Is only mentioned, lest the omission of his name might be regarded as a “slight.” He is a slow-goer, and, except that his presence confirms a law, we hardly know what he was created for. However, his habits are quite regular; and we note that he takes the _rôle_ of evening star, setting on the 2d at 1:22 a. m.; on the 17th, at 12:23 a. m., and on the 28th, at 11:37 p. m. Has a direct motion of 14´ 35´´; a diameter of 2.6´´; and on the 8th, at 9:00 p. m., is 90° east of the sun. NEW ORLEANS. BY GEORGE ALFRED TOWNSEND. New Orleans is our most pleasing American city to persons from a northern climate. Florida presents no place important enough to illustrate a large general society. Texas has rising towns, but the Anglo-Saxon domination there brings them more and more into resemblance to our own settled English, or rather, British communities. In San Francisco we are charmed not only with a complete change of foliage, scenery, and climate, but with unexpected varieties in the population, there being a little tinge of the south of Europe as well as of Mexico and of the Celestial Kingdom in the speculative yet placid elements there. Yet New Orleans is not so hard as even San Francisco. It is a land not merely of fruit, but of the sugar-cane. It lies on that warm gulf whose farther shores were more historical three hundred years ago than now. As time advances and we complete our own connections and general developments we see more and more that the American destiny must be southward. Canada, which has had a much longer history than the United States, presents even now but a thin rim of settlement, and her entire population from the banks of Newfoundland to Vancouver’s Island is not equal to that of the single state of New York. On the other hand, Mexico, through which the Americans have built costly railroad systems piercing to the very capital city, has a population certainly twice that of Canada, and probably three times the number, considering the extension of Mexico toward Central America. American diplomacy has little other ground to cover for the near future, than the republics to the south of us. The surfeit of enterprises and of productions in the United States compels us to consider a time when we must not only find markets in the Spanish American states, but shall become, if not pioneers, as we once were, certainly competitors in the Pacific Ocean, of the English, Germans, and other modern nations. We have opened a way to the Pacific by railroad, but the canal long contemplated across Central America will operate more impartially toward shippers, will cheapen the movement of goods, and incline the United States rapidly toward an understanding of the new peoples to our southwest, in methods no doubt providentially designed. New Orleans has been so clearly understood by our railroad magnates that they have hastened, almost without public assistance, to connect her not only with great points