The head of a Hippopotamus has recently been brought to England, with all the flesh about it, in a high state of preservation. This amphibious animal was harpooned while in combat with a crocodile, in a lake in the interior of Africa. The head measures near four feet long, and eight feet in circumference; the jaws open two feet wide, and the cutting-teeth of which it has four in each jaw, are above a foot long, and four inches in circumference. Its ears are not bigger than a terrier's, and are much about the same shape. This formidable and terrific creature, when full-grown, measures about 17 feet long from the extremity of the snout to the insertion of the tail, above 16 feet in circumference round the body, and stands above 7 feet high. It runs with astonishing swiftness for its great bulk, at the bottom of lakes and rivers, but not with as much ease on land. When excited, it puts forth its full strength, which is prodigious. "I have seen," says a mariner, as we find it in Dampier, "one of these animals open its jaws, and seizing a boat between its teeth, at once bite and sink it to the bottom. I have seen it on another occasion place itself under one of our boats, and rising under it, overset it, with six men who were in it, but who, however, happily received no other injury." At one time it was not uncommon in the Nile, but now it is no where to be found in that river, except above the cataracts. * * * * * THE COSMOPOLITE. A CHAPTER OF BULLS. I confess it is what the English call _a bull_, in the expression, though the sense be manifest enough.--POPE. We are friends to the exposition of the weak sides of great men, inasmuch as it reads them a valuable lesson on their own infallibility, and tends to lower the molehills of conceit that are raised in the world as stumbling-blocks along every road of petty ambition. It would, however, be but a sorry toil for the most cynical critic to illustrate these vagaries otherwise than so many slips and trippings of the tongue and pen, to which all men are liable in their unguarded moments--from Homer to Anacreon Moore, or Demosthenes to Mr. Brougham. Our course is rather that of a good-humoured _exposé_, the worst effect of which will be to raise a laugh at the expense of poor humanity, or a merited smile at our own dulness and mistaken sense of the ridiculous. First, of the ancient Poets, who make departed spirits know things past and to come, yet ignorant of things present. Agamemnon foretels what should happen to Ulysses, yet ignorantly inquires what is become of his own son. The ghosts are afraid of swords in Homer, yet Sibylla tells Aeneas in Virgil, that the then habit of spirits was beyond the force of weapons. The spirits put off their malice with their bodies; and Caesar and Pompey accord in Latin hell; yet Ajax in Homer, endures not a conference with Ulysses.