To where the long grass waits his sharpened scythe;
And when the sun is up in the warm heaven,
In motley groups the haymakers appear,
Seeking their labour blythe;

Summer! to thee earth's richest wealth is given,
Thou Croesus of the year!-* * *

THE RIO DE LA PLATA.-This river is flooded at certain periods, and like the Nile inundates and fertilizes the adjacent country; at which time the Indians, leaving their houses, and betaking them to their canoes, float hither and thither till the waters retire. In April 1793, a violent wind up-heaped this immense mass of water to a distance of about 10 leagues, submersing the whole country, while the bed of the river was dried up in such a manner that it might be walked upon dryshod. Foundered and sunken vessels again saw the light; and among others thus brought to day, was an English vessel which had been lost in 1762. Many people descended into this bed, visited and spoiled the vessels thus exposed, and returned with pockets filled with precious articles and money, which for more than thirty years had been " in the deep bosom of the ocean buried." This phenomenon lasted three days, when the wind abated, and the waters rolled back into their usual channels.

THE NIGER. In a work recently published by Lieutenant General Sir Rufane Donkin, "on the course and probable termination of the Niger," he endeavours to show that the disputes upon this knotty subject have all originated by a substitution of the definite for the indefinite article, and calling it the Niger instead of a Niger. The meaning of Nile or Neil he states to imply a blue, black, or dark colour, not only in Africa, but in the Hindoostanee, the Persian, and Arabic languages, where all deep rivers which assume a dark hue are called Niles. In Hindostan, for instance, the term "black water" is given to the ocean; and he enumerates many rivers in the East which are called by the natives Niles. From this he concludes that Niger, or "black river," is synonymous with Nile, and is merely a general term for all large rivers, and that the river perceived by the African travellers at Bornou is the Niger, or as he says more properly, a Niger or Nile; indeed, he says the earlier geographers used to call the large river in Central Africa by the generic term of " Nile," while some of the Arabian writers, by way of distinction, call it "the Nile of the Negroes.' This river, after emptying itself into the lake Domboo, pursues a northern course towards the Mediterra

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nean, into which Sir R. Donkin proceeds to show it formerly emptied itself by the Gulf of Syrtis, but is now lost in the sands of the great desert, which have been long encroaching on the once fertile and populous region of the Negro Nile. In reference to this encroachment of the sands, he makes these striking observations : " If we turn to the valley of the Nile of Egypt, we shall see at this moment the very process going on by which the lower part of the Niger, or Nile of Bornou, has been choked up and obliterated by the invasion of the Great Sahara, under the names of the Deserts of Bilmah and Libya. Thus has been rubbed out from the face of the earth a river which had once its cities, its sages, its warriors, its works of art, and its inundations like the classic Nile; but which so existed in days of which we have scarcely a record. In the same way shall perish the Nile of Egypt and its valley-its pyramids, its temples, and its cities! The Delta shall become a plashy quicksand-a second Syrtis! and the Nile shall cease to exist from the Lower Cataract downwards; for this is about the measure or height of the giant principle of destruction already treading on the Egyptian valley, and which is advancing from the Libyan Desert, to the annihilation of Egypt and all her glories, with the silence, but with the certainty too, of alldevouring time!”

AN ADVENTURE OF SIR HUMPHRY DAVY.-The fall of the Traun is a cataract, which, when the river is full, may be almost compared to that of Schaffhausen for magnitude, and possesses the same peculiar characters of grandeur in the precipitous rush of its awful and overpowering waters, and of beauty in the tints of its streams and foam, and in the forms of the rocks over which it falls, and the cliffs and woods by which it is overhung. In this spot an acci dent, which had nearly been fatal to me, occasioned the renewal of my acquaintance in an extraordinary manner with the mysterious unknown stranger. Eubathes, who was very fond of fly-fishing, was amusing himself by catching graylings for our dinner in the stream above the fall. I took one of the boats which are used for descending the canal or lock artificially cut in the rock by the side of the fall, on which salt and wood are usually transported from Upper Austria to the Danube; and I desired two of the peasants to assist my servant in permitting the boat to descend by a rope to the level of the river below; my intention was to amuse myself by this rapid species of locomotion along the descending sluice. For some moments the boat glided gently along the smooth current, and I enjoyed the beauty of the

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moving scene around me, and had my eye fixed upon the bright rainbow seen upon the spray of the cataract above my head, when I was suddenly roused by a shout of alarm from my servant, and looking round, I saw that the piece of wood to which the rope had been attached had given way, and the boat was floating down the river at the mercy of the stream. I was not at first alarmed, for I saw that my assistants were procuring long poles, with which it appeared easy to arrest the boat before it entered the rapidly descending water of the sluice; and I called out to them to use their united force to reach the longest pole across the water, that I might be able to catch the end of it in my hand, and at this moment I felt perfect security; but a breeze of wind suddenly came down the valley and blew from the nearest bank, the boat was turned by it out of the side current and thrown nearer to the middle of the river, and I soon saw that I was likely to be precipitated over the cataract. My servant and the boatmen rushed into the water, but it was too deep to enable them to reach the boat; I was soon in the white water of the descending stream, and my danger was inevitable. I had presence of mind enough to consider whether my chance of safety would be greater by throwing myself out of the boat, or by remaining in it, and I preferred the latter expedient. I looked from the rainbow upon the bright sun above my head, as if taking leave for ever of that glorious luminary; I raised one pious aspiration to the divine Source of light and life; I was immediately stunned by the thunder of the fall, and my eyes were closed in darkness. How long I remained insensible I know not; my first recollections after this accident were of a bright light shining above me, of warmth and pressure in different parts of my body, and of the noise of the rushing cataract sounding in my ears. I seemed awakened by the light from a sound sleep, and endeavoured to recall my scattered thoughts, but in vain; I soon fell again into slumber. From this second sleep I was awakened by a stranger, and was soon restored to myself.

