Entries from January 2006 ↓

I enjoyed reading Certain Personal Matters so much at DP that I wanted to be sure to tell you about it when it posted to Project Gutenberg.

It’s a group of about 40 essays written by H. G. Wells for the Pall Mall Gazette at the end of the 19th century. In it you’ll find some hints of his novels of speculative fiction (”Of a Book Unwritten” and “The Extinction of Man”), hints of other peoples’ novels of speculative fiction (”From an Observatory”), and many (often humorous) observations on how life was lived and books were written in the 1890’s.

Some things haven’t much changed…

The revival at Venice of the mosaic art, chiefly for internal and external artistic decorations of private and public buildings, goes on uninterruptedly and working in mosaic is now (our consul says) carried on in that city on a large scale and with great success, says the London Daily News. A mosaic is a work framed by the use of “tesserae” or small cubes of enamel, marble or other material and of a gold-and-silver leaf between two films of the purest glass of various colors, which are skillfully mixed on cement so as to produce the effect of a picture. The composition of human figures in different attitudes, animals, draperies or other objects requiring a careful delineation are intrusted to the best workmen and the execution of the background to the less trained workmen. The splendid mosaics which are made at Venice continue to be in great demand in the artistic markets of the world for the skillful manner in which the tesserae are arranged, for their extreme beauty and delicacy of color, the rich harmony of effect and from their being nearly indestructible. The manner in which mosaics are now made for decorative purposes is quite different from the elaborate system used by the ancients, which consisted in fixing the tesserae one by one on the cement previously applied on the wall. The modern method of the Venetian school consists in executing the mosaic in the workshop by having the tesserae fixed with common paste on the section of the cartoon assigned to each workman. When all the parts of the mosaic are complete they are put together on the floor or on a special wooden frame. The mosaic, which is then a perfect representation of the original cartoon, is again divided into section on the reverse side, marked with a progressive number and carefully packed to be sent off to the place for which it is intended. The surface of the wall where the mosaic is to be fixed is then covered with cement, into which the sections of the mosaic are uniformly pressed according to their numbers and the key-plan supplied to the fixers. When the cement has hardened the paper on which the tesserae have been pasted is gently taken off and the faithful copy of the original cartoon is again exhibited on the right side.

Many theories have been set up as to the origin, objects and purposes of the Western mounds. They seem to rise and fall in accordance with the ingenuity of the numerous writers on the subject. A curious and novel idea has been made public by a St. Louis Judge, relative to the mounds on the American bottom. He argues that the locality of St. Louis and its environs was once the bed of a great lake, supplied by the Missouri and Mississippi, with an outlet at Niagra Falls. In the course of centuries the barriers of the lakes at the falls were worn away, as the present falls (the outlet at Erie) will in time be. The great lake was thus drained, and the region became cultivatable. But it was a dangerous region. When the ice ran and the driftwood came down the narrow passage below would gorge, and the river would stand back on the former bed of the lake. To remedy this, a race of people far superior to the present Indians–probably the ancesters of the Aztecs–built the mounds as places of refuge for themselves and their flocks and herds, when the water rose. They were evidently built for practical purposes, and are clearly artificial formations. They were not intended for tumuli (burial places), as no skeleton or weapon has been found in any of them, except one skeleton, and that was wrapped in a Macinaw blanket. If we take into account the “wear down” of all these mounds for a thousand years, and count the numbers on both sides of the river, it is easy to see they were once capacious enough to furnish places of refuge for all the inhabitants of the valley and their flocks and herds and provisions. Whoever looked from the dome of the Court House (continues the Judge) and saw the ferryboats taking the inhabitants of the American bottom from the mound on that side of the river, at the last great overflow, will at once see the plain, practical purpose of these mounds.–Philadelphia Press.