discovered that ice is compacted by the action of ice-crystals uniting in exactly this manner. A great scheme for laying out the whole of the Great North Road between London and Edinburgh on a scientific basis was in progress when the successful trial of the competing locomotives at Rainhill, near Liverpool, cast a warning shadow over the arrangements, and finally led to the project being entirely abandoned. Had the work been done, it is quite possible that the railways to the north would have taken another direction; that, in fact, instead of land having to be surveyed and purchased for them, the new, straight, and level road would have been given up to and largely used by the railways. Telford was the engineer chosen by the Government to execute this work, of which the portion between Morpeth and Edinburgh was actually constructed. The survey of the road between London, York, and Morpeth was begun as early as 1825, and had been not only completed, but the works on the eve of being started, when the Rainhill trials in 1829 stopped them short, and caused the utter waste of the public money spent in the surveying. III IT were vain, nowadays, to seek any of the old starting-points from London. The late Mr. Frederick Locker-Lampson asked in 1896, “Are ‘The Bull and Mouth,’ ‘The Spread Eagle,’ The Swan with Two Necks,’ and ‘The Green Man and Still,’ yet in existence?” With some little research he would have discovered that—with the sole exception of the last-named—they are not. The “Bull and Mouth” in later years became the “Queen’s Hotel,” and was demolished only when the site was required for an extension of the General Post Office in 1887. At the same time as the “Queen’s” disappeared, the street at the side of it, called from the old inn “Bull and Mouth Street,” was stopped up. In this street was the entrance to the famous old coaching-stables which were in the last years of their existence used as a railway receiving-office for goods. On their being pulled down, the grotesque plaster sign, representing a giant face with yawning mouth in which stood a bull, was removed to the Guildhall Museum, where it may still be seen, together with the yet larger and more elaborate sign which decorated the frontage of the “Queen’s.” This also included a mouth and a bull, set amidst a frame of plaster fruits and flowers, with the inscription:— “Milo the Cretonian, An ox slew with his fist, And ate it up at one meal, Ye gods! what a glorious twist.”