hink a person as safe in consuming a certain quantity of arsenic, as in
using the potatoes now exposed for sale.'"

This is how the Famine of 1846-7 began, and what followed is a matter of
history, which everyone ought to know, and ponder well over, but it can
hardly come under the name of Gossip. There were, naturally, a few food
riots in different parts of the country, but everyone tried to do their
best, even in a blundering way, to alleviate the distress. The
Archbishop of Canterbury composed a Special Form of Prayer, to be used on
Sunday, 11 Oct.

On 29 Sep. the gigantic equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington,
which used to crown the arch opposite Apsley House, and which was taken
down 24 Jan., 1883, and then set up at Aldershot, was moved from the
artist's (Wyatt) studio, in Harrow Road, to Hyde Park. It was 27 feet
high, and weighed about 40 tons, being made of brass guns taken by the
Duke in various victories. Being of so great a weight, the appliances to
remove it were on an equally massive scale, the carriage and framework in
which it was placed weighing about 20 tons. It took 100 soldiers to haul
the statue out of the studio; and, when mounted on its carriage, it took
29 huge dray horses, lent by Mr. Goding, of the Lion Brewery, Waterloo,
to drag it to its destination. It was escorted by soldiers and military
bands, and did the distance in about an hour a half. The next day was
spent in preparing to hoist it; the day after, it was lifted some 50
feet, and there remained all night--and the next day was safely landed
and put in position. From that time, until it was taken down, it was the
butt of scoffs and jeers, and no one regretted its departure.

Gun cotton was brought into public notice by some experiments by its
inventor, Professor Schonbein, of Basel, before the chairman of the East
India Company, and a number of scientists. Professor Brande had
previously lectured upon it, at the Royal Institution, on 15 Jan., when
he stated that, about fifteen years before, Braconnot had ascertained
that sawdust, wood shavings, starch, linen and cotton fabrics, when
treated with concentrated nitric acid, produced a gelatinous substance,
which coagulated into a white mass, on the addition of water; this
substance, which he called "xyloidine," was highly inflammable.
Schonbein, however, made his explosive from purified cotton, steeped in a
mixture of equal parts of nitric and sulphuric acids, which when
c