into them would defeat their purpose and
destroy their character. The Reading and
Refreshment Rooms for working people are
designed to supply in the best possible way
the particular wants of a class. The first
room of the kind ever opened is in Edinburgh,
where it was established about a year ago.
There are now in that city several others.
They are opened at five o'clock in the morning,
and provide at that hour coffee or
comfortable breakfasts for many a man who
used to commence work with a glass of
whisky. Thousands of working men,
wanting refreshment, go to a public-house
because they scarcely know what else to do.
To take the case of Westminster—in which
district it is proposed that the first London
rooms of this kind shall be established—there
are in the neighbourhood of the Abbey great
numbers of work-people employed upon the
new Victoria Street, many of whom come
from a distance and are compelled either to
bring food with them and eat it in the open
air, or to retire into the public-houses. Two
large public-houses have been in fact created
for their use. Why not create something more
desirable? Every one who is acquainted with
that strange and ever widening London
boundary of bricks and mortar, among which
workmen are for ever stirring, and out of
which houses are for ever rising, knows how
the public-houses are built out in the fields
at regular distances, in anticipation of the
workpeople who presently will swarm about
them. Why not set on foot the practice of
providing in a better way for the comfort of
respectable and steady workmen, who accept
now unwillingly the tap-room as a necessary
but most undesirable kind of accommodation?

The Reading and Refreshment Rooms
for working people, which it is thought
desirable to found in those and other localities,
are by no means intended to diffuse teetotalism.
They should supply meals on any
scale within the workman's means; he will
require generally roast or boiled meat for his
dinner, and he will in most cases like a glass of
beer. There is no reason why, with a few
obviously reasonable precautions, anything
that is comfortable within the limits of
moderation should be denied. There are in
London some few cheap lodging-houses for
the work-people, in which they can get a
good dinner, including beer, for sixpence,
and a woman who has kept such a house
for some years allows that she makes fifty
per cent, on her whole outlay. Contenting
themselves with a more reasonable return
for their investments the founders of Refreshment
and Reading Rooms for working men
could easily provide at a cost within the
means of every industrious man a place in
which during the intervals of labour he could
wash, if he pleased, eat and drink, and obtain
rational intellectual amusement.

We trust that the promoters of the scheme
at Westminster, and of all cheap News Rooms,
will succeed in their good work, and stimulate
to exertion many active imitators.

A RUSSIAN STRANGER.

An illustrious stranger made his appearance
in London in the year eighteen hundred
and fifty-one. He was not entirely unknown;
the jewellers, and the lapidaries, and the
dealers in articles of vertù had long
appreciated him, and by them he was recognised as
a valuable acquaintance; but to the world at
large his very existence was scarcely known.
When he made his first appearance in a
polished green jacket, the inquiry ran around
—who is he; what is his name; whence does
he come; and how does he make his jacket?
It was found that his name was Malachite;
that he belonged to a Russian family; and
that his jacket, like that of a harlequin, was
a patchwork of pieces placed edge to edge.
Still there were anxious queries put forth—
What is malachite? and we have reason to
believe that among the millions who made
their first acquaintance with this foreigner
in the year named, there is a very notable
per-centage who could not and cannot yet
answer this question. And yet it deserves
to be answered, as we may soon see.

One very strange circumstance connected
with malachite is, that it is not a stone or a
marble of any kind; it has neither lime, nor
clay, nor flint, nor sand in its composition—
nothing which can be considered as a necessary
or integrant part of stone or marble or
alabaster. It is a salt. A sore puzzle this
will be to those (and their name is legion)
who recognise salt only as a condiment to be
added in little crumbles to savoury mouthfuls;
but the learned chemists have a way of
applying the term salt, which it is worth
while to know. When an acid is combined
with a metal, or the oxide of a metal, or an
alkali, or an earth, the compound becomes a
salt—the chemists say so, and therefore of
course it must be so. Now the delicate white
granular substance which we can buy for
daily use at three pounds for a penny, and
which we should be perfectly willing to buy
at a shilling a pound if we could not obtain it
for less, is a salt because it is composed of
muriatic acid and the alkali soda (or more
strictly chlorine and sodium); and by the
same token malachite is a salt because it
consists of carbonic acid and oxide of copper.
We need not carry our chemistry further
than this; suffice it to say that malachite is
really and truly carbonate of copper. There
may be, and are other forms of carbonate of
copper; but malachite is believed to acquire
its remarkable and beautiful appearance by
being formed in drops, a sedimentary deposit
analogous to stalactite and stalagmite. It is
supposed by Sir Roderick Murchison that the
carbonate was once a liquid, and that it
gradually solidified by slow dropping—just as is