they found their resistance. "I do not however,"
said a learned judge, delivering his
opinion in favour of the plaintiff, "attribute
any weight to the fact of the plaintiff himself
being the discover of the new mode, or of the
defendant having had it communicated to him
by the plaintiff. However much these facts
might affect the moral justice of the case, they
do not seem to me to alter the law." So it is.
Upon the moral of the case there cannot be a
question that an hour's investigation would
not readily and finally decide, but that does
not alter the law. Right may be a very
proper thing; but—right is not the question
argued in a court of law.

The decision of the judges thus given
was to the following effect, that the former
judgment should be reversed, and there
should be what the courts call a "venire de
novo," which is a Latin form of the invitation,
"Come to us again." The suit was put as nearly
as possible in the position of a case that never
had been tried; because the majority of the
judges had expressed their decision in favour
of the plaintiff's claim.

A new trial, however, could not be had,
because the defendant moved in the next
place for a further appeal from the Exchequer
Chamber to the House of Lords. Mr. Heath
is dead, and his fourteen years' patent expires
almost in the present week. For the
convenience of all parties, however, during
litigation, an extension of the patent during
seven years has been obtained, in the hope
that Sheffield will make of its own free will
if not compelled by law to make some
reparation to the widow and the family of the
man whose claim to payment for most valuable
services it has been found more easy to resist
than to deny. When, after a due delay, the
House of Lords shall have affirmed the
decision of the judges in Exchequer chamber,
we suppose that the whole round of the
lawcourts may be fought again;

                     "Beyond is all abyss,
    Eternity, whose end no eye can reach."—

We let our thoughts drop silently into the
spacious pitfall.

              A PUFF OF SMOKE.

MEN will smoke tobacco and, we fear, take
snuff for many centuries to come. M. Natalis
Rondot calculates—a little hyperbolically—
that there are at least a hundred millions of
tobacco smokers in China. Two manufactories
alone send out yearly from St. Orner forty-five
millions of pipes, made out of eleven thousand
tons of clay; then we have the rest of France,
England, Germany, and other countries, not
forgetting Turkey. Dr. Boyle tells us that
the poor native of India smokes his clay upon
the bosom of his mother earth, by digging
with his fingers two small holes in a clay
soil, and boring a tunnel between them with
a piece of stick. He puts tobacco into one
hole, lights it, and lying down upon the
ground, applies his mouth over the other.
The Turk in smoking his narguile does not
part too readily with his dear fumes, but
sucks them all into the lungs; leaving, if he
can afford it, the last portion of the charge
in every bowl, and taking a new bowl at
every sitting. He measures often the length
of a journey, by the number of pipes that
might be smoked while making it, just as we
were told lately of the Ostiaks in Siberia,
that they reckon time by kettles. Probably
one man in every four throughout the
human race is, more or less, a smoker of
tobacco.

We have already (vol. iv. p. 526) described
the manufacture of clay pipes, and we shall
say nothing now upon that subject; but we
know our duty to the aristocracy, even of pipes;
and must apologise for our neglect of
meerschaum and of amber.

What is meerschaum? In the language of
the chemists it is:
              (MgO, SiO3 + HO.)

Nothing could be clearer to the general
public than that explanation, it is MagO
SiO three plus HO. In other words it is a
hydrated silicate of magnesia; or a compound
of magnesia, flint, and water, in variable
proportions (for it is not crystalline), and it
is often coloured more or less, with a tinge
varying from pale yellow to deep brown,
communicated by the silicate of iron. It
is an earthy matter easily indented with
the finger nail; and when wet may be
cut with a knife. Some kinds of meerschaum
(foam of the sea) will sink in water, some
kinds float: the pipe-makers prefer to buy it
not unusually light, and not unusually heavy.
The light meerschaum is too porous, and
contains often large holes. The heavy is perhaps
a manufactured compound. The greatest
quantity of meerschaum comes from Natolia
in Asia Minor; but it is dug also in parts of
Spain, Greece, and Moravia.

Before the meerschaum is carved by the
manufacturer, it is soaked in a liquid ointment
of wax oils and fats, and by this soaking there
is communicated to the pipe bowl that
property of passing through a series of shades of
colour during use, for which the meerschaum
pipes are prized. The heat of the burning
tobacco causes the wax and fats united with
the substance of the bowl to go through a
process of dry distillation, and form products
which unite with the results of the distillation
of tobacco, to produce the true chameleon
effect.

The meerschaum parings left by the pipemaker
are pounded and compounded into a
factitious block, out of which bowls are made,
called Massa bowls.

Of amber, out of which the delicate
mouth-pieces of lordly pipes are formed, we need say
little, for it is a material whose history is well
known. The PhÅ“niciaus—Yankees of the