"Little enough, monsieur," said the cook,
shrugging his shoulders.

"But let us see, mon ami," said Brillat,
diplomatically. "Let us go into the kitchen
and talk matters over."

They went; there were four splendid turkeys
turning simultaneously at the fire.

"Comment?" said Brillat. "Ah, cochon!
You told me you had nothing in the house. Let
me have one of those turkeys."

"Impossible!" said the cook, "nom du ciel,
impossible! They are all bespoke by a gentleman
up-stairs."

"He must have a large party?"

"No; he dines by himself."

"I should like to be acquainted with the man
who orders four turkeys for his own eating."

"I'm sure that he will be charmed. Follow
me, monsieur."

M. Savarin followed him, and found his own
son, sitting in plaintive expectation at the table.

"What, you rogue, four turkeys, and all for
yourself? O scélérat! This is not the road
to fortune!"

"Yes, sir," replied the unrepentant Absolom,
"but you know, that whenever I dine with you,
you always eat the whole of 'the fools leave
them' (the tit-bit we English call the oyster),
so I was resolved for once to enjoy myself, and
here I am, ready to begin, although I need
scarcely say not expecting the honour of your
company."

Worthy son of a worthy father! Such are
the men who, in their less selfish moments, keep
alive the vestal fire of sociability, and contribute
to the gaiety of nations. When shall we see
the laws of cooking reduced to a code, and the
gastronomic library enriched by some
Shakespeare of cooks, whose Hamlet shall be a new
form of turtle soup, his Macbeth a new entremet,
and his Lear a new variety of bisque?

LIGHTNING.

THE ancients knew little more about lightning
than that it was something to be afraid of.
Tiberius encircled his head with a laurel crown.
Houseleek, in French joubarbe, the beard of
Jove, is still believed to protect the roofs on
which it grows from thunderbolts. Augustus
wrapped himself in sealskins and retired into
his cellar, as people do in towns bombarded by
artillery.

Down to a much more recent period, the popular
conception of thunder has been persistently
gross and material. Sir Thomas Browne, in
accordance with the opinion of his day, stood
up for the explosive origin of thunder, grounding
his belief on Cardan's affirmation that
gunpowder fired "doth occupy an hundred times a
greater space than its own bulk. And this is
the reason not only of this fulminating report
of guns, but may resolve the cause of those
terrible cracks and affrighting noises of heaven;
that is, the nitrous and sulphureous exhalations
set on fire in the clouds; whereupon, requiring
a larger place, they force out their way, not
only with the breaking of the cloud, but the
laceration of the air around it."

The same tenets were in vogue with ancient
mariners. They held that, in southern parts,
both at sea and land, thunder and lightning
are more frequent and more violent than northward,
because the sun hath greater power.
The sun exhales moist particles; these condense
and gather into clouds. When these clouds
enclose some fiery exhalations, extracted from
sulphur and nitre, both out of earth and the
ocean, this produces lightning with thunder.

Descartes taught that thunder was caused by
a heavy cloud, falling on another cloud beneath
it, which cracks under the pressure exactly
like a bladder violently sat upon by a clown in
a circus, or, to use his equally homely illustration,
like a leaf laid in the hollow of your
hand and smartly struck with the other hand.
Sir Isaac Newton was of opinion that thunder
is not occasioned by the fall of clouds, but
by the kindling of sulphureous exhalations which
are always ascending into the air when the earth
is dry.

That lightning is a solid projectile shot forth
from the sky, was long an admitted article of
faith. Were not the bolts of the thunder found
in the ground, just as we find musket-balls after
a battle? Who could resist evidence that may
be seen and handled? Of these thunder-darts
shot out of the middle region, are there not
divers in Gresham College? Kentman
mentions one of an ash colour, which, being rubbed,
smelt like a burnt cow's horn. Moscardo calls
them "pierres ceraunies," thunder-stones, from
the Greek word signifying lightning. Ceraunia,
according to Pliny, is a gem generated by
thunder: of which you shall find no mention in
Mr. King's Natural History of Precious Stones.
The fossils known as belemnites, vulgo "thunderbolts",
derive their name from the Greek word
for a missile weapon. If they be lightning
cooled down and crystallised, they are the
earliest known form of conical shot. Geologists,
unfortunately, have made them out to be the
bones of extinct species of cuttlefish. Nay,
even the inkbag peculiar to those cephalopods
has been found connected with the "bolt," so
well preserved that drawings have been made
with this pristine sepia.

Everybody is now aware that lightning is
only an intense or concentrated manifestation
of electricity. What the thing electricity is, we
are far from knowing. Dr. Tyndall ventures to
say no more than that we have every reason to
conclude that heat and electricity are both
modes of motion. We know, experimentally,
that from electricity we can obtain heat, and that
from heat (as in the case of the thermo-electric
pile) we can obtain electricity. But although
we have, or think we have, tolerably clear ideas
of the character of the motion of heat, our ideas
are very crude as to the precise nature of the
change which this motion must undergo in order
to appear as electricity—in fact, we know, as
yet, nothing about it.