another married brother, and a sister also
married; and these several fraternities, with
their children, and fathers, and mothers, make
up a goodly company. Yet, large as this
home circle is, it all converges into a point
once or twice a week; and dinners and
soirées are given in the most domestic
manner possible. True, the husbands
sometimes go out and smoke their cigars in a
café, and read the newspapers there, while
sipping their absinthe and water, or chocolate;
and sometimes, too, they dine out
together at a restaurant, instead of at home.
But these facts argue no want of family
feeling. They are simply characteristics of
Parisian life, not necessarily including either
license of habits or indifference. Indeed, the
whole tenor of the French middle-class life is
strongly the reverse; although we know this
is a new view of French character, and one
which many will not accept.

On the whole, there are many worse things
than a French ménage, with its cheapness,
its gaiety, its out-of-door pleasures, its social
charms and artistic arrangement. And though
that little dark-eyed woman has the terrible
fault of perverting the thing that is, and of
reading letters that don't belong to her, and
of suspecting every one she knows, sees, or
hears of, of immoral practices, yet, in spite of
these fearful misdemeanours, there is
something so arch, animated, and bright in her,
that, between her tact and her cleverness, her
gracious manners and her spirituelle conversation,
she is a very fascinating little person. If
she were but truthful and severely honourable
—which she is not always, more's the pity!—
she would be an admirable specimen of feminine
attractiveness and loveable womanhood.

DONE TO A JELLY.

PROFESSOR OWEN, when lecturing on the
results of our late Exhibition, spoke warmly
and well respecting the economical value of
little fragments from the animal world—little
bits which our forefathers were wont to
throw away. He dwelt on the fact that
the most uninviting, and seemingly most
worthless parts of animal bodies, are turned
to uses of the most unexpected kind by the
inventive skill and science of man. He
remarked that the most signal progress in the
economical extraction and preparation of
pure gelatines and glues from the waste
remnants of the skins, bones, tendons, ligaments,
and other gelatinous tissues of animals, has
been made in France, where the well-organised
and admirably-arranged establishments for
the slaughter of cattle, sheep, and horses in
large towns, give great and valuable facilities
for the economical application of all the waste
parts of animal bodies. Indeed, this is one
way to measure our social progress. While
some men are striving to make better use
than our forefathers of substances always
recognised as valuable, others are directing
their attention to humble and lowly bits
and scraps which a former age would have
spurned, kicked, trampled on, despised, burned,
and otherwise ill-used and maltreated.

Given, a bone—to find a basin of soup in
it. Here is a problem in gelatinous mathematics;
and a very sensible problem it is
too. Many generations ago the French
chemist, Papin, set to work in good earnest on
this matter. He made a vessel which he
called a digester, closed everywhere except at
a small hole at the top, which was provided
with a safety-valve; the digester was
enormously strong; insomuch that when the valve
was weighed down heavily, water could be
made to boil at a much higher temperature
than the familiar two hundred and twelve
degrees. This was the gist of the whole
matter; for whatever may be extracted from
bone by hot water, much more can be
extracted by doubly hot water. Papin broke
his bones, put them into the digester, made
the water boil at a fierce heat, and obtained a
gelatinous extract which became a tremulous
solid when cold. Another old philosopher of
those days, Boyle, found the means to make
the most of a cow-heel. He exposed it to a
moderate heat for four hours in a perfectly
close vessel, without any water; he then
found the entire cow-heel to be so softened,
that he could cut it up with a knife, as if the
softer parts had furnished moisture for
mollifying the rest. The late Mr. Aikin found
that, after extracting much gelatine from
bones by ordinary boiling, there was another
portion which nothing but a higher boiling
heat could liberate from the cellular structure
of the bone. During the long Napoleonic
wars, bone-soup was made in some of the
hospitals and military head-quarters of
France, by Papin's method; and many
pamphlets were written in advocacy of the
plan of collecting bones as a soup-making
article of food in besieged garrisons. Those
who have tasted it say, however, that bone
gelatine extracted at this high temperature,
has a sort of unpleasant burnt flavour; and
certain chemists have suggested quite a
laboratory-like mode of proceeding. First
take, or beg, or borrow, or pick your bones;
boil them to extract the fat; steep them in
very diluted muriatic acid, to dissolve the
earthy basis; wash the remaining semi-transparent
gelatinous mass in water; dissolve it
in forty times its weight of boiling water;
evaporate the jelly thus produced to a state
of greater consistency;—and there is your
soup. Whether bone-soup is really made,
let the scientific cooks declare; but it is
certain that the scrapings, shavings, and
sawdust of bones are used by pastrycooks as
a material for jelly, which is yielded the more
readily on account of the attenuated state to
which the fragments of bone have been
previously reduced; and the jelly is said to be
nearly as good as calfs-foot jelly. Bone