In the Arctic region, says Dr. Kane, the frost is so intense as to burn. Sudden putrefaction of meat takes place at a temperature of thirty-five degrees below zero. The Greenlanders consider extreme cold as favorable to putrefaction. The Esquimaux withdraw the viscera immediately after death, and fill the cavity with stones. Dr. Kane was told that the musk ox is sometimes tainted after five minutes exposure to great cold. In Italy, south of the great alluvial plain of Lombardy, and away from the immediate sea-coast, the lakes occupy the craters of extinguished volcanoes. In Arabia, travelers declare, the silence of the desert is so profound that it soon ceases to be soothing or solemn, and becomes absolutely painful, if not appalling. In Java, that magnificent and fearful clime, the most lovely flowers are found to conceal hidden reptiles; the most tempting fruits are tinctured with subtle poisons; there grow those splendid trees whose shadow is death; there the vampire, an enormous bat, sucks the blood of the victims whose sleep he prolongs, by wafting over them an air full of freshness and perfume. Darwin, in his Voyage, speaks of the strange mixture of sound and silence which pervades the shady parts of the wood on the shore of Brazil. The noise from the insects is so loud that it may be heard even in a vessel anchored several hundred yards from the shore; yet within the recesses of the forest a universal silence appears to reign. At Syracuse, an English gentleman was taken to a dirty cistern; seventy women were washing, with their clothes tucked up, and themselves standing in a pool,--a disgusting scene. "What do you bring me here for?" said he to the guide. "Why, sir, this is the Fountain of Arethusa." In the Fourth Circle of Dante's Hell are the souls of the Prodigal and the Avaricious: they are forever rolling great weights, and forever smiting each other. "To all eternity," says the poet, "they shall continue butting one another." A dung-hill at a distance, said Coleridge, sometimes smells like musk, and a dead dog like elder-flowers. Scargill declared that an Englishman is never happy but when he is miserable; a Scotchman is never at home but when he is abroad; an Irishman is at peace only when he is fighting. The melancholy, says Horace, hate the merry, the jocose the melancholy; the volatile dislike the sedate, the indolent the stirring and vivacious; the modest man generally carries the look of a churl. Meyer, in conversation with Goethe, said he saw a shoemaker in Italy who hammered his leather upon the antique marble head of a Roman emperor. The lark, that sings out of the sky, purifies himself, like the pious Mussulman, in the dust of the ground. The nightingale, they say, sings with his breast against a thorn. The fragrant white pond lily springs from the same black mud out of which the yellow lily sucks its obscene life and noisome odor. An elephant, that no quadruped has the temerity to attack,