blow, which severs the glass that had been gathered on the “pontil” from the bottom of the bottle. The process, in the form described above, has been obsolete for many years, improvements, consisting of appliances for facilitating the various operations, having been gradually introduced. The most important of these is the substitution of metal moulds for the fire-clay moulds of earlier times. These metallic moulds are made to open and close at will by the action of a pedal, and are designed to give the entire bottle its final shape, except for the indentation of the bottom, although this is sometimes produced by a convex piece placed on the bottom of the mould. In the formation of the neck thickening, also, important mechanical aids have become almost universal. These last consist of tongs provided with rollers and arranged to rotate about an axis that terminates in a tapered spike which enters the neck of the bottle; by pressing the tongs together so as to bring the rollers against the outside of the neck and rotating the whole, the rollers are made to form the neck thickening in an accurate and rapid manner. Important and valuable as these improvements of the ancient process of bottle-blowing undoubtedly are, they do not touch the main disadvantages of the process--disadvantages that seriously affect the economy of the process and the well-being of the workers employed upon it. It is consequently not surprising that a great number of inventors have laboured at the problem of the purely mechanical production of bottles. A large number of patents have accordingly been taken out in connection with bottle-making machinery. The first of these to attain any favour was that devised by Ashley, but although great claims were made for it, its use has not extended. At the present time, however, there are a number of bottle-works actually at work producing bottles by mechanical means; one of the most successful of these machines is that devised by Boucher, of Cognac. The products of this machine, exhibited in Paris at the exhibition of 1900, were equal, and possibly superior, to the best hand-made bottles. The Boucher machine, although by no means entirely automatic, requires no highly-skilled labour beyond that of a workman whose duty it is to operate the various levers of the machine at the right instant and in the proper order. The details of the machine, as set forth in the patents and other published descriptions, are somewhat complicated, and vary somewhat in the different models; the general principle and mode of operation is, however, the same in all varieties of the machine, and we shall therefore give a brief account of it here.