have a flow rapidly changing between one mile and three miles. Now, taking the resistance to vary as the square of the velocity, the three-mile current would have 2 and a quarter times as much power to roll over a shell or bottle as the tidal current alone; and moreover this current would be rapidly shifting, so that a bottle would be continually moving about if the water were able to move it at all. I think therefore that even with a depth as great as 40 fathoms the effect of the waves is not to be disregarded, at least in the case of a locality subject to oceanic swells, and where there is a sensible tidal current as well. It is likely enough that it is only in the case of a specially heavy ground swell that the effect of the waves would be liable to be significant.

Jan. 19.

There is another consideration to be borne in mind in comparing the efficiency of a wave current and a tidal current in rolling over shells, &c.

The tidal current flows for about 6 hours in the same direction, and all during that time there is a constant formation of eddies at the bottom; the water is retarded against the bottom, and the retarded water is mixed up with the advancing, so as to form a stratum near the bottom, where the velocity is reduced below that due to the tidal current. Exactly as in the case of wind, which blows more strongly a little way up than near the surface of the earth, the effect of which is seen in the curvature of a descending shower which you see under a rain cloud at no great angular altitude when it lies in a direction from you more or less across the wind.

I need hardly say that if the depth be less than what I have supposed the proportion of wave velocity at the bottom to that at the surface for a given period of wave will be greater than the eight fifteenths I have calculated for the case chosen, and that same proportion of eight fifteenths would be attained for waves of a smaller period than 17 seconds. I am dear sir,

ARTHUR R. HUNT, ESQ.

Yours very truly,

G. G. STOKES.

P.S. Since writing the above, I have looked over your paper in the Proceedings of the R.S. for April 20, 1882. In connexion with p. 3, I may notice that the formula 2 gives 328 feet as the wave-length corresponding to an 8 seconds period in deep water. Within the soundings of the Bay you found it 375. These are in good harmony.

BIOGRAPHY OF SAMUEL COUSINS, R.A., MEMBER

OF THE LEGION OF HONOUR.

BY G. PYCROFT, M. R. C. S.

(Read at Plympton, July, 1887.)

SAMUEL COUSINS, retired R.A., the eminent engraver, was born in Exeter on the ninth day of March, 1801. He was the son of a respected tradesman of Exeter, and had four brothers and four sisters; among the former was Henry Cousins, a mezzotint engraver of note, and John Cousins, his eldest brother, who survives him.

The lifetime of Samuel Cousins was a time of transition. When he began the practice of his art, line engraving was brought to great perfection, and was the style of engraving generally preferred. He lived to see this branch of art die out. Mezzotint engraving was in the days of his youth pure. It was unmixed by line or machine ruling, and was the result of scraping comparative lights out of a plate of soft copper. He lived to see this process entirely given up, to the great grief of connoisseurs, who never cease to regret the superior softness and depth imparted by the copper over that given by the hard steel plates now in use. When he finished his apprenticeship, he began by practising his art in a new manner, by a mixture of mezzotint scraping and engraving in line and point, and that too not on soft copper, but on a hard plate of steel. In this manner he worked for sixty years, and produced plates which hastened the death of, if they did not actually destroy, the exquisitely beautiful art of brilliant line engraving. He lived on to see his art deteriorate, to see plates rapidly produced, weak, flat, and colourless, which would not compare with the full, deep, rich work of Lupton, Turner, or S. W. Reynolds; and a few years before his death he witnessed the uprise of the new art of Photogravure-a process which he thought, and which he did not.

hesitate to declare would supercede mezzotint altogether. I have thought it right to give a brief memoir of this artist, to preserve it where it can be sought for and found; namely, in the pages of our Transactions, and to publish a complete list of all his works, a list never before compiled or published.

Samuel Cousins was placed by his father in the Exeter Episcopal School, and at a very early age began to try what he could do with the lead pencil. He took to drawing heads, used to run off to the print-shops to study and admire the engravings, and by degrees-not slow, but very rapid degreeshe improved so much that he undertook the portraits of his father's customers, and their friends, in pencil, at five shillings each. He next copied engravings; indeed, in those days, which were prior to book illustration and pictorial newspapers, the print-shop windows were the only art galleries a poor boy had the opportunity of inspecting. He next

exhibited his pencillings at the shop of Mr. Upham, a bookseller in High Street, Exeter. Here they were seen and admired by the late Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, Bart., who at once took an interest in the boy, became his patron, and remained his fast friend to the day of his death.

