Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 126.djvu/835

Rh of people being brought acquainted with other uses, with other fabrics and materials, with other forms, must have an immense effect, in the end, on the art-needlework of to-day, as compared with the art-needlework of centuries bygone; and it will be well that this should be actively borne in recollection by the council of the royal schools. One curious fact about this inevitable growth and alteration is, that the precise way of it cannot be foretold. Like other growths, it is growth, not fabrication, and it must be left to the development of time. Let the council, being sure it will come, be on the watch for it, that is all; and let them go on all the more hopefully with their labours, knowing that, though they plant for only one sort of fruit, others will come, no less necessary and nourishing; and that these fruits will be their fruits, and should not be looked upon as unexpected or alien.

One result from the establishment of schools for art-needlework is perhaps so manifest, it may as well at once be pointed out. If the art be good for gentlewomen, it will be good for other women, not born gentle, but perhaps as cultivated, as full of patience and art-feeling, as necessitous. Needlework is classic. Josiah brake down the houses nearby the house where the women wove hangings; Solomon decked a bed with coverings of tapestry, with carved work, with fine linen of Egypt; set a woman far above rubies who laid her hands to the spindle, who made herself and her household coverings of tapestry, and silk, and scarlet; Moses wished for hangings of fine twined linen, wrought with needlework; Valeria found Volumnia and Virgilia "manifest housekeepers," and did what she could to make them "play the idle housewife" with her for an afternoon. "What, are you sewing here? Come, lay aside your stitchery! I would your cambric were as sensible as your finger, that you might leave pricking it for pity!" Anne Hathaway must have used her needle resolutely; with, possibly, somewhat too persistent and too flippant will; how otherwise could Shakespeare have written so humorously:

And with all this evidence of the adherence of women to ornamentation by the needle, let the council of the Royal School of Art-Needlework congratulate themselves heartily if they are the means of the art being cultivated much more largely than it could be within their walls, and if it reaches all over the country, and is practised by women of all grades. Some comic satisfaction may come to the council, too, anent a new species of what may be called benefit of clergy. Nineteenth-century young ladies have been in the habit of inundating bachelor and favourite curates with braces and slippers, worked on canvas, in "lovely" Berlin wool. If, after this loan exhibition, young ladies (without the prospect of immediate recompense for it) will embroider bath foot-stands, bath blankets, borders for table-covers and hangings, and panels for folding-screens, they may be quite sure their presents will be very much more useful and acceptable than they are now, and the Royal School of Art-Needlework maybe thanked for having brought about a very practical, albeit it may be an utterly unintended, revolution.

 

 From The London Medical Record.

, the Austrian Arctic explorer, has been laying some of the results of his explorations before the Geographical Society of Vienna. Referring to the influence of extreme cold on the human organism, he related that on March 14, 1874, he and his companions made a sledge journey over the Samiklar glacier, in order to make observations of Francis-Joseph Land. On that day the cold marked forty degrees (Reaumur) below zero. Notwithstanding this intense cold, M. Payer and a Tyrolese went out before sunrise to make observations and sketch. The sunrise was magnificent; the sun seemed surrounded, as it does at a high degree of cold, by small suns, and its light appeared more dazzling from the contrast with the extreme cold. The travellers were obliged to pour rum down their throats so as not to touch the edge of the metal cups, which would have been as dangerous as if they had been red-hot; but the rum had lost all its strength and its liquidity, and was as flat and thick as oil. It was impossible to smoke either cigars, or tobacco in short pipes, for very soon nothing but a piece of ice remained in the mouth. The metal of the 