Here, one day, Dr. Morice chanced to be the spectator of an Annamite funeral, which is always celebrated with a certain amount of pomp, and attended by a numerous train of mourners. The coffin is planted in the centre of a small portable house, made of paper painted in brilliant colours, and cut into curious shapes. A score of bearers carry this miniature temple, resting upon their shoulders the bamboos which support it. A company of persons with torches scatter along the road their prayers to Buddha, traced on golden and silver papers, and set fire to them. In the rear march the friends and relatives of the departed, some uttering forced lamentations, all smiling “in their sleeves;” for these singular people are never so moved by their sorrow that they cannot laugh at a jest, or at any incident of which they immediately seize, as by intuition, the comic side. * * * * * ~THE GECKO DESCRIBED.~ Here too he saw some geckos: indeed, they were numerous enough to be considered the genii of the place. Inhabiting the forests and waste places, as well as the huts of the Annamites and the houses of the French, this large lizard, so common in Cochin-China, is one of the animals which give to the fauna of the country its peculiar character. Does the reader know what a gecko is like? If not, let him try to conceive of a gigantic terrestrial salamander; its skin, of a bluish-gray, covered with a quantity of tiny tubercles rising in the middle of an orange-tinted patch; its great eyes having a large gold-yellow iris; while, owing to the sucker-like lamellæ that line the under surface of its feet, it is able to walk easily on the smoothest surfaces, and utterly to defy the laws of gravitation. Its cry, to which it owes the name given to it in every language, is curiously sonorous; and when first heard, fairly startles the hearer. A shaky grumble or grunt serves as prelude; then, five, six, or eight times, lowering its voice regularly half a tone on each occasion, it jerks out its cadenced notes, which are sometimes written _gecko_, and sometimes _tacke_; the performance terminating with a grunt of satisfaction. ~ITS FAMILIARITY WITH MAN.~