children, bearing children thereafter. Beyond
what I have described, however, nothing was
to be seen, unless it were the shows, the
dancing-bears, the sweetmeat stands, and the
segans or gipsies, brown as copper, who are
miracle- workers, and who for half a rouble read
my hand, and bestowed upon me three wives,
fifteen children, and four estates.

AN ELASTIC TRADE.

Indian-rubber, thirty or forty years ago,
was known to the grown-up English world as a
substance necessary to the furnishing of drawing-
boxes, and to the use of all men and boys,
women and girls, who had at any period of their
lives pencil marks to efface. Paterfamilias
smelt it on the surface of the holiday letter,
electrical with energetic rubbing at the faint
ruled lines which had saved the pen of the
young caligrapher from travelling up hill and
down hill and round all manner of corners. The
consumption of Indian-rubber at some schools
used to astonish the masters. My first school
acquaintance with this article was, in fact, as a
quid. When, therefore, I lately visited the
Indian-rubber Works at Silvertown, and, being
taken into the presence of the Masticator, was
told that in the mastication of Indian-rubber
began all its wonderful applications to the use
of man, I saw in that engine an old grown-up
schoolfellow. Mastication of Indian-rubber!
Why, I have seen forty boys chewing like one,
steadily, though surreptitiously; I have heard,
here the creak of the tough fresh quid between the
grinders there, the juicier sound of work on the
half-masticated article. The first machine
masticator was found able to get through only about
two ounces at a time. In the mouth, it was
more than a day's work, and wearied the jaws
to reduce to the right consistency a piece as
big as a small filbert. Our manufacture was
perfect when the hard rubber was transformed
into a soft plastic mass, which we could use as
dough for the manufacture of air-puffs or turn-
overs. This pastry was to be heard bursting
during school hours with unaccountable little
cracks that might have converted some school-
masters of the present day to a belief in spirit
-rapping. We had a prejudice in favour of black
rubber. When white inside, we were firm to an
opinion (established by the rounded shape of the
fragments cut from the imported flask-shaped
mass) that it was a cunning preparation of cow's
udder. We did not accept whiteness as a sign
of purity.

Well, we who survive have now lived to
know all about it. No schoolboy's mind thirty
or forty years ago was ever poisoned with
information on natural history. Indian-rubber
was leathery, therefore hide; was Indian, therefore,
hide of elephant. When spurious, or English,
it was got from bull or cow. Some such
opinion may still prevail at Eton, though every
little Sunday-schoolboy has this mysterious affair
by heart as a " common object," and will reply
to questions at a gallop with the information,
that, This substance is the concrete milky juice
obtained from several trees, but chiefly from
one of the fig tribe. When first drawn, it
resembles cow's milk in appearance; it has also
a sweetish milky taste, and may be drunk with
impunity. Like milk, it curdles, and then yields
thirty or forty per cent of solid caoutchouc.
Eton to Sunday scholar: Go on, little one.
Why do you call it caoutchouc? Sunday-scholar
to Eton: Caoutchouc from the Indian cachucu.
The milky juice is received upon a mould of
clay, generally pear-shaped, is white at first,
but assumes its dark colour upon being dried in
smoke. It is principally imported into Europe
from Brazil, Columbia, and other parts of South
America. Of late years, however, a considerable
quantity has been brought from Java, Penang,
Singapore, Assam, and Africa. Eton triumphant.
Hollo, youngster. Foot short!

Java Pe | nang Singa I pore I Assam and I Aferi(!) | ca.

In the early days of Indian-rubber, the milky
juice itself was now and then brought to us
unchanged. Sir Joseph Banks had a bottle of
it that did not for some time decompose. When
it did, he in vain offered at Lisbon fifty louis-
d'ors for another. In our own time it has been
imported in barrels under the impression that
advantage might come of its use in processes of
manufacture; but it travels ill, and when it
arrives in good order, after all the expense of
cooperage and extra stowage, it is hardly so
useful as a preparation that can easily be made by
treatment of the solid rubber, which takes up the
least possible room, and requires no care on
the journey hither. Only a hundred years ago,
Indian-rubber, which is now in some form part of
almost every person's dress, of every room's
furniture, was in this country a rare curiosity.
In seventeen hundred and seventy, Dr. Priestley
published a Theory and Practice of Perspective,
with the following addition to its preface:
"Since this work was printed off, I have seen
a substance excellently adapted to the purpose
of wiping from paper the marks of a black-lead
pencil. It must, therefore, be of singular use
to those who practise drawing. It is sold by
Mr. Nairne, mathematical instrument-maker,
opposite the Exchange. He sells a cubical
piece of about half an inch for three shillings,
and he says it will last several years."

Before this time the new substance had
excited in France the attention of the learned. M.
de la Condamine, a great French mathematician,
who was sent in seventeen 'thirty-six to Peru,
to observe the figure of the earth at the equator,
wrote from Peru to the Academy of Sciences
the first account of the curious juice used by
the native Indians (after whom it has been
called) and by other residents, for making
syringes, bottles, boots, and so forth. He told
how the articles were moulded in soft clay, how
the moulds were broken, and the soft mass
ornamented by pricks with a point of hard wood.
He described the use of the liquid in those
parts as a waterproof coating for cloth, and his
own use of a great canvas prepared with liquid