Most men have a pet country which, above all others, they desire to visit. Some long to roam amidst the classic relics of Italian grandeur, or to explore the immortal sites and renowned battle-fields of Greece; some set their affections upon Spain, and languish after Andalusia and the Alhambra; whilst others, to whose imagination the hardy North appeals more strongly than the soft and enervating South, meditate on Scandinavia, thirst after the Maelstrom, and dream of Thor and Odin, of glaciers and elk-hunts. We have a friend for whom the West Indies had a peculiar and irresistible fascination, to which neither length of voyage nor dread of Yellow Jack prevented his yielding; we have another--who has never yet lost sight of Britain's cliffs--whose first period of absence from his native land is to be devoted to a pleasure trip to Hindostan. Such fancies and predilections may often be traced to early reading and association, but not unfrequently they are capricious and unaccountable, and we shall not investigate why the Eastern Archipelago, of all the regions he had read and heard of, had the greatest attractions for Dr. Edward Selberg, a young German physician of much intelligence but little fortune, strongly imbued with a love of adventure and the picturesque, and with a desire to increase his stores of medical and scientific knowledge. The motives of his preference he himself is puzzled to explain. Many difficulties opposed themselves to the realisation of his darling project--a visit to the Sunda Islands. His means were inadequate to the cost of so expensive an expedition; and although the advantage of science was one of his objects, he had no hope that his expenses would be defrayed by the government of his own or of any other country. At last, through friends in Amsterdam, he obtained the appointment of surgeon to a transport, on board of which, in September 1837, he sailed from the Helder for the island of Java. Besides the ship's company, he had for companions of his voyage a hundred soldiers and two officers. The Dutch East Indies hold out small temptation either to civil or military adventurers. Few visions of speedy fortune, fewer still of rank and glory, dazzle the young and ardent, and lure them from their native land to the fever-breeding swamps of Batavia. Thus the Dutch government cannot afford to be very squeamish as to the character and quality of the men it sends thither. Dr. Selberg's account of his fellow-passengers is evidence of this. "Amongst the soldiers," he says, "were natives of various countries, Dutch, Belgians, French, Swiss; nearly half of them consisted of the refuse of the different German states. Most villanous was the physiognomy of many of these; the traces of every vice, and the ravages of the various climates they had lived in, were visible upon their countenances. They were men who had served in Algiers, Spain, or the West Indies, who had been driven back to Germany by a craving after