The Sun.
London, England, 1859-11-15 00:00:00

THE AERIAL SHIP.

The New York Times publishes a letter from
Professor T. S. C. Lowe, the aeronaut, who proposes
to undertake the aerial voyage to Europe in the
City of New York balloon. Professor Lowe reposes
great confidence in the efficacy of the apparatus he
has devised fer the accomplishment of his under-
taking, and avows his determination, in case of
disaster, to repair damages and try again.
" Some people," he writes, " may think that I am
insane, rash, or a seeker after fame, but this is not
the case. I have for two years coolly considered
the subject, and have pi ovided for every contingency.
I intended to make my first trip news the ocean
entirely a private undertaking; but finding that
the amount of expense to be incurred would over-
tax my personal means, I have been compelled to
announce a public exhibition while preparing for
the voyage. lam confident of success for various
reasons :—First : I have a large balloon, which
has a capacity of 723,000 cubic feet ; therefore,
should the envelope be no more perfect than those
which are usually constructed, it will retain its
power for a longer period. Second : I have devised
mechanical appliances for raising and lowering the
balloon while in the air without expenditure
of the lifting power. Third : I have invented
an apparatus for indicaing the different cur-
rents below, so that advantage can be taken of
these currents should I find myself going too
far north or south. Should any accident occur, or
should the balloon, machinery fail to accomplish
its work, the metallic libeboat, which will be sus-
pended below the car, is rigged with sails, and will
prove sufficiently strong to endure any sea. It is
true, I would have preferred another season of the
year for undertaking this great experiment of
transatlantic aerial navigation, but should this
first attempt at an exploring expedition, as I term
it, not prove entirely successful, I shall not be
deterred from instituting experiments with a
view to ascertaining the cause of failure and the
remedy thereof. I shall be supplied with all the
philosophical apparatus necessary to make meteo-
rological observations. If aerial navigation is ever
perfected, it will be accomplished by perseverance,
even in the midst of opposition and detraction. I
am willing to take the risk, and if I can do any-
thing to add, in however small a measure, to the
store of our scientific knowledge, I shall feel amply
repaid. I have no doubt, but cherish a fervent
hope, that the time is not far distant when we can
travel in the air without the aid of balloons for a
buoyant force. I have already devised a plan for
an aerial carriage, which can be navigated in any
direction, and at a high rate of speed, as soon as a
propelling power can be discovered, the weight of
which shall be one-third of that we now employ.
It only requires some shrewd and intelligent in-
ventor to do this, and aerial navigation will become
a practical science."

Mr. and Mrs. J. G. Sheppard have arrived at
Farrance's Hotel, Belgravia, from their seat, Asho High
House, Suffolk.

ROBERT COOMBES, LATE CHAMPION OF THE
THATIES.-At the last meeting of the Thames Subscrip-
tion Club, established for the encouragement of rowing in
the Thames and the relief of deserving watermen—the Hon.
George Denman, M.P., president—it was resolved to give
the sum of .E 5 from the funds towards the public subscrip-
tion now being raised to relieve the necessitous condition of
the family of this once celebrated and meritorious waterman.
The case is ono well deserving public sympathy. The
father, who is in a lunatic asylum, has left eight children,
four of whom, girls, are wholly dependent upon the mother,
one being unhappily a sufferer like her father. Mr. C. J.
Selwyn, M.P., and Messrs. G. Antrobus, C. Curling, G.
Raphael, J. Nottidge, J. C Stahlschmidt, J. Draper, and
C. Clifford, all well known in the acquatic world, have
headed the subscription list, and the last-named gentleman
(the inventor of the excellent plan for lowering ships' boats)
has been appointed treasurer of the funds subscribed to-
wards the above laudable object.

---
THE ABDUCTION OF JUDGE HUrfB
CHILD.

