The Sun.
London, England, 1864-08-01 00:00:00

THE SUN, LONDON, MONDAY EVENING, AUGUST 1, 1864.

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THE PREVALENCE OF INFANTICIDE.—Last week,
a meeting was held in this metropolis, under the
auspices of the Coroner for Middlesex, to call public atten-
tion to the rapid increase of infanticide. This is an ugly
word, shocking and shaming us so much, that we are un-
willing to allow the truth it declares. "Is it possible," the
well-to-do and comfortably-provided reader exclaims, "that
infanticide can be a prevalent crime in this civilized metro-
polis? Talk of it among the Chinese if you will, or among
African savages, and I will believe you, but do not scanda-
lize our Christianity by telling us that it is practised in St.
James's or the City of London. We aro afraid that it will
not be found easy to answer the impeachment, however
disgraceful and humiliating. It' we argue from what we
do know, we shall see reason to suspect that Dr. Lankester
and his friends have truth on their side. One sin breeds
another as fast as flies vivify in hot weather. We have
only to look at the swarms of lost women who parade our
main thoroughfares by gaslight, and reflect, first upon their
inability and unwillingness to maintain the fruits of their
sin, and secondly, upon the proved fact that the mortality
among infants under one year is excessive in those districts
that are chiefly inhabited by this class of unfortunates, and
we shall feel some diflieulty iu resisting the conclusion to
which the arguments clearly point. Diverging, however,
from this special view of infant mortality, there can be no
doubt that, throughout this metropolis, there is a large
preventible sacrifice of life among children under five years
of age. Dr. Letheby informs us that, in our own City of
London, 39 per cent of all the deaths occur among children
under this age, and that there is about one-third more of
these deaths than there should be if the mortality were in
the same ratio as that for all England. In the Holborn
district matters are worse in this respect, for there we find
that the mortality ascends to 41 per cent.—City Press.
LETTER FROM NASSAU.—NASSAU, N. P., July 2.
—ln for it again ; over 120 in the sun, and not a
breath stirring—right in front of ray window is a cluster of
beautiful feathery bamboos, but for the last few days not a
leaf has stirred to my knowledge. This is the rainy season
—thunderstorms, including any amount of lightning, either
sheet or forked, provided on the shortest notice. As soon as
the ground is saturated with rain and the clouds roll off, out
comes the sun as fierce as though another Phaeton had
usurped the ribbons and got out of his latitude into outs,
and then everything is enveloped in a most unhealthy va-
pour for an hour or so, and in a little while again the leaves
are cracking with heat—and so it is likely to go on for two
months or so, bad cess to it I Sergeant Yellow Jack arrived
a few weeks ago, and is busy beating up and down the city
for recruits to fill up the ranks of the noble army of martyrs.
Ono or two fatal cases occurred among the garrison. Some
English workmen, recently imported for building purposes,
are now tenants of houses which will outlast anything they
could have built had they been spared to exercise their skill.
Many a robust young fellow is seized one day, dies the next,
and buried on the third. Nothing is talked of but this hide-
ous disease—in fact, there seems to be a kind of fascination
about the affair, and people not knowing how soon they
may be hurried off, seem determined to have a good chat
beforehand. For my part, I got pretty well seasoned with
fever last year, but then I exposed myself a peat deal ; just
at present, however, I crawl carefully along the shady side
with an umbrella overhead—the old song, "Keep always on
the sunny side," doesn't apply here. Several English
sailors have been found dead in the streets from the effects
of drink and exposure to the sun. Poor Jack, at home
ho could drink twice as much without even a headache,
but in this climate it is " kingdom come" in no time
I saw a body the other evening snug under the lee of
some cotton bales—the poor wretch had crawled there
to escape the heat and have a nap in the shade, and, in
consequence, there he was, napping in the very land of
shadows. The fever is also raging among the vessels, and
what with church bells tolling on shore and flags at half -
snast in the harbour, the general tone of the place is any-
thingEmehaepuvdtteiahc
aibennrnsheat
iace
rshhdhee ets rtn
comingni
time
, hgbiaee,
pnrhf
eiodenr
pines;
it
os otherui;
pss
r pot
drvheai
itdyst
ey
there
huc themselveseemrr tema
wi
e nr
0.
rteh Ia
fivet
‘ usF o
with
Tutel
drs aps
enrwl
proper
t
the captain of one of them (the
Blue Bell) took fever. There is no regular medical man at
Eluthera, but Dr Kirkwood, of this city, happened to be
there on a visit, and out of the five vessels he could only get
13 grains of quinine; the consequence was the case proved
fatal.—. Liverpool

