make a short voyage home by the new cut across the Isthmus of Darien. A second and not less important advantage will be the great impulse given to our manufactures from the number of steam-engines that must necessarily be employed in removing and towing such immense masses. Perkins's apparatus will be used, and by navigating the vessels by Carbonari from the neighbourhood of Mount Vesuvius, who are accustomed to coals and explosions, it is calculated that a pressure of fifteen hundred atmospheres to the square inch may be safely experimented, at which charge an engine of the smallest dimensions will attain such a prodigious concentration of power, as tò drag an iceberg of a mile in circumference, supposing the requisite impulsion and velocity can be communicated to it, at the rate of twenty miles an hour. As the whole of the shares are not yet sold, a few subscribers may still be taken in upon application at the proper office. A second undertaking, not less gigantic in its conception or beneficial in its object, has been suggested by the following portion of an ancient Milesian astronomical hymn, entitled "Langolee." "Long life to the moon, for a noble sweet creature, That serves us with lamplight each night in the dark; This valuable hint is likely to be realized by an ingenious application of Dr. Black's theory of latent heat. It is well known that all bodies contain a certain portion of caloric, which they give out by pressure; almost every substance becomes warm by friction, cold metals may be hammered till they are hot, and we have now a familiar illustration of this principle in the new instantaneous-light machines, which produce fire by simple pressure of the atmosphere. Independently of the quantity of this subtle element with which the moon, in common with all matter, is pervaded, she must have absorbed, almost to saturation, the ardent rays of the sun which have been playing upon her surface for such a succession of ages, and we have thus an immense reservoir of quiescent moonshine ready to be reconverted into active sunshine, if adequate means can be found for its expression. To effect this purpose it is proposed to raise in patent balloons a sufficient number of hydraulic presses to compel the moon to give out caloric in the proportions that may be required. From accurate calculations it appears that a sufficient quantity may be easily procured to double the attraction of that planet upon the ocean, and of course to enable ships to work double tides-an incalculable benefit to our commerce. converging the rays into a focus, and directing them to particular ponds and lakes, their temperature may be raised to the boiling point, or 212 of Fahrenheit, which will effect an important saving in the making of tea and all culinary processes, to say nothing of the improvement of the general health by such extensive and natural warm baths. From the known influence of this luminary upon lunatics, some unfavourable symptoms may at first be manifested by our amateur actors, craniolo By gists, writers of Visions of Judgment, followers of Joanna Southcote, believers in Prince Hohenlohe's miracles, March hares, and holders of Spanish, Poyais, and Columbian Stock; but on the other hand, the additional heat will enable us to grow at least double the quantity of cabbage, an important solace to artisans in general, but more particularly to our tailors. Compensation must of course be made to our writers of Sonnets to the Moon, who will be cut short of their whole fourteen lines if they cannot apostrophise her as pale as Cynthia, and dissert upon her chaste ray and mild lustre ; but this expense will be more than repaid by the treasures that will doubtless be discovered in that repertory of all lost things, from the wits of Orlando down to the wit of Don Juan. The Lord of the lantern and bush, who has so long stood in his own light, will be let down by a parachute and exhibited at Bullock's in Piccadilly, as the Man out of the Moon, from which it is expected to procure a sufficient revenue to raise the wind for the balloons. Many ingenious mechanicians entertain serious doubts as to the feasibility of the third scheme, for which patents have been taken out, though I cannot myself see any scientific grounds for their misgivings. Volcanoes are now universally admitted to owe their projectile power to steam. Water from the surface of the earth, or from some of the caverns of the deep, comes in contact with the subterranean fires, producing such an instantaneous expansion of vapour that in its efforts to escape, it tears open the surface and carries all before it, thus forming a natural steam-engine. Hitherto its tremendous power, being left to its own irregular energies, has either ended in smoke, or produced terror, havock, and destruction, by desolating plains and overwhelming cities. It is high time to stop these mischievous pranks, and avail ourselves of that stupendous engine which Nature herself has built, and offers us ready made and for nothing, even supplying an inexhaustible reservoir of fuel without one shilling expense. It is proposed to fix an apparatus over the crater of Vesuvius, so as to convert the mountain into a regular steam-engine, turning a river into one of the smaller orifices to generate the vapour in any quantities, and of course providing safety-valves for its escape after a certain pressure, which, as the mountain itself forms the boiler, may be carried to many thousand atmospheres upon the square inch. The direction of this