The trial Of Ilonie Cherean for stealing Judge
Hue's child in the Tuileries Gardens, came on on
[ Saturday at the Assize Court of the Seine, Paris.
The court was as full as it could hold. An mi-
-1 usually large proportion of fashionably-dressed
ladies were among the audience. Many hundreds
of applications for tickets of admission had been
. necessarily refused. The prisoner, when brought
into the dock by three gendarmes, appeared borne
down with grief. The judge, M. Auspach, allowed
her to sit while being interrogated. Her answers
were wholly inaudible in the body of the court.
During the whole day she held her head down, and
never once raised her eyes. She sobbed frequently
and violently, and except when spoken to by the
judge kept a handkerchief to her face almost con-
tinually. She is rather a pretty girl, with a full and
ratherfitt face, giving her an appearance considerably
older than she really is. She is only between 16 and
17. Her appearance excited a movement of intense
curiosity in the court ; her dress and gestures were
narrowly scrutinised by the ladies, but by means
of her thick black veil and white pocket handker-
chief she concealed her face from the scrutinising
glances of all but those very near her. The trial
completely dispelled all the dark and mysterious
rumours which were circulated when the facts con-
nected with the Tuileries "rape" were imperfectly
known or inaccurately reported. The nurse from
whom the infant was stolen was perfectly innocent,
and the idea of a vengeance or conspiracy to extort
money on the part of a people who had formerly
known Judge Hua is a mere fable. The facts are
simply these :—Leonie Chereau, the daughter of a
huissier of Orleans, sometime since deceased, lived
in that city with her mother, in rather easy
circumstances as small bourgoisie. In Sep-
tember, 1848, a Mdlle. Prieur, a member of a
family which had long been intimate with
the Chereaus, was married at Orleans. On
that occasion, George Prieur, a young and
handsome man of 20, who stood behind the counter
of a large shop in the Rue Ratnbuteau, in Paris,
came to Orleans to his sister's wedding. He was
received at Madame Chereau's, and in the course of
four days he succeeded in seducing Leonie, whom
he had known from a child, but whom he had not
seen since she wag 13 years old. He promised her
marriage, and subsequently revoked his promise
with a singular heartlessness and brutality which
provoked most severe remarks, not only from the
prisoner's counsel, but from the public prosecutor
and from the bench. Leonie, in order to induce
him to perform his promise and marry her, pre-
tended to be enceinte. In due course of time she
told him that she had brought forth a boy. He
answered coarsely—" If you have a child, produce
it ;" and from that moment she conceived the idea,
which she carried out with wonderful ingenuity
and perseverance, of possessing herself of an in-
fant. She addressed herself to midwives and
foundling hospitals, both in Orleans and Paris,
as a person desirous of adopting a child, but in
her ignorance of law she was unable to comply
with the conditions required to sanction an adop-
tion. Once a poor woman offered her a child, but
she refused it because it was too old for herpurpose.
At last, after having come up to Paris without hor
mother's knowledge, and wandering about the
streets in despair all night, she went into the
Tuileries gardens, fastening by the merest accident
upon Madame Hua's nurse, who is a simple-minded,
talkative country girl, and by pretending to be the
sister of the child's mother ingratiated herself into
her confidence. Incredible as it may appear, she
sent the nurse to a shop in the Rue Rivoli, to ask
for some lace, which she said she had fought to
make the baby a frock, and persuaded the nurse to
abandon her charge. The moment the nurse's back
was turned she made off with the baby, threw away
its clothes in the street, or gave them to children whom
she saw at play, and dressed it up in things which
she had previously bought. Then she showed the
child to all her friends in Paris, to whom she had
previously stated that she had lost her own. Her joy
at finding it was so well acted that it deceived all her
friends, and even her own mother. The fact of the
deliberate stealing of the child was so distinctly
proved that insanity was the only possible plea for
the defence. This defence was brought forward,
and not without some foundation, in a most eloquent
speech by M. Lachaud. It was proved by two
medical ;men of Orleans that Leonie Chereau had
come to womanhood precociously, and that for the
last three years she had been subject to violent
hysterical attacks. The eminent Dr. Tardieu, of
Paris, that she was afflicted with hysteria in a very
high degree ; that one of the characteristics of
hysteria was dissimulation, and that it might,
though it certainly did not necessarily, produce
insanity. He nevertheless gave his own opinion
very
.strongly that in this case the hysteria of
Leome Chereau had not affected her mind so as to
make her irresponsible :for her actions. Upon
this evidence, however, coupled with all
the circumstances of the case, and the absence
of any sordid motive. M. Lachaud submit-
ted that this child, who but a few months
since (when she was under sixteen) might have
been found by the jury irresponsible on the ground
of her youth, was a fit subject for the fostering care
of an asylum, and not for the infamy of a prison,
He asserted that at the time she committed the act
charged against her she was " mad for love and of
disease."

The Judge having summed up,
The A dvocat e-G en eral solemnly assured them that
society would be shaken to its foundations if they
established the precedent that a woman might com-
mit crimes with impunity if she happened to be
subject to vapours.
But the prisoner's youth, her tears, the wrongs
suffered from her faithless lover, and the eloquence
of M. Lachaud prevailed.

