prepared, should be taken prior to going on board, when it will, in most cases, prevent sea-sickness; if taken during the retching, it will greatly reduce its violence and the pain arising from the sickness.

SHIPPING AND SHIP-BUILDING AT CYPRUS.

A correspondent of the Department of State at Washington, writing from the island of Cyprus, under a recent date, gives the following facts in relation to the port of Cyprus, and the regulations relative to ship-building at that port :—

"There being no good port in Cyprus, the number of vessels belonging to the island is quite insignificant, and these are small craft not built in Cyprus, but on the coast of Caramaria from Castel Rasso to Adalia. Vessels are also sometimes bought at public sales in and out of the island; but these instances are extremely Small boats are built in Cyprus now and then.

rare.

66

The regulations with regard to ship-building, sailors in merchant service, shipping, navigation, quarantine, &c., are exactly the same as those in Constantinople and the other principal ports of the Turkish Empire.

"There is, however, no direct trade whatever between this island and the United States, and vessels of the said States seldom visit our shores. The customs duties on exports and imports, as well as the weights and measures in common use in this island, are the same as those established by the supreme law of the mother country The Spanish dollar is worth here at present twenty-six-and-ahalf piasters.

"Foreign vessels are not liable to port charges, nor any other dues, with the exception of those exacted for quarantine."

OXYD OF COPPER.

The ordinary method of preparing this substance as it is used in organic analysis, is to heat the nitrate of the metal to ignition in a crucible; this is attended with much inconvenience, owing to the salt melting, frothing, and in general flowing over the sides of the vessel; in addition to which the crucible commonly cracks during the operation, and permits the liquid portion to run through into the fire, Now all this may be avoided by using a vessel of copper, which is easily made by any one, by simply taking a piece of sheet copper, and folding it so as to form a water-tight vessel, without the use of solder; every one by inspecting a common kitchen fire-shovel will render this intelligible.

In a vessel of this description the nitrate may be safely decomposed, and without any risk of overheating and fusing the oxyd; although the vessel gradually wears out in so doing, it yields a quantity of oxyd of copper, which is mixed along with that produced from the nitrate.

ANALYSIS OF LAKE SUPERIOR IRON.

ADRIAN R. TERRY, Esq., in compliance with the request of E. B. WARD, Esq., has analyzed two specimens of Lake Superior iron, in the region of Detroit, and gives the following statement as the result. The composition of No. 1 is, according to Mr. Terry's analysis, of oxide of iron 96.00, silica of silex 2.50, alumina .40, water and loss 1.10-100; the composition of No. 2 is as follows: peroxide of iron .96, silica of silex 2.50, alumina .40, water and loss 1.10. Mr. T. describes them as "remarkably fine specimens of nearly pure peroxide of iron, which must, from the absence of sulphur, make the best of iron."

YIELD OF THE GOLD FIELDS IN AUSTRALIA.

The Melbourne Journal of Commerce, good authority, of September 13th, 1855, thus speaks of the product of Gold in Australia :

"We have the most conclusive evidence to offer of the great and continually increasing amount of our gold produce. The population on the various gold fields are devoting their energies to modes of obtaining gold other than those which until within these two weeks have been almost exclusively employed. Instead of searching for the precious metal solely in the alluvial drifts-that is, instead of gold digging they are now commencing gold mining, and we are happy to say, from reliable private information, with the most satisfactory results. Our friends in England will scarcely credit a yield of ten ounces per ton, but we know that the quantity obtained from one claim at Mount Blackwood has equalled that for nine successive days, during which time only the machinery has been in operation; and this has been even eclipsed by the produce of another claim, about one hundred yards from the claim which gave the preceding results, the amount obtained from which-if we did not know it for a fact-we should hesitate to publish, for it exceeds eighty ounces per ton, 114 cwt. having produced sixty-three ounces, or over six pounds troy. As yet these are individual cases. It is necessarily so, for there are few machines of any sort, and fewer still of any value, at present in operation in the Mount Blackwood field. When these can be increased in number and efficiency, the results will no doubt be still more astonishing, for the reef commonly known as Simmons' Reef is only just opened, and experienced miners inform us that as they descend from the surface the quartz becomes richer. We know that this recf is being worked for a distance of six miles, and there are other reefs already opened, which promise nearly-perhaps those working them believe equally well."

PROGRESS OF DAGUERREOTYPING.

Niepiece, the co-laborer of Daguerre, has, after years of study and experience, succeeded in almost perfecting the art which his associate discovered. “I have begun," says he, "with reproducing in the camera obscura, colored engravings, then artificial and natural flowers, and lastly, dead nature, a doll dressed in stuffs of different colors, and always trimmed with gold and silver lace. I have obtained all the colors, and, what is more extraordinary and curious, the gold and silver are depicted with their metallic luster, and rock-crystal, porcelain, and alabaster, are depicted with the luster natural to them."

There is at Pittsburg an establishment called the "Eagle Steel Works," manufacturing cast steel of all varieties, bar, shear, and sheet. They have three converting furnaces, five heating furnaces, and eighteen melting furnaces. They em ploy about sixty hands, many of them imported from England, and consume annually seven hundred and fifty tons of iron, one-third of which is Swedish. The steel produced by these works has been repeatedly tested, and is found fully equal to the best English imported.

