the same kind of intelligence across France, confirming me in my conclusions before noted. And ever since this period of 1796 we have never had any extraordinary alternation of extreme heat or wet, without its being to me the result of some accompanying volcanic agitation in Mount Hecla, or Mount Vesuvius or its neighbourhood; and the recurrence of the violent ebullition that has this year being going on at Mount Etna may therefore be considered as the electric cause not only of the extraordinary heat of our late summer, but also of the floods that have subsequently poured down upon us. It is only of late years that scientific men have paid due attention to these physical phenomena. Sir Humphrey Davy, I think, was the first who laid down their causes; and if we recollect the account given by Sir Stamford Raffles of the appalling effects of the tremendous explosion of Tombora, in Sambowa, one of the islands east of Java, in the year 1815, described as so violent in its immediate neighbourhood as to cause men, and horses, and trees to be taken up into the air like chaff; and of its effects being perceptible in Sumatra, where, nearly at a thousand miles distance from it, they heard its thundering noisy explosions,--thinking of this, we may well accede the comparatively small vibrations that we occasionally feel, as arising from the interchange of civilities passing between our volcanic neighbours Hecla and Vesuvius, or Etna; and glad we may be that we have them in no more inconvenient shape or degree than we have hitherto experienced them. I have some friends in Lancashire who have been a good deal alarmed by the vibrations they have lately experienced; and I must confess that my good wife and myself were, on the morning of the 10th Dec., not a little startled in our bed by a shock that aroused us early to inquire after the cause of it, but for which we cannot account otherwise than that, from its sudden electric character, the Lancashire vibration had reached us. The chief purport, however, of my present communication is, to make inquiry amongst your readers, whether any of them, like myself, have observed and experienced any recurrence of these concomitant and physical obtrusions. WM. S. HESLEDON. Barton upon Humber. * * * * * Minor Notes. _Value of MSS._--In the cause of Calvert _v._ Sebright, a question arose as to the sale of a collection of manuscript books by the late Sir John Sebright in the year 1807. In aid of the inquiry before the Master, as to the difference in value of the manuscripts in 1807 and the year 1849, Mr. Rodd made an affidavit, from which I have made the following extract, showing the prices at which five lots were sold in 1807, and the prices at which the same lots were sold at the late Mr. Heber's sale in 1836: