NEW WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS.

The article entitled The First Idea of
Everything, in our last number, abundantly
showed that there may be, literally and materially,
nothing new under the Sun; yet, so many
new facts, principles, and laws, are almost
daily coming to light, that the world is in no
want of novelties. Thus, a new branch of
physics has of late years been inaugurated by
the discovery of what is called the spheroidal
state of matter. When we had got as far as
steam and gas, we fancied we had fathomed
the uttermost secrets of nature; but now,
marvels which a writer of fiction would
hardly dare to introduce into a fairy tale or
a legend, turn out to be incontestably and
demonstrably true. For instance, a bold
experimentalist—some people might call him an
impudent quack—set his heart on manufacturing
a lump of ice. And where does he
succeed in making it? Of all preposterous
places in the world, he produces it inside a
glowing crucible standing in a heated furnace;
the heat of the furnace moreover not being
the gentle temperature which bakers use to
reduce beef and potatoes to a savoury dish
nicely browned and with the gravy in, but a
chemist's white-heat; and the bit of ice, so
turned out, is not a half-melted hailstone
which you would suck with pleasure (if
clean) after a summer afternoon's thunderstorm,
but a diabolical little lump of such
intense coldness that you would take it to
be the concentration of a whole Russian
winter, or an essential ice-drop distilled out
of the very North Pole itself. The
performer of the feat is Monsieur P. H.
Boutigny (d'Evreux), member of various
learned and scientific societies and Chevalier
of the Legion of Honour, who has proved by
experiment on his own proper person—and
his friends have not hesitated to follow his
example—that the judicial tests, or ordeals of
former ages, by red-hot iron, by boiling
water or oil, and other ingenious means of
torture which have been in use at diverse
epochs amongst almost every nation under
the sun —he has demonstrated that these
fearful, fiery trials may have been triumphantly
passed through and undergone, without
any exercise of charlatanism or trickery
on the part of the actors, and also without any
supernatural interference beyond the influence
of physical laws which have always been in
operation and do act to the present day.
Occult powers of nature they may have
hitherto been, but natural powers they ever
remain.

One Adurabad Mabrasphand, a priest of
Zoroaster, wishing to convince the dissenters
and infidels of his day of the superior truth
and holiness of his faith, proposed that on his
naked body there should be poured eighteen
pounds of melted copper hot from the furnace,
on the condition that, if he received no harm,
disbelievers should bow and yield their
credence in the presence of so great a prodigy.
The Dictionnaire Historique, which tells
the tale, adds that the trial was reported to
have been made with such complete success,
that all the sceptics were incontinently
converted.

Is this a gross fable, or is it only an unexplained
fact? Most readers are tempted to
treat it as a coarse and vulgar story utterly
repugnant to common sense. But many things
which common sense has scornfully rejected
have found a refuge and a resting-place in the
realms of science. In proof of the fact, we
have only to go back to the infancy of steam,
gas, and electricity.

M. Boutigny regards the anecdote as an
undoubted fact; and however improbable, it
really is, nevertheless, perfectly veracious
and historical. Many credible things, he
remarks, are false; and many incredible things
are true. It is hardly worth disputing now
whether the hard-named apostle of Zoroaster's
creed enjoyed his hot copper shower bath
or not, because M. Boutigny backs his
opinion by personal proof of the possibility of
the case. He has plunged (he writes) a finger
or his hands, several times, into a mould
of incandescent metal, frightful to look at.
He has repeated the experiment with silver,
bronze, and lead, and the result has been
completely identical; the same sensation,
and no burning—except in an instance which
he mentions afterwards. He adds, that by
wetting the finger with ether before plunging
it into melted lead, a feeling of chilliness
is experienced. By wetting the finger with
water, it may be plunged with impunity into
tallow heated to three hundred degrees of
centigrade. Réaumur's thermometer takes