It is reported that the Cowles Electric Smelting and Aluminium Company, whose works are at Cleveland, Ohio, have declared their ability to produce the valuable white metal known as aluminium at the price of half-a-crown a pound. If this report be true, we may look for a revolution in many branches of trade, for the metal is not alone useful as it is, but is almost more important by reason of the valuable alloys it forms with copper, &c. The Company reduce it from the ore by means of a modification of the electric furnace invented some years ago by the late Sir W. Siemens. It is probable that aluminium bronze will replace steel for many purposes where great tensile strength is required. The expense saved by substituting for steel, which has to be welded and built up coil by coil, a metal for heavy ordnance which can be simply cast and run into moulds, would be enormous. The discovery of petroleum wells on the west coast of the Red Sea is both interesting and full of promise for a country such as Egypt, whose finances have for so long been in a deplorable condition. The yield of oil is at present but insignificant when compared with the enormous quantities which gush forth at Baku, and with the amount tapped from the American wells. But there is every indication that the yield will increase to a great deal more than two tons a day, the present output. There is little doubt that petroleum will form the fuel of the future for our steamships; and a station so near the great international highway of Suez where that fuel can be readily obtained, cannot fail to become a place of great importance. Already the oil is being used by certain ships instead of coal. Once again has truth outrun fiction, for the camera in the hands of MM. Henry of Paris has accomplished a feat which no romance-writer would have dared to imagine. Most persons know by sight that beautiful group of stars called the Pleiades, and most people know, too, that this group attracted the attention of star-gazers in very early times. It is mentioned in the book of Job, and profane authors have also weaved many a pretty legend concerning this group of distant suns. In November last, the Messrs Henry photographed the Pleiades; and the picture showed the presence of a nebula of spiral form which no human eye had before seen. Another photograph taken in America showed the same appearance, though the largest telescopes in the Paris Observatory gave no evidence to corroborate the photographic appearances. But at the observatory of Pultova, where a gigantic instrument, possessing an object-glass thirty inches in diameter, has lately been erected, the nebula has been detected by the eye of M. Struve.