Sydney Smith has thus sketched a few of the natural wonders of this new world:--"In this remote part of the earth, Nature (having made horses, oxen, ducks, geese, oaks, elms, and all regular and useful productions, for the rest of the world) seems determined to have a bit of play, and to amuse herself as she pleases. Accordingly, she makes cherries with the stone outside; and a monstrous animal, as tall as a grenadier, with the head of a rabbit, a tail as big as a bedpost, hopping along at the rate of five hops to a mile, with three or four young kangaroos looking out of its false uterus, to see what is passing. Then comes a quadruped, as big as a large cat, with the eyes, colour, and skin of a mole, and the bill and web-feet of a duck, puzzling Dr. Shaw, and rendering the latter half of his life miserable, from his utter inability to determine whether it was a bird or a beast. Add to this, a parrot with the legs of a sea-gull; a skate with the head of a shark; and a bird of such monstrous dimensions, that a side-bone of it will dine three real carnivorous Englishmen;--together with many other productions that, on the discovery of the country, agitated Sir Joseph Banks, and filled him with emotions of distress and delight." ------------------ VICISSITUDES OF MINING. Humboldt relates of a Frenchman, Joseph Laborde, that he went to Mexico very poor in 1743, and acquired a large fortune in a very short time by the mine of La Canada. After building a church at Tasco, which cost him 84,000_l._, he was reduced to the lowest poverty by the rapid decline of those very mines, from which he had annually drawn from 130,000 to 190,000 pounds' weight of silver. With a sum of 20,000l., raised by selling a _sun_ of solid gold, which, in his prosperity, he had presented to the church, and which he was allowed by the archbishop to withdraw, he undertook to clear out an old mine, in doing which he lost the greatest part of the produce of this golden sun, and then abandoned the work. With the small sum remaining, he once more ventured on another undertaking, which was, for a short time, highly productive; and he left behind him, at his death, a fortune of 120,000_l_. ------------------ TROPICAL DELIGHTS.