not the only material for bells. Sometimes
a little lead, arsenic, or zinc, is added to
the copper and tin. It used to be a
favourite idea that silver, thrown into the
melting furnace, improves the tone of a
bell. In casting the tenor-bell of Lavenham
church, the neighbouring gentry, after
drinking to the toast of " Church and King"
out of silver tankards, threw the tankards
into the melting-pot. Smaller bells have
often been made of silver alone, as if to
justify, or to be justified by, the allusion to
"silvery tones." At the Strawberry Hill sale
in 1842, one of the lots consisted of a very
beautiful silver bell made by Benvenuto
Cellini, for Pope Clement the Seventh; its
exterior was chased or sculptured with a
profusion of lizards, grasshoppers, flies, and
other reptiles and insects; and its intended
purpose was, by its silvery sound, to drive
away all obnoxious assemblages of such
creatures. Among the oddities of this
subject was the bequest of a silver bell to the
school at Wreay in Sussex, by a Mr. Graham,
in 1661. On an appointed day every
year, two of the boys, who had been chosen
captains, were to sally forth, each followed
by his partisans, distinguished by blue
and red ribbons, and march in procession
to the village green; there their fighting-
cocks were to have a match; and on the
result of this match was to depend the
honour of possessing the silver bell for the
next twelve months, the successful captain
bearing it away suspended from his hat.
As for other metals besides copper, tin,
and silver, it is known that steel and iron
are occasionally used for church bells.
Such bells have been cast in Westphalia, at
Sheffield, and at Dundyvan, near Glasgow.
Steel bells are lighter and cheaper than
those of bell-metal, and yield a rich and
brilliant tone; but the sound is said to be
unable to penetrate to a great distance.
Cast iron, with the addition of a little tin,
has been tried; but the alloy was far too
brittle. Glass bells, and wooden bells, are
also talked about; but we do not see how
the former could bear any hammering or
clappering, nor how the latter could yield
a sound worth hearing. One of the
missionaries to Fiji, however, has described a
bell or sounding instrument made from the
hollowed trunk of a tree, like a trough,
and placed on a coil of rope or some other
elastic mass on the ground; when struck
at one end with a mallet, it gives out a
sort of stifled roar which we are told could
be heard twelve miles off.

The sound of a bell is further dependent
on size, shape, and proportion. The familiar
"bell-shape" is not a mere random guess or
fancy. It has been found by experiment,
after comparing sounding bodies shaped like
springs, spirals, hemispheres, tuning-forks,
gongs, cylinders, flat plates, &c., that a bell
of the ordinary shape, and of the same
weight, will give out its sound to a greater
distance than any of them: albeit, some of
the others yield rich and deep tones. In
describing the several parts and proportions
of a bell, the founders speak of it almost
as a living being, with its head, mouth,
waist, and haunch. Some bells are made
with very long waists, almost cylindrical;
but this is not a general characteristic.

As to the actual tone, pitch, or musical
note of a particular bell, it does not depend
on any one of the dimensions singly, but on
the relation between the diameter, height,
and thickness. The larger the diameter
the deeper the tone, height and thickness
remaining unaltered; the thinner the metal
the deeper the tone, diameter and height
remaining unaltered. The German bell-
founders adopt a kind of average rule,
maintaining certain ratios between the diameter
of the mouth, the diameter of the head or
upper part, the height, and the thickness of
metal; and a certain ratio between the
weight of the bell and the weight of the
clapper. In this way they can make a pretty
good guess beforehand at the tone which a
bell will yield. English bell-founders have
ratios of their own, which they regard in
some sense as trade secrets. In practice,
however, there are often unforeseen and
unexplained difficulties in the matter; the
Royal Exchange bell, for instance, is said
to have failed in yielding either the pitch
or the quality of tone intended. By filing
or chipping away some of the metal at the
thickest part, called the " sound-bow,"
where the hammer or clapper strikes, the
tone is deepened; whereas by reducing the
diameter of the lower edge it is raised.
The Great Tom of Lincoln, though smaller
than the great bell of St. Paul's, is heavier,
on account of its greater thickness, and
yields a higher tone. Connoisseurs in bell-
science aver that modern church bells do
not throw out such rich penetrating sounds
as the bells cast many centuries ago; and
they attribute this to the pernicious craving
for cheapness which is now besetting us.
A thin large bell will yield a note of the
same pitch as a smaller bell containing
greater thickness of metal; but the tone is
poor and meagre. The monster bell at Moscow,
which is estimated to weigh four to five