is limited, and depends entirely upon its temperature. At 50° F. it can hold twice as much vapour as at 32°, and again at 80° F. it can hold three times as much as at 50°.

When, therefore, air at the comparatively warm temperature of the earth's surface has absorbed as much vapour as will saturate it, and afterwards tends to ascend, the decrease in its temperature which occurs on its elevation to a greater height renders it impossible for it to continue to hold the aqueous matter in the condition of diffused vapour, and, as the air soars upwards to cooler regions, this vapour is condensed to exceedingly minute watery particles, having the appearance of white, misty bodies. So also on a hot summer's day the air lying over wet, marshy ground is copiously saturated with invisible aqueous vapour; but on the air growing cooler after sunset, it will not be able to keep all those vapours dissolved, and must let some part of them coalesce into very small visible particles which form those mists that appear to rise from marshy grounds on a summer's

evening. This is the origin of clouds and of fogs, and the latter, when they first reach London, are simply masses of air which contain very minute particles of suspended water, condensed from a state of vapour.

A familiar experiment may assist in making this intelligible. By using a lens of an inch focal length, anyone may observe the nature of these particles over the hot surface of a cup of dark coffee or tea, when they will be distinguished as a white dust of watery particles of a uniform size, blowing about over the surface of the coffee, or rising in little wreaths and whirlwinds like dust on a windy day. By covering the coffee with a clear glass tumbler we can ourselves fill it with fog, for the vapour will be instantaneously cooled, and fill the glass with a miniature white cloud or mist, which will again disappear if the glass remains long enough in position to be heated to the same temperature as the coffee.

A similar condensation of the vapour to watery particles is caused also by changes in the atmospheric or barometrical pressure, increase of pressure having the same effect as a decrease in the temperature of the air. Both one and the other cause the diffused aqueous vapours contained in the air to pass into the liquid state, which explains why fogs are so often accompanied by cold and by a considerable rise in the barometer; but by far the largest masses of clouds are produced by columns of air, charged with aqueous vapour, rising and growing cold as they rise.

Some of our London fogs come from the sea, and the river Thames is accountable for others, but the great extent of marsh land and stagnant water which is traversed by the east and north-east winds, before they reach the City, is probably answerable for the peculiar prevalency of mist and fog which distinguishes the Metropolis during the three or four winter months. From Greenwich to Gravesend on the south side, and from Whitechapel to beyond Tilbury Fort on the north, the land on both banks of the Thames is one almost uninterrupted marsh, and both banks of the river Lea are in the same case. A creeping mist may almost constantly be observed at this season of the year ascending in spreading sheets from the surface of these marshes, some of which are more than a thousand acres in extent, and any scheme for the relief of London from fogs would hardly be complete without it included their drainage and sanitation.

When not actually born in these extensive marshes, it is here that most of the London fog is cradled, nourished and intensified, before proceeding onwards to the vast fattening grounds of the