THE TWO GREAT OBJECTS OF THE LATE REBEL
RAID.—The two great objects of the late rebel raid
were—first, the diversion of General Grant's army from
Richmond to the defence of Washington, in which they
have failed; but in the second, which was plunder, they
have doubtless succeeded beyond their most sanguine ex-
pectations. From Sigel's stores, at Martinsburg, from
Wallace's, at Frederick, from the farmers, millers, shop-
keepers, and apothecaries of Maryland, they have carried
off a greater quantity, perhaps, of the very articles of plun-
der they most needed than could be gathered in the whole
country between Richmond and Georgia. In fact, Jeff.
Davis every summer, so far, has drawn upon Old Abe for
the needful supplies for the army of Lee, and has obtained
them—artillery and ammunition, provisions and clothing,
shoes, greenbacks and medicines, niggers, horses, and wag-
gons, &c.—to the extent of millions of dollars. How much
longer can we stand this sort of war, in which we have to
supply both armies ? Row long, Mr Fessenden ?-I\rew
York Herald.

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THE ROYAL SOVEREICrN.

The iron-cased turret ship Royal Sovereign, Cap-
tainharbour on Saturday from her short cruise outside
Sherrard Osborn, C. 8., arrived Portsmouth
the Isle of Wight, on which she stated from off
Osborne immediately after the visit of her Majesty
to the ship on Thursday evening. The return of
tho ship to Portsmouth harbour is sagely owing to
orders given some time since by the Admiralty to
place her in dock at the earliest opportunity, in
order to remove the band of zinc whica is now fixed ,
round the ship below the water-line and between
the armour-plating and the Muntz metal sheathing
on the ship's bottom, and substitute in lieu of it a
wooden band, on a plan which has been approved
by the Admiralty. It is also understood that a
peculiar kind of cement, simple in application and
not expensive, which has been brought under the
notice of the Admiralty by Captain Coles, will be
applied experimentally to that portion of the ship's
armour plating below the water-line. If successful,
the experiment may probably help materially in
the solution of the problem lately referred to by
Lord Clarence Paget in the House of Commons—
how to preserve and keep clean the bottoms of iron
ships on service in tropical waters. The Royal
Sovereign's necessarily short cruise,from which she
returned on Saturday, only extended to about 20
miles south of St. Catharine's, in a parallel line
with the Isle of Wight, quite far enough from the
land to test her rolling properties had the wished-
for breeze been met with; butalthough a nice sum-
mer Channel breeze, south-westerly,
was found, it
was accompanied with no great swell, and a greater
roll could not be got out of the ship then 5 deg.
each way. Enough, however, was seen to give the
officers every confidence in their ship under ordi-
nary circumstances at sea, and it is evidently un-
necessary to wish for any further confidence to be
placed in the sea behaviour of a craft which after
all is only a conversion, and is merely being used as
a floating means of testing Captain Cowper Coles's
principle of working monster ordnance on board
ship by means of revolving platforms protected by
cylindrical armour. The Royal Sovereign, in fact,
must be viewed from three distinct positions, to
which reference will be made after concluding our
notice of the short cruise from which she has just
returned. It was an important point to test the
ship under steam off the land, for it will be remem-
bered that on her first preliminary run outside
Portsmouth harbour the steam pipes of two of her
boilers gave way at their junction in the stop valve
boxes ; and, with this object in view, Capt. Osborn
caused the guns to be fired in every position the
ship assumed under the influence of her engines and
the motion given to her by the wind and sea, and
the communications between the steam pipe and
boilers remained in their normal condition, thus
proving that the expansion joints which had been
applied in Portsmouth dockyard were fully equal to
the service for which they were fitted, and would
prevent any recurrence of a similar accident to the
one referred to. The low angles of 5 deg- to which
the ship only reached in her rolling motion pre-
vented Capt. Oeboru and Capt. Coles from testing
the working of the turrets and guns in as severe a
manner as they wished, but no perceptible differ-
ence in the revolving of the turrets or the working
of the guns was noticed by the men employed. In
the firing, two rounds were first used on Friday in
caling the guns, and afterwards 93 rounds were
fired from them with solid cast iron shot and 351 b.
and 401 b. charges, according to the elevation of the
guns. There was not the slightest hitch throughout.
the tables on which the turrets and guns stand re-
volved as freely, and the guns worked as easily and
controllably as during the two days' practice on
Tuesday and Wednesday last in St. Helen's Roads,
and there was also the same absence of concussion
or smoke inside tue turretu or on the lower deck.