Captain Bagnall, a gentleman of Knightsbridge, near London, passing through Exeter, and loitering down the High Street, was much struck by the pencil-drawings in Mr. Upham's window; and finding on enquiry that they were the production of a boy eleven years of age, he bought several, and on his return to town exhibited them at the Society of Arts; and this Society, on the 28th of May, awarded young Cousins the silver palette for a pencil-drawing, a copy of Heath's engraving of the "Good Shepherd," after Murillo; and in the following year the silver Isis medal for another pencil-drawing, the subject of which was a "Magdalen." The former of these is now on exhibition among a nearly complete collection of Samuel Cousins's works at Messrs. H. Graves and Co., Pall Mall, London.

These early pencil-drawings were seen at the Society of Arts rooms by S. W. Reynolds, the mezzotint engraver, who thought so highly of them that he got his friend, Mr. Whitbread, M.P., to write to Cousins's father, asking his permission to take his son as an apprentice without a fee. The boy was sent to London, to Captain Bagnall's house, in 1814, and here he remained till October, when S. W. Reynolds was ready to receive him. Sir Thomas Dyke Acland at the same time made arrangements that the boy's

education should still go on, and for that purpose, with S. W. Reynolds's consent, he put him to school with Dr. North annually for six weeks at a time. This time thus lost to his master, Cousins was compelled to make up at the end of his apprenticeship.

Cousins served his full time of seven years faithfully, and produced, of course, many works; but these did not have his name appended to them. It was therefore very difficult to say what pictures he finished without his master's help. It was well known that the pictures of Sir Hugh, the Colonel, and Lady Harriett Acland, for the Sir Joshua series, were entirely his work, but beyond that the Art world was in darkness. Mr. A. Graves, however, some months before Cousins's death, induced him to go through the whole set of the Reynolds' work, and sign all he did entirely himself, and the list appended up to No. 89 is the result of this enquiry.

At

At the close of his apprenticeship Cousins was induced, by his good friend Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, sorely against his will, to accept the offer of S. W. Reynolds to take him as an assistant for four years at a salary of £250 per annum. the close of this period he grew tired of engraving, and had it not been for his desire to bring his brother Henry up to the profession, he would have given it up altogether. For a time he paid a visit to Brussels, and supported himself by miniature painting; but he soon returned, and worked in his new style of engraving-partly line, partly stipple, partly etching, but mainly mezzotint. He thought the introduction of line a great improvement, as it produced sharpness, gave brilliancy, and removed the smoky deadness of the old style of engraving.

In the year 1826 was engraved the first plate on his own account, a private order-the portrait of Lady Acland and her children; and also his first public plate of "Master Lambton," after Sir Thomas Lawrence.

In the year 1831 he completed the well-known portrait of Lady Peel, after Sir T. Lawrence, which gave the greatest satisfaction to the artist and to Sir R. Peel, both of whom wrote most flattering letters to the engraver.

In the year 1835 Cousins was elected a member of the Royal Academy, and the year was also made famous in his life from the commission he received from Mr. Moon to engrave Wilkie's "Maid of Saragossa." The excellent manner in which this last transcript was executed led the way to the great commission of which he was so proud, and which

at once stamped him as the great mezzotint engraver of his day; namely, the order to engrave Landseer's masterpiece"Bolton Abbey in the Olden Time."

Mezzotint engraving, or rather the mixed style of mezzotint, was at that time rapidly superseding the more slow and expensive line engraving-a beautiful branch of the art that has now almost died out; and Raimbach, the eminent line engraver, in his Life, says "that he dates the decline of line engraving from the day of the production of Mr. Cousins's inimitable plate of Bolton Abbey."

In 1838 he was engaged in a large engraving from a portrait of "Her Majesty in her Coronation Robes," by Chalon. So many copies of this were at once sold, that Cousins was commissioned to engrave a second rather smaller plate.

In 1839 followed Leslie's large picture of "The Queen receiving the Sacrament at her Coronation." In 1854 he received from the Emperor Napoleon III. the Order of the Legion of Honour in recognition of his skill in engraving the portrait of that monarch after Winterhalter. And in the following year he received the far greater honour of being elected a Royal Academician; and this honour was the greater, as he was the first engraver who had attained the full honours of the Academy.

The famous and incomparable plate of "The Midsummer Night's Dream" was published in 1857. Sir Edwin Landseer was so pleased with this, that he wrote to Cousins to say, "that this was his greatest work as an engraver, and that he had improved in some respects upon the picture itself."

In 1872 he produced nothing. He was weary of engraving. He spent much of his time in looking over and arranging his great collection of prints, and he presented a nearly complete set of his public and private plates to the British Museum.

art.

In 1874 he was seventy-three years of age, and he determined to use the graver no more. He was tired of the intense attention and the solitary life inseparable from his "Hitherto," said he, "I have only suffered existence. I want to live." Before him he saw some years of leisure; but the publishers knocked at his door, and would allow him no peace. Cousins gave in. He would work for them on certain conditions. First, that he should engrave only such subjects as he liked; second, that he should not be hurried; third, that the ordinary remuneration should be doubled.