sufficient to colour a hundred weight of cheese.
It may, however, be questioned whether annatto is not sometimes
adulterated with red lead.

Gouda cheese, the best made in Holland, is prized for its soundness,
which is referable to muriatic acid being used in curdling the milk
instead of rennet. This renders it pungent, and preserves it from
mites. Parmesan cheese, so called from Parma in Italy, where it is
manufactured, and highly prized, is merely a skim-milk cheese, which
owes its rich flavour to the fine herbage of the meadows along the
Po, where the cows feed.

* * * * *

BASKET SALT.

The finer salt sold under this denomination is made by placing the
salt, after evaporation, in conical baskets, and passing through it a
saturated solution of salt, which dissolves, and carries off the muriate
of magnesia or lime. Pure salt should not become moist by exposure to
the air.

* * * * *

PETIT-OR.

The imitation of gold sold with this taking name is nothing more than
the alloy formerly called Pinchbeck, and made by melting zinc, in a
certain proportion, with copper and brass, so as in colour to approach
that of gold.

* * * * *

THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

* * * * *

CHIPS OF TOM CRINGLE'S LOG.

[Our old friend Tom Cringle (of Blackwood,) occasionally spins or splits
his _Log_ too small. The incidents are weakened in the drawing out,
or exaggerated in the telling; but they are sometimes relieved by
brilliant descriptive touches, such as the following, introduced to set
off the fate of one of Tom's heroes at Santiago.]

_The Butterfly, Chameleon, and Serpent._

Glancing bright in the sunshine, a most beautiful butterfly fluttered in
the air, in the very middle of the open window. When we first saw it, it
was flitting gaily and happily amongst the plants and flowers that were
blooming in the balcony, but it gradually became more and more slow on
the wing, and at last poised itself unusually steadily for an insect of
its class. Below it, on the window sill, near the wall, with head erect,
and its little basilisk eyes upturned towards the lovely fly, crouched
a chameleon lizard, its beautiful body, when I first looked at it, was
a bright sea-green. It moved into the sunshine, a little away from the
shade of the laurel bush, which grew on the side it first appeared on,
and s