"Why, Vasco de Gama, to be sure"--perhaps, the reader will reply. In Portugal, however, a much more ancient navigator has been mentioned. Vieyra, an old preacher of great renown at Lisbon, said in one of his sermons:--"One man only passed the Cape of Good Hope before the Portuguese. And who was he? and how? It was Jonah, in the whale's belly. The whale (or rather great fish) went out of the Mediterranean because he had no other course; he kept the coast of Africa on the left, scoured along Ethiopia, passed by Arabia, took post in the Euphrates, on the shores of Nineveh, and, making his tongue serve as a plank, landed the prophet there." ------------------ THE FIRST KALEIDOSCOPE. When, by a happy accident, Sir David Brewster had discovered the leading principles of the kaleidoscope while repeating Biot's experiments on the action of fluids upon light, he constructed an instrument in which he fixed permanently, across the ends of the reflectors, pieces of coloured glass, and other irregular objects. But it was not till some time afterwards that the great step towards the completion of the instrument was made, in the idea of giving motion to these objects, which were placed loosely in a cell at the end of the instrument. When this idea was carried into execution, the kaleidoscope in its simple form was completed. The next and by far the most important step of the invention was, to employ a draw tube and lens, by means of which beautiful forms could be created from objects of all sizes, and at all distances from the observer. In this way, the power of the kaleidoscope was indefinitely extended, and every object in nature could be introduced into the picture, in the same manner as if these objects had been reduced in size, and actually placed at the end of the reflector. ------------------ FERGUSON AND HIS WIFE. James Ferguson and his wife led a cat-and-dog life, and she is not once alluded to in the philosopher's autobiography. About the year 1750, one evening, while he was delivering to a London audience a lecture on astronomy, his wife entered the room in a passion, and maliciously overturned several pieces of the apparatus; when all the notice Ferguson took of the catastrophe was the observation to the audience--"Ladies and gentlemen, I have the misfortune to be married to this woman." ------------------ A DESCENT IN A DIVING-BELL.