incalculable power, which will give the shareholders the command of the whole world, is a matter for future consideration; but it is proposed in the first instance to make Vesuvius instrumental to the complete excavation of Herculaneum and Pompeii, which seems but fair, as it was the sole cause of their destruction, and to project all the excavated rubbish into the Hellespont, so as to stop the passage of the Dardanelles to the Turkish fleet, and thus operate a favourable diversion for the Greeks. The projector is decidedly of opinion that by this enormous engine he can, if necessary, stop the diurnal motion of the earth upon its axisan invaluable security to our Asiatic possessions, as in the event of a mutiny or revolution in that quarter we could keep them in the dark for six months, and so ruin them in the cost of candles; or renew the days of Phaeton, by scorching them in the sun until they allowed us to rule the roast. A certain theorist has suggested that we might even raise the earth nearer to the sun, provided it was previously lightened by embarking in balloons all our heaviest and most bulky articles--such as the History of Brazil, the Court of Aldermen, Busby's Lucretius, Louis Dixhuit, all our tomes of controversial divinity, the elephant at Exeter Change, &c. &c.-but I confess I am disposed to consider this scheme as the chimæra of a visionary. Others may perhaps be disposed to pronounce a similar judgment upon the fourth project, which will, however, be very shortly in a course of actual experiment. It appears by the last papers from America that a Colonel Sims has proposed to the President to discover a new world, and has demanded a squadron for the purpose. This terra incognita he maintains to be situated within our own globe-that the old earth, in fact, has a young one in its stomach; and the arguments by which he supports this strange position are both numerous and plausible. If Columbus, by merely consulting a map of the world, became convinced that the equipoise of the system required a counter-ponderant continent in the southern ocean, the colonel insists that we may à fortiori conclude that the earth must contain another within it. In the first place, he observes, that Nature is ever economical of her means, creating nothing in vain; but that if we presume the whole contents of our planet, which is nearly eight thousand miles in diameter, to be solid, there would not only be an incredible waste of materials, but that the weight of such a prodigious mass would infallibly drag us out of our sphere in the system of the universe, and precipitate us into the blind abysses of space. M. Dupin calculates the weight of the great pyramid at above ten millions of tons; yet what is this huge pile, enormous as it is, compared to a single mountain? and what are all the mountains and seas upon the surface of the earth, compared to its cubic contents ? By supposing it to be hollow, its buoyancy in space becomes no longer inexplicable, and the principal difficulty that remains is to discover the door of entrance, which the colonel confidently pronounces to be situated at the North Pole. It is conjectured that all the mountains of the undiscovered land are formed of loadstone, and that the position of the aperture leading to them occasions the polarity of the needle. Its name occasioned some little difficulty, the term new world being already applied, the new world being deemed tautologous; Simsia was rejected as not being classical, Simia as exposed to a ludicrous perversion, Subterranea as not strictly accurate, the country being rather within than beneath our own, on which account it was finally resolved to term it Interranea. A loan has already been raised for the new government, and the Interranean five per cents. are quoted at 96, having been done at a 100. A bookseller in the Row has given a considerable sum for the copy-right of the Voyage, and the public of both Continents (who now discover the appropriateness of that designation since they contain another within them) are looking with the utmost anxiety for the results of this interesting voyage. H. FELLOW TRAVELLERS. NO. II. Ir may not always be possible, in the formation of travelling alliances, to foresee that opposition of tastes and opinions which I have described as tending, in various ways, to damp enjoyment and awaken disgust; but the inconvenience arising from a discrepancy of pursuits may generally be anticipated. I have therefore avoided the mineralogist, with his two-pound hammer and his budget of broken stones, looking as if he had carried off one of Mr. M'Adam's roads; I have shunned the botanist, who would lead me through miles of marsh to meet with a nondescript duckweed, or starve me on a barren crag while he completed his set of lichens, or fix me a whole day in a hedge-alehouse, that he might study a scarce kind of houseleek: and I have generally kept aloof from all those ardent travellers who pursue any study or amusement so indiscreetly and with so little prudent respect of persons, times, or places, as to procure themselves a mortifying notoriety wherever they appear. A very well-meaning enthusiast of this class is my respected acquaintance Mrs. Sarah Clackmannan, a lady of great literary attainments but unbounded simplicity, who makes it her boast to study human nature from the drawing-room to the cottage. Every journey she takes is, to her, a sentimental one, and the choicest results of her observation are from time to time collected into elegant volumes and