“I also wished to make my mind easy as to the lot of the poor workmen whom I had seen descending in the bell. The foreman assured me that they enjoyed every comfort in it. Have they not seats to rest themselves on, a wooden ledge on which to place their feet, an assortment of tools and necessary utensils suspended on a cord or hooked on to the walls of their hut, which is nearly as well furnished as that of Robinson Crusoe’s? From all this explanation I was bound to conclude, unless the foreman was mixing up a little irony in what he told me, that the divers were quite ‘at home’ in the bell. The fact is, that really they pass in it a great part of their existence. Almost all of them suffer a great deal at first from a violent pain, which they themselves define as ‘a toothache gone into the ears,’ and they have a humming in the head, ‘as if some one had let fly a swarm of bees there;’ but these troublesome symptoms disappear after the second or third descent. Their confidence in this dry chamber, almost isolated in the midst of the turmoil of the ocean, approaches sometimes to temerity. In 1820, Dr. Collodon, of Geneva, who had gone down in a diving‐bell on the coast of Ireland, bethought himself that at the depth at which he then was, a stone, or any other trifling cause obstructing the action of the air‐valve, would be sufficient to enable the water to invade the bell. He confided this not very reassuring reflection to one of the divers who was with him. The latter, smiling, answered him by merely pointing out with his finger one of the glazed loopholes which were over their heads. The doctor examined it attentively, and ascertained, in fact, that the glass was cracked sufficiently to allow bubbles of air to escape pretty freely. This was a very different and more serious cause of uneasiness than the rather improbable contingency of an obstruction of the air‐valve. The diver was well aware of the cracked glass, and cared nothing about it.” Some time since, when the present writer descended in the diving‐bell exhibited in London, a seal which then disported in the tank would rub its nose outside against the little glass windows, and look in, as though wondering what on earth a visitor was doing there in _his_ element! The same poor animal afterwards came to grief in a very sad way. When the water was drained off out of the tank the seal got into the pipes below, and thence to the sewers. It was found, still alive, some time after, in the sewers of the Euston Road, a considerable distance away, but succumbed later to the mephitic influences of the filthy stream.