The jury gave her the benefit of the medical
opinions that "hysteria" might produce madness,
and rejected their positive testimony that it " had
not" in the present case. They pronounced a verdict
of not guilty, and the robber of Madame Hua's
child, whose crime had nearly driven the young
mother out of her senses, walked free out of the dock.
It is a great defect in the French code that a jury
cannot find a verdict of not guilty " on the ground
of insanity." In this, as in all like instances, there
is nothing upon the record to show that the pri-
soner was not acquitted upon the facts. The con-
sequence is, that although an acquitted prisoner
may be really insane, there is no special machinery
for 'treating him as a lunatic. The circumstance at-
tending the trial may direct attention to his case,
but if it becomes necessary to lock him up the ver-
dict is no evidence. In point of law, he can only bo
dealt with jast like any other person whose mind
may be thought to be affected. Leonie Chereau is
certainly not mad, and no medical man of respect-
ability would think himself justified in signing a
warrant for her confinement. But M. Lachaud, in
the course of his speech, made a sort of promise
that her mother would send her to a convent until
she attained her majority. Such a promise is cer-
tainly not binding, but it will very likely be kept.

LIFEBOATS ON Till: COASTS OF
VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA.

--+--

he following communication, addressed to the
Royal National Lifeboat Institution, relative to the
establishment of several lifeboat stations on the
coast of Victoria, will be read with interest. Last
year that society transmitted to Australia working
drawings on a large scale of its plan of lifeboat and
transporting carriages, and every information
re-
specting the efficient management of lifeboats :

" VICTORIA.

" Department of forts and Harbours,
Williamstown, Sept. 16, 1859.
" Sir,—lt will be interesting to you, no doubt, to
know that there exists in this remote place a desire
to establish on our coast similar institutions to those
extant on the shores of Great Britain for the preser-
vation of life from shipwreck. To this and the head
of this department, Capt. Ferguson, has laboured
under many difficulties, but with success I am glad
to say. We have established on our seaboard live
stations, aid supplied each with a lifeboat, built upon
the principle adopted by the Royal National Life-
boat Institution, which in every respect have been
found worthy the noble service they are intended
for.

" In addition to which the Government have,
upon Capt. Fcrguson's recommendation, obtained
from England three complete sets of the rocket and
mortar apparatus, and have issued an order by this
mail for three more, which will make the stations
already established very complete in every respect.
"I beg to forward you an extract from the Go•
vernment Gazette, from which you will perceive
that one ofthe boats in question has been the means
of saving 19 lives, which otherwise must have per-
ished. I also forward you a copy of our rules, which
as far as our local position admits, have been com-
piled from those issued by the Royal National
Lifeboat Institution.
" Capt;Ferguson would feel obliged if you would
be so good as to furnish this department from time
to time with such information as may be valuable
for our lifeboat service.--I am, &e.,
(Signed) " W. COLLINS REES.
"To the Secretary of the Royal National
Lifeboat Institution."

The following are the particulars of the wreck
referred to in the foregoing, as furnished by Har-
bour-master Fawthrop, of Portland. Oa the
morning of the Gth August, 1859, the passenger
ship Admella was wrecked near west Cape
Banks. On the 11th intelligence of the disaster
reached Portland, 168 miles from the wreck. At 10
p.m. the steamer Lady Bird left Portland, with the
Portland lifeboat in tow, and reached the scene of
the diaster at 8 a.m. on Friday, the 12th inst., the
wind strong from the N.N.W. The unfortunate
people were seen perched on the poop, about 30 feet
in length, with the stump of the mainmast standing,
and a tattered flag suspended on the end. Fearful
breakers surrounded the wreck on every side, and
continued to the shore, a distance of fully a mile and
a half. The spectacle created feelings of pity in
every one, and the lifeboat was immediately
manned by the volunteers selected at Portland, and a
gentleman proceeded with two rockets to throw a
small line from the lifeboat to the wrock. At 9.20
a.m. the lifeboat left the steamer, and accompanied
by a whale-boat pulled in for the wreck, keeping
to the northward or the weather side, and anchored
about one and a half cables distant, veering out
line till within 10 or 15 fathoms, and fired the
rockets, but unfortunately both failed. We then
made several efforts to throw a small line, but that
also failed, and immediately after several heavy
breakers, as if to foil us, broke completly over th•
lifeboat with such force as to carry everything be-
fore them. After they had passed, the lifeboat rose
.again, and soon cleared herself, but we had lost
eight of our oars and rudder broken—it was there-
fore impossible to do more than return, which pro-
videntially and fortunately was the ultimate means
of rescue, as we saved the lifeboat for another at-
tempt; one•man having been washed out of the life
boat, but fortunately recovered by keeping hold of
the boat.

