What a ludicrous picture has Sydney Smith drawn of the animal annoyance of tropical climates. "Insects," he says, "are their curse. The bete rouge lays the foundation of a tremendous ulcer. In a moment, you are covered with ticks. Chigoes bury themselves in your flesh, and hatch a large colony of young chigoes in a few hours. They will not live together, but every chigoe sets up a separate ulcer, and has his own private portion of pus. Flies get into your mouth, into your eyes, into your nose; you eat flies, drink flies, and breathe flies. Lizards, cockroaches, and snakes get into your bed; ants eat up the books; scorpions sting you on the foot. Everything bites, stings, or bruises. Every second of your existence, you are wounded by some piece of animal life, that nobody has ever seen before, except Swammerdam and Merian. An insect with eleven legs is swimming in your tea-cup; a nondescript, with nine wings, is struggling in the small-beer; or a caterpillar, with several dozen of eyes in his belly, is hastening over the bread and butter. All nature is alive, and seems to be gathering all her entomological hosts to eat you up, as you are standing, out of your coat, waistcoat, and breeches. Such are the tropics. All this reconciles us to our dews, fogs, vapours, and drizzle; to our apothecaries rushing about with gargles and tinctures; to our old British constitutional coughs, sore throats, and swelled faces." ------------------ INVENTION OF THE DIVING-BELL. In the United States of America, generally, and to some extent in England, the invention of the diving-bell has been attributed to Sir William Phipps; who was, however, one of the first persons who used the bell advantageously, in recovering nearly 300,000l. treasure from a Spanish wreck, near the Bahamas. The _invention_, or the earliest use of the diving-bell, dates from upwards of a century before the birth of Phipps; the first instance of its use being at Cadiz, in the presence of Charles V., in 1538; whereas Phipps was born at Pemaguid, in America, in 1650. There is, likewise, another popular error, that the Mulgrave family, of which the present head is the Marquess of Normanby, descended from Sir William Phipps; the founder of the Mulgrave family being Phipps, one of the earliest explorers of the Arctic regions. ------------------ EXPERIMENTS WITH AN ELECTRIC EEL. In 1838 there was brought to London, and exhibited at the Adelaide Gallery, in the Strand, a living specimen of the electric eel, or gymnotus, being the first received in this country alive within the present century. It was fed upon fish, and occasionally with bullock's blood, and was kept warm by water, artificially heated. With this eel several interesting experiments were made, allowing periods of rest from a week to a month between each set. One of these is thus described:--