If the shots fired by the Royal Sovereign on Friday
aro compared with the shots fired by the American
monitors in their grand attack upon Charleston in
18(33, and if the English monitors two previous
days' tests in firing at anchor be also taken into
consideration, it must bo admitted, we think,
by every unprejudiced mind that the Eug-
lish turret principle has been very fairly
tested, and has proved a decided success ;
and this may be asserted without entering any
further into the somewhat foolish controversy of
" central v. broadside ships'ineh gun has been fired
batteries" than to ob-
servo that the 12-ton 10i-
in the Channel from a central battery on board a
ship, whereas it has not from a ship's broadside
battery. In the grand attack upon Charleston the
nine Federal ironclads, mounting 23 guns between
h
numbert e
only
of shots fired 139 e
fire d I ibeyt ei
anyl in all,
dthe
one a vesseln
threet
26. The Royal Sovereign fired on Friday 20 shots
per gun from her five guns, and at different angles
and degrees of elevation, the highest elevation being
18 degrees, an extent of elevation which can be at.
tamed by the guns of no other ship in her Majesty's
navy, whether mounted on the broadside or pivoted
on the upper deck.
Reverting
statedto
th
adlistsinocvterepiogsnitioninsusft rom
which be
viewed by the general public, it is necessary that
thee
Royal
this part of the question should be thoroughly un-
derstood in order that no erroneous impressions
may take their hold on the public mind. These
hh we
three positions are-1.. the hull of the ship ;2, the
turrets and their motive Power ; 3, the guns. For
the first and third the Admiralty
and War Depart-
ment are alone responsible. For the second Capt.
Coles alone is responsible, We have said enough
to prove that Capt. Co les, 8 part in the work has been
well and satisfactorily performed. With regard
to the ship's hull
and her guns, a little more
remains to be said. In the first place, what-
ever her behaviour may eventually prove to be
at sea, the Royal Sovereign is,
after all, but an
adapted means of floating turrets and guns so as to
test the practicability of the system afloat. The hull
undoubtedly draws too much Water—that is, swims
too deeply—to be of service in shallow waters; it
has too much breadth, and exposes an unnecessary
area of upper-deck planking to
aplunging fire ;but
these and other objections which might be urged
against the hull of the Royal R
—avereign are matters
which concern only the Admiralty and the public,
but not Captain Coles.
The ship was selected by
the Admiralty for a most important experiment, and
it would be rashness,
injuatdicious the very least, to say that
the selection was 1 Whatever faults of
hull the Royal Sovereign may now
possess.
The ship's guns are a more serious matter to deal
with. The four turret guns of the "I 4
—oyal Sovereign
each weigh 12 tons, and have each a bore the diame-
ter of which is 103 inches. They are coil-built, but
are simply smooth-bore guns, throwing a spherical
castiron shot of 1501 b with 35th of Powder as " full"
charge, or with 401 b of powder as a "distant"
charge. Now, it is evident that from this 12-ton
gun, with its 101 in. diameter of bore, bat a miser-
able return is got with a 1501 b. cast iron shot. The
fact is, the guns of the Royal Sovereign should bo
made by some simple mode of rifling to throw
3001 b. cast iron shell for any engagement with
wooden ships, and steel shot and shell of the same
weight for the benefit of ironclads. It is asserted,
however, that the Royal Sovereign's guns will only
stand as smooth bores, and that any attempt to rifle
them can only end in their destruction. This as-
sertion reduces the question of the Royal Sove-
reign's efficiency to a very narrow compass, If she
has to wait for her rifled 300-pounders (or 600,
pounders, as the case may be) to be manufactured,
then the ship should be at once supplied with steel
shot to some extent, however small, in order toren-
der her present armament of smooth bore guns of
some use against the iron coat of an adversary. At
the present moment there is not one steel shot or
shell en board the ironclad fleet of her Majesty's
navy, which is therefore thus, however efficient may
be its powers of defence, harmless in powers of
offence against any similarly protected adversary.

