There are few public men who have held so many important public trusts with such universal popularity.  The liberality of the General’s views, his sagacity in council, and above all, the purity of his patriotism and the unselfish nature of his administrations, are claims upon the gratitude of South America that will command wider recognition in times to come even than they obtain at the present time.

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THE CELL OF THE BEE.—­Hive-bees not only differ from wasps in building their comb with material secreted by themselves, but they also differ in the mode in which they construct their cells.  All the wasps which I have hitherto described have their tiers of cells single:  now, the honeycomb is invariably double.  And, moreover, whilst all these wasps and hornets arrange their cells horizontally, the bee arranges its comb vertically.

I think it needless to enter into very minute descriptions of the honeycomb, as all my readers are doubtless perfectly familiar with its appearance.  Each cell, like that made by the wasp, is hexagonal, and the cells are put together in a manner which secures the greatest strength for the least possible material.  Kirby and Spence state that “Maraldi found that the great angles were generally 10 degrees 28 minutes, and the smaller ones 70 degrees 32 minutes:  and M Koenig, an eminent mathematician, calculated that they ought to be 109 degrees 26 minutes, and 70 degrees 34 minutes, to obtain the greatest strength with any given amount of material.”  Lord Brougham states that he has discovered that the bee is right and the mathematician was wrong, and that other mathematicians with whom he has communicated agree with him, and have detected the source of the error.—­Instinct and Reason.

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DISASTERS of life, like convulsions of the earth, lay bare the primary strata of human nature:  they expose to us elements we might forget, or suppose to be transmuted by the alchemy of civilization.  In this respect they are, like those geological expositions, useful lessons and mementoes to the lawmaker.

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ORIENTAL CARAVANS.

The hadj, or pilgrim-caravan, pursues its route principally by night, and by torchlight.  Moving about four o’clock in the afternoon, it travels without stopping till an hour or two after the sun is above the horizon.  The extent and luxury of those pilgrimages, in ancient times especially, almost exceed belief.  Haroun, of Arabian Nights’ celebrity, performed the pilgrimage no less than nine times, and with a grandeur becoming the commander of the faithful.  The caravan of the mother of the last of the Abassides numbered one hundred and twenty thousand camels.  Nine hundred camels were employed merely in bearing the wardrobe of one of the caliphs, and others carried snow with them to cool their sherbet.  Nor was