Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/302

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Walks in the Black Country

one in a hundred men well-read in other sciences can conceive what subtle and delicate principles, laws, and combinations are brought to bear in perfecting the lenses and prisms and in adjusting the focus of each so as to produce the aggregate and required result of the whole. Here you see these beautiful structures at every stage of their building Many of them are complete, ready for being mounted upon their sea-beaten pedestals on "a wild and rock-bound coast." An oriental or ancient fancy might take them to be the crystal crowns of huge giants stalking over the earth with their heads in the clouds. In seeing so many fully or nearly completed, it was pleasant to think that they were not to supersede but to supplement those now shedding out their lustre upon the sea; that these grand lanterns were not only to be hung up on the rocky capes and cliffs of foreign coasts never before lighted, but to be added to the number now surrounding these home islands, to be a tiara of stars shining like the light of great hopes to the tempest-tost sailors in the blackest night. Some of these lanterns are thirty feet high and twelve in diameter, and will throw the glow and glare of their light full thirty miles out upon the sea. The cost of one of the first order is about £2,000; that shown in the Great Exhibition of 1862 was marked £3,000.

The Chances are as celebrated for the produc-