Archaeological Institute of,Great Britain and

Ireland.

WARwicK, Saturday.
The leading business of to-day was an excursion
to Charlecote and Stratford-on-Avon. Previous to

the excursion, however, there was a meeting at the
Court-house hero for the reading of papers. Four

papers were set down in the progrararse, but, in

consequence of their length, only two were read,
when the hour of departure for Stratford arrived.

These were—

1. "On the Lif© and Times of John de Strat-
ford," by the Dean of Chichester.
2. " Boscobel, and the Escape of Charles II," by
the Rev. G. Dodd.

Early in the afternoon the majority of the mem-
bers, accompanied by a number of ladies, proceeded
by road to Stratford-on-Avon, calling on the way at
Charlecote-park, the seat of the Lucy family, who,
as everybody knows, are descendants of the Sir
Thomas Lucy whose name is so intimately assn•
ciated with the life of Shakspere. The house is an

Elizabethan mansion. The hall contains a large
number of portraits of the Lucy family, and in the
library is a portait of the Lord Keeper Coventry.by
Vandyck, given by himself to a Lucy. The church
was rebuilt a few years since by Mrs Lucy, and the
monuments of the three Sir Thomas Lucys are pre-
served in the new building.
From Charlecoto the party travelled four miles
further along a well wooded and fertile country to
Stratford, where they arrived aboat four o'clock.
It was rathtr a notable coincidence that the excur-
sion of the Arcbreologists to the birth and burial
place of Shakespeare should have happened on the
last day of the sale of the remnants of the tercen-
tenary celebration. The sale had been going on
nearly all the week, and the auctioneer had just
knocked down his last lot as the archxological pil-
grims from Warwick arrived at the Shakespearean
shrine. Of course the visitors inspected all the
"lions" of the place, beginning with the church,
so pleasantly placed on the banks of the "soft-
flowing Avon," as this river has been not inaptly
described, though its waters were to-day rippled
into tiny waves by a fresh westerly breeze, which
rustled cheerily among the fine elm trees that bor•
der the churchyard, and caused the willows on the
banks of th 3 classic stream to show the grey lining
of their copious foliage. The church and its
monuments have been too often described to
leave anything new to be said of them.
The Shakespeare bust (which has recently been
painted in colours) stands against the north wall
of the chancel, an enduring monument to the
greatest of England's poets. Thousands upon
thousands, not only of Englishmen and English-
women, but inhabitants of far distant lands, have
gazed upon it and silently acknowledged the great
gifts of him whose memory it perpetuates and
whose lineaments it is believed faithfully to pour.
tray. The church had only just been cleared of an
excursion party of workpeople from the busy mid-
land metropolis, when they were succeeded by the
more learned visitors. The following is an exact
copy of the inscription beneath the bust

" Judicio Pylivm, gall° Socratem, arts Maronem
Terra tegit, popvlvs mcsret, Olympvs habet.
Stay passenger, why goest thov so fast ?
Read, if thou canst, whom enviovs death hath plast
Within this monvment, Shakspere with whome
Qvick natvre dide : whose name doth deck ys tombs
Far more than cost : sith all yt he hath writt
Leaves bring art bat page to serve his witt.
Obiit ano Doi, 1616.
Etatis 53, die 23 Ap."