At 11.20 we reached the Lady Bird, and imme-
diately refitted the lifeboat, and again, at 5 p.m.,
stood in for the wreck to examine the surf, the wind
having considerably abated and changed to the
westward ; but the surf was still too heavy to make
the risk, and as I saw there was every prospect of
better weather I determined to wait until daylight,
and therefore the steamer stood off and on during
the night, making signals by blue lights and
rockets every two hours, in order to cheer the suf-
ferers. On Friday, the 12th inst., the Lady Bird
stood in for the wreck, and the surf having fallen
considerably we immediately manned the lifeboat,
9 a.m., and proceeded to the wreck, anchoring, as
before, about a cable's length from it, and suc-
ceeded in getting a line over the wreck and
quickly hauled alongside, and in a few minutes
we had the gratification of delivering nineteen
" spectres"—they were in appearance, from their
misery—and at 10 a.m. delivered them safe onboard
the steamer, and immediately left for Portland,
which we reached in safety at 6 p.m., having towed
the lifeboat a distance of 168 miles at a speed of 10
miles an hour. I cannot speak too highly of the
qualities of the lifeboat; end trust that, should need
be, it may still do more, so as amply to reward the
benevolent design of those who huve so liberally
provided the same for the sole purpose of allievat-
ing the distress of the helpless shipwrecked mari-
ners and others who from time to time are placed
in such trying circumstances.

CASE OF POISONING FROM EATING

SA USAGES.

An inquest was held yesterday at the Fox
Tavern, Fox-place, Kingsland, before Mr. Hum-
phries, coroner, on view of the body of Win. Eaton,
aged 39, whose death took place from eating sau-
sages under circumstances published in this paper
a few days ago.
The family consisted of the deceased, his wife,
aged 34, and five children, viz.:—Richard, aged
11 years ; Charles, aged 7 years ; Henry, aged 5
years; Thomas, aged 3 years; and Matilda, aged 1
year. All except Richard partook of the sausages,
and subsequently became ill, but recovered under
medical treatment, with the exception of the de-
ceased.

The court was crowded during the inquiry. Mr.
Beard, solicitor, attended to watch the proceedings
on behalf of Mr Peachy, at whose shop the sausages
were sold. Mr. Valentine, inspector of nuisances,
attended for the Metropolitan Board of Works, and
Mr. Ellis, solicitor, represented the Board of Works
for Hackney District, within the limits of which
the occurrence took place.
The jury having viewed the body, the following
evidence was taken :

Jemima Eaton—The deceased was my husband.
He was in good health as usual on Friday morning
the 4th instant. On the evesing of that day, we
had sausages, with bread and butter for supper.
That was at half-past six o'clock. Richard was out
at the time, and did not get any. He has not been
ill. We went to bed about nine o'clock, and were
taken ill about one, with vomiting and purging,
followed by delirium. Mr. Sutton, surgeon, was
sent for on Saturday morning. He came twice that
day, and once on Sunday. On Monday we sent for
Mr. James, who attended deceased till his death on
Thursday evening last.
By Mr. Beard—We had no other animal food
but the sausages on that day:
Charles Eaton, aged seven years, after having
been questioned as to his understanding the nature
and obligations of an oath, was next sworn. He
said he bought the sausages at a poll: butcher's shop
opposite the Black Bull, in High-street, Kingsland.
Mr. Beard admitted the sausages were bought at
the shop of his client.
Examination continued—Witness asked for a
pound, and-a-half of sausages, and paid 61d for them.
They were beef sausages:, My father sent me for
them.

Mrs. Eaton recalled—There waslllb. of sausages
at 44d. per lb.
Mr. Ellis—ls that the usual and ordinary price ?
Witness—Yes.

Mr. J. James, surgeon, 25, Nelson-terrace, Kings-
land—l was called in to see the deceased on Mon-
day. I had not attended him before. He appeared
to be suffering from English cholera, with vomiting
and purging. I prescribed the usual treatment,
and on Monday night these symptoms abated.
There was no vomiting or purging on Tuesday, but
a little vomiting on Wednesday morning. The de-
ceased was much exhausted when I saw him. He
gradually sunk, and died on Thursday evening.
His wife and children were suffering at the same
time with similar symptoms. They have recovered.
I have since made a post mortem examination of the
deceased. The chest was perfectly healthy. The
stomach and intestines were inflamed and injected.
I have not opened them. 1 have them still in my
possession, with the kidneys, spleen, and liver.
From the examination I have made I am of opinion
that death arose from some irritant in the bowels,
but I cannot state its nature without, analysation.
There were no external marks of violence. Mr.
Shepherd, surgeon, was present.
The Coroner—lt must be obvious that it would
be most convenient for the jury to adjourn at this
intestines
might of the proceedings, in order that the
might be subjected to analysation.
Mr. Beard—Some of the sausages were after-
wards taken from my client's shop. Will they be
analysed also? They ought to be.
Mr. James—l have one I got front Mrs. Eaton.
The inquiry was then adjourns for a week.