and
experience of the manipulator. How could it be otherwise?

Everything connected with the production of champagne wine was but
recently unknown and unexplained. The proportioning of the sugar
accurately dates, as it were, from but yesterday, and the measurement
of the absorbing power of wine for carbonic acid has but just entered
into practice, thanks to Mr. Salleron's absorptiometer. The real
strength of the bottles, and the laws of the elasticity of glass and
its variation with the temperature, are but little known. Finally, the
physical constitution of cork, its chemical composition, its
resistance to compression and the dissolving action of the wine, must
be taken into consideration. In fact, all the elements of the
difficult problem of the manufacture of sparkling wine show that there
is an urgent necessity of introducing scientific methods into this
industry, as without them work can now no longer be done.

No one has had a better opportunity to show how easy it is to convert
the juice of the grape into sparkling wine through a series of simple
operations whose details are known and accurately determined, so we
believe it our duty to recommend those of our readers who are
particularly interested in this subject to read Mr. Salleron's book on
sparkling wine. We shall confine ourselves in this article to a
description of two of the apparatus invented by the author for testing
the resistance of bottles and cork stoppers.

It is well, in the first place, to say that one of the important
elements in the treatment of sparkling wine is the normal pressure
that it is to produce in the bottles. After judicious deductions and
numerous experiments, Mr. Salleron has adopted for the normal pressure
of highly sparkling wines five atmospheres at the temperature of the
cellar, which does not exceed 10 degrees. But, in a defective cellar,
the bottles may be exposed to frost in winter and to a temperature of
25 deg. in summer, corresponding to a tension of ten atmospheres. It may
naturally be asked whether bottles will withstand such an ordeal. Mr.
Salleron has determined their resistance through the process by which
we estimate that of building materials, viz., by measuring the limit
of their elasticity, or, in other words, the pressure under which they
take on a new permanent volume. In fact, glass must be assimilated to
a perfectly elastic body; and bottles expand under the internal
pressure that they support. If their re