printed for private distribution; a harmless indulgence of vanity in a maiden of large fortune and of "a certain age." In the drawing-room her peculiarities are understood and humoured; but the cottage which she has visited as a stranger (for where she is known her approach is welcome notwithstanding her eccentricity of conduct) never receives her a second time without marked uneasiness; and very often, if she has been descried at a distance, every inmate is gone to the fields by the time she taps at the door. Her custom is to establish herself in the midst of the rural family, and interrogate every person in downright terms upon such matters as appear to her most interesting; the men upon their village feuds, their amours, jealousies, pecuniary losses, and the faux-pas of their female relations; the women upon their matrimonial expectations, their rivalries, and their disappointments in love. Unhappily, nature has not formed her for the arts of insinuation; her bodily proportions approach rather to those of the elk than of the antelope; in other words, she is a large, bony person, about six feet high; she steps up a staircase like the statue in Don Giovanni; her voice says in all its tones "We are a giantess ;" her laughter might be supposed the cackle of Sindbad's roc; her condolence, the moaning of Glumdalclitch for the loss of Grildrig; and when she adopts a soothing tone, it is as if one should make love through a speaking-trumpet. Meeting her once at a watering-place, I was ensnared into an acceptance of her offer to carry me in her pony-chaise through some of the neighbouring villages. At the first of these she began her accustomed visits to the cottages; and she questioned an innocent-looking girl, the parish-clerk's daughter, in such a manner that I became uncomfortable at the third query, and in five minutes was obliged, from mere embarrassment, to stroll into the street. By and by I had great difficulty to dissuade her from alighting at a house where it was evident no modest 1 woman ought to be seen, nor indeed any man who valued appearances. At last groups began to assemble at the doors and gaze after us, and I overheard some talk of a man in woman's clothes; my fair companion asked me what the people said; I muttered something about a typhus fever, and Mrs. Clackmannan, who is afraid of every thing, but particularly of infectious diseases, wheeled her pony about and fled home with as much alacrity as I could desire. I cannot forget, among the fellow-travellers who have exposed me and themselves to an unwelcome share of public notice, a gentleman who once accompanied me from Lausanne, when I had occasion to leave that city in considerable haste. We were setting out before daybreak, in a very dark morning. All at once it struck my companion that he had never paid a visit to the celebrated house and garden in which Mr. Gibbon completed his Roman History. Without explaining himself to any one, he took up an ostler 's lantern, and very quietly walked down the street to Gibbon's house, where he made such vigorous application to the bells and doors as roused not only the inhabitants of this classical abode, but their neighbours on every side. To make himself understood by the quaking porter, who at last answered his summons, was an affair of more time than the emergency allowed, and the bold Briton, first putting an écu into the man's hand and desiring him not to be uneasy, marched familiarly through the house, let himself into the garden, took two turns on the terrace, examined the summerhouse with his lantern, and came back well satisfied with his exploit, and very indifferent to the opinions of some hundred lookers on, who were gathered together in the streets and at the windows, part of them terrified, part angry, part amused, but all willing to put the worst construction upon this outrage of the mad English. It required the sacrifice of a few more écus to abridge our explanation with the police on this unseasonable tribute to departed genius, and we did not escape from Lausanne till it was light enough for the saucy citizens to laugh in our faces. Again, in the course of the same journey, we had fixed our residence for the evening in one of the soberest Swiss towns, Lucern; my companion was, by some accident, separated from me, and I presently found him, to my infinite shame and consternation, shouting at the highest pitch of his voice in a court of the Ursuline convent. When he had finished this exercise, he laughed several times with great energy, after which he changed his place and shrieked, then barked like a dog, and was at last beginning to thunder out a stave of "Old Towler," when I recovered presence of mind enough to lay hands upon him and cut short his amusement. Several domestics of the convent had been gazing at him in silent alarm, but without daring to approach, as they naturally supposed him to be some raging demoniac, or a person just seized with hydrophobia. I enquired what ailed him, and if he were determined to bring the whole town upon us?" Do not interrupt me," he said, (and began to crow like a cock,) "I am only trying for an echo. It is very odd, I am sure I read in-I don't know whose travels, that there was an echo about the Ursuline convent in this city, which gave five responses. But these things are very hard to find sometimes. I once shouted three days at an old abbey in Ireland before 1 could make it answer. The people were so ignorant they knew nothing about it. But, as you say, perhaps I am in a mis |