* * * * *
_Burton Ale._--Many of our readers may recollect the dispute, about
three years since, between the Burton Ale brewers and the Useful
Knowledge Society, when the excellence of the ale was proved to be the
result of the hard water of which it was manufactured flowing over a
limestone rock. A chemist was dispatched to Burton, and the settlement
of the matter assumed the importance of a discovery; though in the last
century this fact was ingeniously explained by Dr. Darwin, in a letter
to Mr. Pilkington, upon the supposition that some of the saccharine
matter in the malt combines with the calcareous earth of hard waters,
and forms a sort of mineral sugar, which, like true sugar, is
convertible into spirits.
_Read-y Wit._--A young man, in a large company, descanting very
flippantly on a subject, his knowledge of which was evidently very
superficial, the Duchess of Devonshire asked his name. "'Tis
_Scarlet_," replied a gentleman who stood by. "That may be," said her
Grace, "and yet he is not _deep read_."