"Every practical success of the season," says the _Times_, "belongs to the Americans." Their reaping machines, their revolvers, their yachts, are great "facts," and every one in England seems willing to admire the skill and enterprise that produced them. Narrow-minded critics, who are too wise to learn, find out that the reasons for the "America's" success were exceedingly trifling; it was only a difference in her build, and in the construction of the sails, &c. Precisely so, and it was only a stroke with a knife that enabled the egg of Columbus (which it is true must be stale by this time) to stand perpendicular. Every one can do it _now_, just as with the aid of fire and coals, and some water, they can rush from continent to continent, and baffle the wind or the waves. Every discovery that is useful is simple. In the works of nature, there is no perplexing machinery. The war at the Cape of Good Hope, still threatens to be expensive and protracted. The British troops have shown great gallantry in action, and the greatest endurance and even cheerfulness under the severe fatigue inseparable from the nature of the country, and the wide range embraced by the operations. But they are few in number; the policy of the insurgents is to avoid as much as possible a general engagement; the frontier is too extended to be effectually protected by stationary posts; the troops, therefore, are necessarily harrassed by constant patrol duty, and with no more decisive result than an occasional skirmish, in which four, five, or six Caffres are put _hors de combat_. The directors of the Manchester Commercial Association, and of the Chamber of Commerce, continue to prosecute their endeavors to encourage the cultivation of cotton in India. In the early part of this year, letters were received by the association that fresh New-Orleans cotton seed was scarce in the districts of Tinnivelly and Coimbetore, and other parts of the Madras territory; and fearing that the India Board, if appealed to, might not be sufficiently prompt in supplying that deficiency. Mr. John Peal, one of the members of the association, has imported at his own risk thirty tons of this seed, and placed it at the disposal of the Court of Directors. A California has been discovered in an interior county of New South Wales. The _Sydney Morning Herald_ of May 20, quotes from the _Bathurst Free Press_ of a few days previous, an article which describes "a tremendous excitement" in the town of Bathurst and the surrounding district of the counties Bathurst, Roxburg, and Westmoreland, on the discovery that "the country from the mountain ranges to an indefinite extent in the interior is one immense gold field."