which had been stored in the same magazine during the night.  This result, although not that intended, was most instructive as regards the danger of using explosives which are liable to freeze at such a moderate temperature, and the thawing of which is undoubtedly attended with great risk unless most carefully performed.  Also, the small pieces of the gelatine or dynamite, when scattered by the explosion of the detonator, might cause serious accident if trodden upon.—­Engineering.

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THE MECHANICAL REELING OF SILK.

When automatic machinery for thread spinning was invented, English intelligence and enterprise were quick to utilize and develop it, and thus gained that supremacy in textile manufacture which has remained up to the present time, and which will doubtless long continue.  The making of the primary thread is the foundation of all textile processes, and it is on the possibility of doing this by automatic machinery that England’s great textile industries depend.  The use of highly developed machinery for spinning cotton, wool, and flax has grown to be so much a part of our conception of modern life, as contrasted with the times of our grandfathers, as often to lead to the feeling that a complete and universal change has occurred in all the textile industries.  This is, however, not the case.  There is one great textile industry—­one of the most staple and valuable—­still in the primitive condition of former times, and employing processes and apparatus essentially the same as those known and employed before such development had taken place.  We mean the art of silk reeling.  The improvements made in the production of threads of all other materials have only been applied to silk in the minor processes for utilizing waste; but the whole silk trade and manufacture of the world has, up to this time, been dependent for its raw silk threads upon apparatus which, mechanically speaking, is nearly or quite as primitive as the ancient spinning wheels.  Thousands of operatives are constantly employed in forming up these threads by hand, adding filament by filament to the thread as required, while watching the unwinding from the cocoon of many miles of filament in order to produce a single pound of the raw silk thread, making up the thread unaided by any mechanical device beyond a simple reel on which the thread is wound as finished, and a basin of heated water in which the cocoons are placed.

Viewed from any standpoint to which we are accustomed, this state of things is so remarkable that we are naturally led to the belief that there must be some special causes which tended to retard the introduction of automatic machinery, and these are not far to seek.  The spinning machinery employed for the production of threads, other than those of raw silk, may be broadly described as consisting of devices capable of taking a mass of confused and comparatively short fibers, laying them parallel with one another, and twisting them into a cylindrical thread, depending for its strength upon the friction and interlocking of these constituent fibers.