ead, and who possesses a taste for reading, can find entertainment at
home, without being tempted to repair to the public-house for that
purpose. His mind can find employment where his body is at rest. There
is in the mind of such a man an intellectual spring, urging him to the
pursuit of mental good; and if the minds of his family are also a little
cultivated, conversation becomes the more interesting, and the sphere of
domestic enjoyment enlarged. The calm satisfaction which books afford
puts him into a disposition to relish more exquisitely the tranquil
delight of conjugal and parental affection; and as he will be more
respectable in the eyes of his family than he who can teach them
nothing, he will be naturally induced to cultivate whatever may
preserve, and to shun whatever would impair that respect.

* * * * *

For producing steel pens the best Dennemora--Swedish iron--or hoop iron
is selected. It is worked into sheets or slips about three feet long,
and four or five inches broad, the thickness varying with the desired
stiffness and flexibility of the pen for which it is intended. By a
stamping press pieces of the required size are cut out. The point
intended for the nib is introduced into a gauged hole, and by a machine
pressed into a semi-cylindrical shape. In the same machine it is pierced
with the required slit or slits. This being effected, the pens are
cleaned by mutual attrition in tin cylinders, and tempered, as in the
case of the steel plate, by being brought to the required color by heat.
Some idea of the extent of this manufacture will be formed from the
statement, that nearly 150 tons of steel are employed annually for this
purpose, producing upward of 250,000,000 pens.

* * * * *

Philosophers abroad are working diligently at many interesting branches
of physical science: magneto and muscular electricity, dia-magnetism,
vegetable and animal physiology: Matteucci in Italy, Bois-Reymond,
Weber, Reichenbach, and Dove in Germany. The two maps of isothermal
lines for every month in the year, lately published by the
last-mentioned _savant_, are remarkable and most valuable proofs of
scientific insight and research. If they are to be depended on, there is
but one pole of cold, situate in Northern America; that supposed to
exist in the Asiatic continent disappears when the monthly means are
taken. These maps will be highly useful to the meteorol