Between Humboldt’s Current of Peru and the great equatorial flow, there is “a desolate region,” rarely visited by the whale, either sperm or right. Formerly this part of the ocean was seldom whitened by the sails of a ship, or enlivened by the presence of man. Neither the industrial pursuits of the sea nor the highways of commerce called him into it. Now and then a roving cruiser or an enterprising whalesman passed that way; but to all else it was an unfrequented part of the ocean, and so remained until the gold-fields of Australia and the guano islands of Peru made it a thoroughfare. All vessels bound from Australia to South America now pass through it; and in the journals of some of them it is described as a region almost void of the signs of life in both sea and air. In the South-Pacific Ocean especially, where there is such a wide expanse of water, sea-birds often exhibit a companionship with a vessel, and will follow and keep company with it through storm and calm for weeks together. Even the albatross and Cape pigeon, that delight in the stormy regions of Cape Horn and the inhospitable climates of the Antarctic regions, not unfrequently accompany vessels into the perpetual summer of the tropics. The sea-birds that join the ship as she clears Australia will, it is said, follow her to this region, and then disappear. Even the chirp of the stormy petrel ceases to be heard here, and the sea itself is said to be singularly barren of “moving creatures that have life.” BOTTLES AND CURRENTS AT SEA. Seafaring people often throw a bottle overboard, with a paper stating the time and place at which it is done. In the absence of other information as to Currents, that afforded by these mute little navigators is of great value. They leave no track behind them, it is true, and their routes cannot be ascertained; but knowing where they are cast, and seeing where they are found, some idea may be formed as to their course. Straight lines may at least be drawn, showing the shortest distance from the beginning to the end of their voyage, with the time elapsed. Admiral Beechey has prepared a chart, representing, in this way, the tracks of more than 100 bottles. From this it appears that the waters from every quarter of the Atlantic tend towards the Gulf of Mexico and its stream. Bottles cast into the sea midway between the Old and the New Worlds, near the coasts of Europe, Africa, and America at the extreme north or farthest south, have been found either in the West Indies, or the British Isles, or within the well-known range of Gulf-Stream waters. “THE HORSE LATITUDES” are the belts of calms and light airs which border the polar edge of the north-east trade-winds. They are so called from the circumstance that vessels formerly bound from New England to the West Indies, with a deck-load of horses, were often so delayed in this calm belt of Cancer, that, from the want of water for their animals, they were compelled to throw a portion of them overboard.