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RATHER SUICIDAL.

“The health of the Earl of Winchilsea and the Conservative members of the House of Peers,” was followed, amid intense cheering, with the glee of

  “Swearing death to traitor slaves!”—­Times.

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NOVEL EXPERIMENT.—­GREAT SCREW.

Several scientific engineers have formed themselves into a company, and are about applying for an Act of Parliament to enable them to take a lease of Joe Hume, for the purpose of opposing the Archimedean Screw.  Public feeling is already in favour of the “Humedean,” and the “Joe” shares are rising rapidly.

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PUNCH’S INFORMATION FOR THE PEOPLE.—­NO. 3.

One of the expedients adopted by the cheap-knowledge-mongers to convey so-called “information” to the vulgar, has been, we flatter ourselves, successfully imitated in our articles on the Stars and the Thermometer.  They are by writers engaged expressly for the respective subjects, because they will work cheaply and know but little of what they are writing about, and therefore make themselves the better understood by the equally ignorant.  We do hope that they have not proved themselves behindhand in popular humbug and positive error, and that the blunders in “the Thermometer"[3] are equally as amusing as those of the then big-wig who wrote the treatise on “Animal Mechanics,” published by our rival Society for Diffusing Useful Knowledge.

[3] One of these blunders the author must not be commended for; it is attributable to a facetious mistake of the printer.  In giving the etymology of the Thermometer, it should have been “measure of heat,” and not “measure of feet.”  We scorn to deprive our devil of a joke so worthy of him.

Another of their methods for obtaining cheap knowledge it is now our intention to adopt.  Having got the poorest and least learned authors we could find (of course for cheapness) for our former pieces of information, we have this time engaged a gentleman to mystify a few common-place subjects, in the style of certain articles in the “Penny Cyclopaedia.”  As his erudition is too profound for ordinary comprehensions—­as he scorns gain—­as the books he has hitherto published (no, privated) have been printed at his own expense, for the greater convenience of reading them himself, for nobody else does so—­as, in short, he is in reality a cheap-knowledge man, seeing that he scorns pay, and we scorn to pay him—­we have concluded an engagement with him for fourteen years.

The subject on which we have directed him to employ his vast scientific acquirements, is one which must come home to the firesides of the married and the bosoms of the single, namely, the art of raising a flame; in humble imitation of some of Young’s Knights’ Thoughts, which are directed to the object of lightening the darkness of servants, labourers, artisans, and chimney-sweeps, and in providing guides to the trades or services of which they are already masters or mistresses.  We beg to present our readers with