Mr. BERESFORD HOPE (the party having assem- 1
bled in the chancel) reminded his audience that this
was no common parith church, but a collegiate
church. Its length was 197 feet, being longer than
Coventry church. Moreover, it was a cross church,
and must have been arranged, looking to the chart.
cel, for a large body of clergy. He called upon the
vicar to give some account of its foundation.
The Rev. G. GRANVILLE thereupon said that in
the time of John do Stratford, rerp,cting whom e
interesting a paper had been read that morning by
Dr. Hook, this church had a dean and four priests,
and as at that time the population was not equal to
the number of priests the latter were employed in
visiting the neighbouring parishes. The deanery
was done away with in the time of Henry VIII.,
and the revenues were placed in tho hands of the
corporation, who from that time paid certain stipends

to the vicar and chaplain. The living was now only
parochial. About 30 years ago the church was
restored. The galleries, though objectionable in an
arcl,m3logical point of view, were less so than any
other church galleries that he had ever seen. The
door on the north side of the chancel, near Shak-
pere's monument, was the entrance to the charnel-
house, which had been pulled down some time ago.
That part of the church in which they were assem-
bled was built in the 16th century, but the tower
and transept were of much earlier date.
Mr SEVERN WALKER, secretary to the Nor►
cester Diocesan Architectural Society, said the
diocese of Worcester (in which Stratford is
situate) did not possess many fine parochial churches,
but this was one. As the vicar had told them,

this was a collegiate as well as a parochial church.
There were originally two altars—the parochial
altar, at the east end of the south side, and the col-
legiate altar, in the usual place, the east end of the
chancel. He pointed out the fact that the columns
supporting the nave arcade are not octagonal, but
hexagonal. He also pointed out three panels in
front of the west window as being rather unusual.
The spire was modern, but copied from the old one.
Mr. BERESPORD HOPE having asked for some
information respecting the colouring of the monu-
ment to Shakspere,
The Rev. G. GRANVILLE said the reason he had,
in conjunction with his fellow-townsmen, for restore
ing the monument to its original colour was that
they conceived the monument ought to bear as
much as possible the stamp and character of the
time when it was placed there. He did not mean
to say that as it was the monument was better than
in stone colour, but the object was to have it re-
stored to its original appearance. He himself saw
the work done. The monument was taken down,
put into a tub of water and chemicals, and the
whitewash washed off it. In this process some of
the paint was slightly rubbed off, and where this
was done it was carefully repainted. They simply
cleaned it of its whitewash. He was aware that
this work had been much canvassed, but he believed
there were now only one or two persons of opinion
that they had done wrong in removing the wash
that covered the old paint.
The next move was to the vestry, where the parish
registers were shown. From the uniform appear•
ance of the writing the register appears to be a copy.
The entries of the baptism and death of Shaksnere
are entered as follows :
" Births.
" 15G4—April 26.—Guliehnus filius Johannis Shakapear."

"Deaths.
" 1616—April 25.—Wi11. Shakspesre, gent."
The name of the bard, it will be seen, is spelt
differently in the t wo entries.
The Chapel of the Holy Cross in the middle of the
town was next visited, and the ruins of New-place
hard by, which are walled in and preserved. The
foundations, which show the ground plan of the
building where Shakspere breathed his last, aro
bared. Shakspere's birthplace in Ilenley-street
was the last place visited, and some time was spent
in its examination. The walls of the room in which
the poet was born are still covered with autographs,
among which is that of Sir Walter Scott. Lord
Byron's was once there, but cannot now be traced.
The attendant informed the visitors that this prat•
tice of scribbling on the wall was now forbidden,
but, in fact, the veto is unnecessary, for there is no
vacant space for another name. The Museum is
fast inzreasing. In it are to be seen Shakspere's
signet ring, his school desk, and the Inden-
ture of his purchase of New-place. H,:re also is the