INVENTION OF BOOTS AND SHOES.

Boots are said to have been invented by the Carrans. They were at first made of leather, afterwards of brass and iron, and were proof against both cut and thrust. It was from this that Homer called the Greeks brazen-footed. Formerly, in France, a great foot was much esteemed, and the length of the shoe in the fourteenth century was a mark of distinction. The shoes of a prince were two-and-ahalf feet long; those of a baron two feet, those of a knight eighteen inches.

MERCANTILE MISCELLANIES.

OUR AMERICAN MERCANTILE BIOGRAPHY.

In a former part of the present number (page 310) we have extracted a part of the preface to the first volume of our "Lives of American Merchants." We now take the liberty of making a few extracts from the critical notices of several of our cotemporaries of the newspaper press as follows:

[FROM THE EVENIing mirror, of feBRUARY 2D, 1856.]

The public have been awaiting, with no little interest, the appearance of Mr. Freeman Hunt's first volume of the "Lives of American Merchants." That volume is just issued. It is a superb octavo, extending to 600 pages, in clear, bold type, entirely befitting the interesting records of the remarkable and honored lives therein sketched. It was a noble and original conception of Mr. Hunt, the pion eer publisher of American commercial literature-of which the Merchants' Magazine is the proud initial memorial-to gather up records of our eminent merchants and financiers, and permanently embody them in a series of volumes of "American Mercantile Biography." In the execution of this conception, Mr. Hunt will have done for our mercantile notabilities what Jared Sparks has done for miscellaneous American celebrities; he will have given them their deserved historical niche, and at the same time contributed an inestimable treasure to our dawning commercial literature.

We have remarked that the only lack in the sketches is in their matter, and this is only in two or three cases, where the reader will feel that if the record had been extended it would not have been wearying. It is intensely interesting to study the personal history, even to minute details, of men who have not only carved their own way to fortune and eminence, but have at the same time influenced the course, and contributed to the progress and elevation of communital and national destiny. Nine of the sketches, those of Perkins, Cope, Brooks, King, Appleton, Slater, Chickering, Clapp, and Jackson, are accompanied with steel engraved portraits. It is to be regretted that portraits do not accompany all the sketches. It is pleasant to look on the faces of those whose names are familiar and honored.

"Commerce is King," and Mr. Hunt was not mistaken when he conceived the princes of Commerce, and the lords of the mercantile-which embrace the empire of the artisan and manufacturer-world, worthy of historical recognition and enduring record. To no class of men is the world, and civilization itself, so largely indebted. Colonization, multiplied enterprise by land and sca, the baring of the mines in the earth's bosom, and the uprising of new communities, cities, and States, are among the fruits of the lives of the men whom Mr. Hunt seeks to memorialize and honor. They have done, and are doing, for our country and age, what their class did for Tyre, Carthage, Venice, Genoa, and the free cities of Germany and Holland-founded or built up commonwealths, enriched States, developed arts, and furnished and sustained victorious armies and fleets. Before their conquering marine piracy has fled the seas, and the fields of peaceful vocation they have opened have made an end of roysterers, robbers, and feudal forays.

Mr. Hunt has only fairly entered on his work; he has a broad and rich field before him--a field scarcely traveled until he entered it. There are hundreds of names appealing to him from the past and present-hundreds of lives deserving to be snatched from greedy oblivion. We learn with pleasure that a second vok ume of “Lives of American Merchants" will be forthcoming by the close of the present year. Let the good work go on, with such rapidity as may be, but in no such haste as to mar its perfectness. There is no man living, perhaps, so well

suited to accomplish the work as Freeman Hunt. Enthusiastic in his interest in the class of whose lives and literature he is the pioneer chronicler, he knows just how and where to lay his hand on the material for his laborious, and not a lit le delicate and responsible enterprise. And he will have his reward. Besides the pleasure immediately derived (and profit, we trust, also) he will have joined his name indissolubly with those he has biographized, and one could hardly desire immortality in a better company.

[FROM THE NEW YORK EVENING POST.]

In this volume we have the memoirs of twenty-one eminent American merchants -all of them remarkable for sagacity and success as men of business, and some of them distinguished as the authors of great commercial and manufacturing enterprises, philanthropists, founders of public institutions, or in some other way as public benefactors. The lives of such men, if the examples are well chosen, are particularly instructive. Commerce is a pursuit which increases in importance with every advance in the useful and elegant arts, with every new facility of com munication between distant countries, and every improved method of transporta tion. It rewards those who are successful with wealth which can be.acquired in no other manner, and gives them, by force of wealth alone, even if they possess no remarkable qualities of mind and character, a high standing and influence among their fellow-men. It is of the greatest importance that the multitudes who are drawn into this pursuit should have constantly before them the examples of those who have acquired in it not merely wealth, but the general respect of mankind, and who have dispensed their wealth worthily, and in obedience to the sug gestions of a wise and large humanity. Mr. Hunt's book presents examples of such men in the greater part of the lives he has given.

