The Rio de la Plata should never be called the Plat River, pronouncing it as we do the Platte River in Nebraska; if the English form is used at all, it should be called Plate, which is so universal that one of the largest, if not the largest, shipping-houses doing business in South America is known as the Brazil and River Plate Steamship Company. A rather singular fact in connection with the skipper is that he has never been to any one of the three largest and most important ports between Cancer and Capricorn,--Calcutta, Bombay, or Rio Janeiro. This is really astonishing, as it would be hard indeed to find another American sailor brought up in the last generation who had never been to either Calcutta or Rio; Bombay is more modern. Captain Scruggs is quite interested in the Nicaraguan Canal project, and he insists that with its completion will pass away the sailing ship from the face of the waters, though I do not entirely agree in this theory. People also thought that when the Suez Canal was cut through it would kill the long-voyage trade to the East; yet what are the facts? It is probable that nearly double the number of sailing vessels pass Agulhas per year as pass Cape Horn, fully eight hundred rounding Africa in both directions in a twelvemonth. The amount of case oil alone from New York and Philadelphia which goes East in sail bottoms is enormous. Few people, though, realize how much cheaper it is to ship goods from New York to either San Francisco or China in sailing vessels than by rail or steamer. For instance, the railway freights from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans averages about fifteen dollars per ton; sailing ship rates, from seven to eight dollars per ton, and often less. Eighty thousand cases of oil, which would be the cargo of a modern two-thousand net ton iron sailing vessel, are transported to Shanghai around Good Hope for seventeen thousand dollars; but if they were sent overland to San Francisco from New York, and then by steamer to destination, the freight charges would be trebled, for they would amount to fifty thousand dollars. We have just finished reading aloud the book which contains perhaps the finest descriptions of tropical scenery in English,--Kingsley’s “Westward Ho.” Nothing could be more charming than the picture of the delight of the scurvy-ridden fellow-voyagers of Amyas Leigh upon first landing in the West Indies; while the description of a Barbadian sunrise is positively entrancing. Latitude, 10° 15′ south; longitude, 34° 35′ west. +June 15+