Volume 2

A selection of curious articles from the Gentleman's Magazine / [By John Walker].

Date:
1811
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A selection of curious articles from the Gentleman's Magazine / [By John Walker]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    water that dribbled down the sides, and tasting the moist- ure by dipping in their fingers. I went to them, and found them Ge mans. They were very obliging; and, as 1 under- stood the language, informed me they were very well versed in searching after mines, which by thus tasting the water they could discover. I mentioned what I had heard of the divining rod, in use on the Mendip Hills, in Somer- setshire, which bends when held over places that contain metallic ore, they said that might well be, for a piece of gold, silver, or any metal, suspended on the end of a very slender switch, when carried over a mine of the. same metal, would be so attracted as to bend the end of the stick5. Some time after, I happened to be at a silversmith’s at Bath, who had a very curious pair of scales, inclosed in a glass case. I admired them; and he said they would weigh to the 200th part of a grain; and there lay in the window a block ol solid silver, about six inches square and two inches thick. What the abovementioned persons told me at Scar- borough, came into my head, and 1 thought this a good op- portunity to try how far what they said was true. 1, there- fore, had a shilling put into one scale, and the beam, which was about 18 inches long, made perfectly level by weights in the other scale; then I introduced the block of silver under the scale that had the shilling, and the beam dropped at that end a full quarter of an inch, and stood there until the block of silver was removed, when it immediately re- turned to the equipoize and level it was before: and this we repeated several times, and it always answered the same. These curious scales were inclosed in the glass case, and the door shut, at every experiment. The other matter, 1 think, may be made useful for keep- ing metal pipes or boilers from the furring, or stony excres- cence, that lodges from boiling water often in them. A friend of mine at Rochester put a common flat shell of an oyster into a new tea-kettle, and kept it in two or three years. During all the time the shell was in the tea-kettle, the tea-kettle gathered no fur, hut all the furring settled on the oyster shell, which I have in my possession now, and which is about two inches thick, and something bigger than it was when put in, and perfectly smooth at the bottom, and where at the edge it had from time to time slipped against the side of the tea-kettle, in appearance like a hone you set razors pn; hut on the top of the shell the fur was like any thing boiling up, curly and uneven. The water there comes from chalky lands. I live in Essex, and have tried the shell, which also gathered the fur, but of a different