[FROM THE BOSTON DAILY TIMES.]

Mr. Hunt, editor and proprietor of that able and popular periodical, the Merchants' Magazine, is engaged on a work of much value.

We have the fullest belief that this work will be a popular one, as we know that it will be found of uncommon interest. We are glad to see the literary field extending itself, and that biography is not to be monopolized by those gentlemen who get their notoriety through their success in the arts of destruction, or as men of scientific knowledge or artistic skill. The soldier is a deserving member of society, and so is the man of science, and the artist; but neither does more for the world than the merchant, provided the latter is worthy of his calling. Nor does it require less talent to succeed as a merchant than as an artist, or as a soldier. No one can be a great merchant who is not possessed of high and various talents, and of very extensive knowledge. A man may be a very respectable artist, and yet be, out of his own metier, an ignoramus; but an ignorant merchant is an impossibility. A man may be in trade, and be ignorant, but he is no more a merchant than a sign-painter is a Raphael. Ignorance would be as fatal to a merchant as ignorance of navigation would be to the commander of a ship. The one thing that the merchant must have is knowledge, if he would not be in constant danger of making shipwreck of his fortunes. We find that all eminent merchants have been superior men, and that they could have succeeded in almost any other department of life, if they had chosen to essay it. Then they are, too, as a general rule, men of liberal minds, though in politics somewhat inclined to conservatism, as is but natural with persons engaged in conducting affairs in which millions are ventured. They give liberally, and in that way have done much for the world's advancement. They are also patriotic, and have been known to come to their country's assistance at times when all others hung back. There were not a few such merchants living here at the time of our Revolution, of whom Hancock and Langdon were splendid examples. The lives of such men are as well worth writing as those of men who have distinguished themselves in politics or in war. We hope that Mr. Hunt will extend his work, and not only give us biographies of merchants of our own age, but also of those eminent merchants who lived in the colonial times.

[FROM THE NEW YORK SUN.]

It was scarcely to have been expected that Mr. Hunt's own pen, busy as it i should have been able to chronicle the careers of all these merchant princes; therefore, he has availed himself of the eminent literary abilities of such men as Edward Everett, Charles King, Thomas G. Cary, S. Austin Allibone, John L. Blake, D. D., and others. In this he has done wisely, inasmuch as all sameness of treatment is avoided, and amongst such a multitude of biographers there must be truth and wisdom.

What Bancroft and Macaulay have done for American and English literature generally, Mr. Freeman Hunt has done, and is doing, for American commercial literature particularly; and in a country like ours such an undertaking cannot fail to lead to results of the very highest importance. It is too much the fashion in Europe for the scions of aristocracy to turn up their noses at the merchantbut with Old World prejudices, thank God, America has nothing to do. Here Commerce stands on its own solid pedestal, and asserts its true dignity. We honor those who have been the builders of their own fortunes, and consider that the man who has by his own unaided efforts built for himself a high position among his brother merchants, as a far greater hero than a Raglan or a Pelissier. To tell us of the struggles, fears, hopes, and final successes of such men in America has been Mr. Hunt's aim, and the execution of his purpose is in all respects worthy of it.

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

All that remains for us to say is, that the volume is beautifully printed, and that the portraits are faithful and finely engraved.

[FROM THE NEW YORK DAILY TIMES]

We have for some days been in possession of the above noble work, and it is with great satisfaction that we see the energy and talents of Mr. Hunt, so long and eminently devoted to the interests of American Commerce and the extension and improvement of American commercial literature, engaged in a walk of exertion still higher, if possible, by its solidity and permanency, than the range of periodical writing, high and valuable as Mr. Hunt has made it.

Mr. Hunt's object in the first volume of these Memoirs, is announced in his preface to be the characterization of what we may term "the First Period of our Commercial History as a Nation," giving the lives of deceased merchants only. He has certainly carried out his laudable design with gratifying success, enriching the studies of our statesmen and scholars with a work which, depicting the first progress and establishment of American Commerce under the republic, and the high enterprise that has given the United States their present unequaled prosperity, will remain a treasured and invaluable standard book of reference. Nor is it merely a dry detail of unadorned, unillustrated facts. The same ability which has rendered it a historical treasure, has not disdained the ornaments of style and diction, yet we have good specimens of every kind of writing. The sketch of Stephen Girard, ascribed by us to the skillful pen of Mr. Hunt, abounds in substantial detail and instructive comparison; that of Nicholas Brown, possibly by the same hand, is smooth and eloquent; those of Samuel Ward and James Gore King, by Charles King, LL. D., combine both varieties of excellence, and if this were the appropriate place, we might specify the others, one by one.

Commerce, as well as art, literature, and war, has had her great, high-minded, noble, and patriotic men, and the gallery before us will hold its place in the library of the future historian, beside the biographies of the statesmen, warriors, writers, and artists who have adorned our country's annals!

A PRACTICAL PATRON OF THE MERCHANTS' MAGAZINE.

We are frequently encouraged in our editorial labors by kind words from generous patrons residing in different sections of the Union; and were it not for abstracting from the space allotted to matters of more general interest, we should be glad to publish more of these gratifying testimonials that our efforts are ap