------------------ EARLY INCITEMENTS TO A SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF NATURE. Baron Humboldt, in the opening of his _Cosmos_, vol. ii., recalls the lessons of experience, which tell us how often impressions received by the senses from circumstances, seemingly accidental, have so acted on the youthful mind as to determine the whole direction of the man's course through life. Childish pleasure, in the form of countries and of seas, as delineated in maps; the desire to behold those southern constellations which have never risen in our horizon; the sight of palms and of the cedars of Lebanon, figured in a pictorial Bible, may have implanted in the spirit the first impulse to travel in distant lands. "If I might (says Humboldt) have recourse to my own experience, and say what awakened in me the first beginnings of an inextinguishable longing to visit the tropics, I should name George Forster's descriptions of the islands of the Pacific--paintings, by Hodge, in the house of Warren Hastings, in London, representing the banks of the Ganges--and a colossal dragon-tree in an old tower of the Botanic Gardens at Berlin." ------------------ THE RIGHTS OF WHITEBAIT. Formerly, whitebait were considered to be the young of the shad; and only of late years has the misnamed fish taken its proper position. It appears that Mr. Yarrell, the able naturalist, was one morning in March struck with the early appearance of whitebait in a fishmonger's shop in St. James's; and knowing that shads, which they were supposed to be, did not make their appearance till much later (May), he took up the matter, and persevered in a course of investigation, which lasted from March to August, 1828. The specific distinction between the two fishes, on which Mr. Yarrell relies as of the greatest value, is the difference of their anatomical character; and especially in the number of vertebræ, or small bones, extending from the back-bone. "The number of vertebræ in the shad," he states, "of whatever size the specimen may be, is invariably fifty-five, while the number in the whitebait is uniformly fifty-six; even in a fish of two inches, with the assistance of a lens, their exact number may be distinctly made out." ------------------ CATCHING ELECTRIC EELS. Humboldt gives a very interesting narrative of the mode of the capture of the gymnoti employed by the Indians of South America. This is done by rousing the eels by driving horses and mules into the ponds which those fish inhabit, and harpooning them when they have exhausted their electricity upon the unhappy quadrupeds.