THE LAKE OF THE SOLFATARA.-Its temperature, I ascertained, was in the winter in the warmest parts above 80 degrees of Fahrenheit, and it appears to be pretty constant; for I have found it differ a few degrees only, in the ascending source, in January, March, May, and the beginning of June; it is therefore supplied with heat from a subterraneous source, being nearly twenty degrees above the mean temperature of the atmosphere. Kircher has detailed in his Mundus Subterraneus various wonders respecting this lake, most of which

are unfounded-such as that it is unfathomable, that it has at the bottom the heat of boiling water, and that floating islands rise from the gulf which emits it. It must certainly be very difficult, or even impossible, to fathom a source which rises with so much violence from a subterraneous excavation; and, at a time when chymistry had made small progress, it was easy to mistake the disengagement of carbonic acid for an actual ebullition. The floating islands are real; but neither the Jesuit, nor any of the writers who have since described this lake, had a correct idea of their origin, which is exceedingly curious. The high temperature of this water, and the quantity of carbonic acid that it contains, render it peculiarly fitted to afford a pabulum or nourishment to vegetable life; the banks of travertine are every where covered with reeds, lichens, confervæ, and various kinds of aquatic vegetables; and, at the same time that the process of vegetable life is going on, the crystallizations of the calcareous matter, which is every where deposited in consequence of the escape of carbonic acid, likewise proceed, giving a constant milkiness to what from its tint would otherwise be a blue fluid. So rapid is the vegetation, owing to the decomposition of the carbonic acid, that, even in winter, masses of confervæ and lichens, mixed with deposited travertine, are constantly detached by the currents of water from the bank, and float down the stream, which, being a considerable river, is never without many of these small islands on its surface; they are sometimes only a few inches in size, and composed merely of dark-green confervæ, or purple or yellow lichens; but they are, sometimes, even of some feet in diameter, and contain seeds and various species of common water-plants, which are usually more or less incrusted with marble. There is, I believe, no place in the world where there is a more striking example of the opposition or contrast of the laws of animate and inanimate nature, of the forces of inorganic chemical affinity, and those of the powers of life. Vegetables, in such a temperature, and every where surrounded by food, are produced with a wonderful rapidity; but the crystallizations are formed with equal quickness, and they are no sooner produced than they are destroyed together. Notwithstanding the sulphureous exhalations from the lake, the quantity of vegetable matter generated there and its heat make it the resort of an infinite variety of insect tribes; and, even in the coldest days in winter, numbers of flies may be observed on the vegetables surrounding its banks, or on its floating islands; and a quantity of their larvæ may be seen there, sometimes incrusted and entirely destroyed by calcareous matter, which

is likewise often the fate of the insects themselves, as well as of various species of shell-fish that are found amongst the vegetables which grow and are destroyed in the travertine on its banks. Snipes, ducks, and various water-birds often visit these lakes, probably attracted by the temperature and the quantity of food in which they abound; but they usually confine themselves to the banks, as the carbonic acid disengaged from the surface would be fatal to them if they ventured to swim upon it when tranquil. In May, 18-, I fixed a stick on a mass of travertine covered by the water, and I examined it in the beginning of the April following, for the purpose of determining the nature of the depositions. The water was lower at this time, yet I had some difficulty, by means of a sharp-pointed hammer, in breaking the mass which adhered to the bottom of the stick; it was several inches in thickness. The upper part was a mixture of light tufa and the leaves of confervæ; below this, was a darker and more solid travertine, containing black and decomposed masses of confervæ; in the inferior part, the travertine was more solid, and of a gray colour; but with cavities which I have no doubt were produced by the decomposition of vegetable matter. I have passed many hours, I may say many days, in studying the phenomena of this wonderful lake; it has brought many trains of thought into my mind connected with the early changes of our globe, and I have sometimes reasoned from the forms of plants and animals preserved in marble in this warm source, to the grander depositions in the secondary rocks, where the zoophytes or coral insects have worked upon a grand scale, and where palms and vegetables, now unknown, are preserved with the remains of crocodiles, turtles, and gigantic extinct animals of the sauri genus, and which appear to have belonged to a period when the whole globe possessed a much higher temperature. I have likewise often been led, from the remarkable phenomena surrounding me in that spot, to compare the works of man with those of nature. The baths, erected there nearly twenty centuries ago, present only heaps of ruins, and even the bricks of which they were built, though hardened by fire, are crumbled into dust; whilst the masses of travertine around it, though formed by a variable source from the most perishable materials, have hardened by time, and the most perfect remains of the greatest ruins in the eternal city, such as the triumphal arches and the Colosæum, owe their duration to this source."-Sir Humphry Davy's Last Days of a Philosopher.