The tea was served out of a majestic delft tea-pot, ornamented with paintings of fat little Dutch shepherds and shepherdesses, tending pigs with boats sailing in the air, and houses built in the clouds, and sundry other ingenious Dutch fantasies. The beaux distinguished themselves by their adroitness in replenishing this pot from a huge copper tea-kettle, which would have made the pigmy macaronies of these degenerate days sweat merely to look at it. To sweeten the beverage, a lump of sugar was laid beside each cup, and the company alternately nibbled and sipped with great decorum, until an improvement was introduced by a shrewd and economic old lady, which was, to suspend a large lump directly over the tea-table by a string from the ceiling, so that it could be swung from mouth to mouth-an ingenious expedient, which is still kept up by some families in Albany, but which prevails, without exception, in Communipaw, Bergen, Flat Bush, and all our uncontaminated Dutch villages.

At these primitive tea-parties the utmost propriety and dignity of deportment prevailed. No flirting nor coquetting-no gambling of old ladies, nor hoyden chattering and romping of young ones-no self-satisfied struttings of wealthy gentlemen with their brains in their pockets, nor amusing conceits and monkey divertissements of smart young gentlemen with no brains at all. On the contrary, the young ladies seated themselves demurely in their rush-bottomed chairs, and knit their own woollen stockings, nor ever opened their lips excepting to say yah Mynheer or yah ya Vrouw to any question that was asked them, behaving in all things like decent well-educated damsels. As to the gentlemen, each of them tranquilly smoked his pipe, and seemed lost in contemplation of the blue and white tiles with which the fireplaces were decorated, wherein sundry passages of Scripture were piously portrayed. Tobit and his dog figured to great advantage; Haman swung conspicuously on his gibbet; and Jonah appeared most manfully bouncing out of the whale, like Harlequin through a barrel of fire.

The parties broke up without noise and without confusion. They were carried home by their own carriages-that is to say, by the vehicles nature had provided them, excepting such of the wealthy as could afford to keep a wagon. The gentlemen gallantly attended their fair ones to their respective abodes, and took leave of them with a hearty smack at the door; which, as it was an established piece of etiquette, done in perfect simplicity and honesty of heart, occasioned no scandal at that time, nor should it at the present; if our great-grandfathers approved of the custom, it would argue a great want of reverence in their descendants to say a word against it.

SIMPLE INTEREST.

(1) Find the interest on £635 17s. 6d. for 8 years 9 months at 3 per cent. per annum.

(2) What will £830 amount to in 5 years 3 months at 4 per cent. per annum?

(3) What will the half-yearly dividend on £7500 in the 3 per cents. amount to?

(4) What principal must be invested to produce £350 per annum at 5 per cent.?

(5) If my half-yearly dividend in the 3 per cents. is £142 3s. 9d., what amount of that stock do I hold?

(6) In what time will £520 amount to £1000 at 5 per cent.? (7) What principal must I invest at 2 per cent. to produce £100 per annum?

DISTRIBUTION OF THUNDER-STORMS, HURRICANES, AND EARTHQUAKES.

THE explanation of these phenomena, as physical facts, belongs to the departments of meteorology and geology as bodies of science. Their distribution and greater or less intensity and frequency in different regions of the earth, with reference to the local conditions and peculiarities on which these depend, however, form part of our present subject. As electricity is accumulated during the evaporation, and discharged in lightning during the rapid and copious condensation of moisture, we should expect to find thunder-storms most frequent in those regions where, owing to any general or special cause, the condensation of vapour is frequent and sudden; and least so where moisture is most copiously and continually abstracted from the surface by evaporation, with but little return in rain. And such is the case; for it is observed that in those parts of the ocean over which the trade-winds sweep, thunder-storms are

very unfrequent, while in the zone of the equatorial rains from 4° to 9° North latitude, where the first and most copious discharge of the up-cast vapour takes place, and where the clouds form rapidly, and hurry to their resolution at regular hours of the day in rain, electric discharges are exceedingly frequent and violent. So also the setting in of the rainy monsoon, in the monsoon countries, is ushered in with violent thunder-storms, and so in certain localities where, during certain seasons, and at regular hours of the day, clouds collect and rain falls copiously (as in the mountainous parts of Jamaica, and in certain valleys leading off from the Lake of Como, in Italy), thunderstorms occur daily during the hottest season.

In the Polar regions, both arctic and antarctic, thunder-storms are of very rare occurrence; a sufficiently copious supply and sudden condensation of vapour being wanting. M. Geisecke, who resided six years in Greenland, only heard thunder once. Thunder-storms, too, are unknown in the rainless districts of Peru and in California, under the lee of the coast ranges of mountains, which, at the same time that they condense the clouds, attract and carry off the atmospheric electricity. Generally speaking, they are more frequent on mountains than on plains. About forty per annum are reckoned to occur in Greece and Italy, and about twenty-four on the coasts of the Atlantic and in Germany. In the United States they are more frequent and fatal than in Europe.

Violent gales of wind, amounting to what may be called hurricanes, occur pretty generally everywhere except on the equatorial seas; but in the Steppes in the interior of Asia, and in the Siberian plains at the foot of the Altai, as well as among those and the Tangnou mountains, as described by Mr. Atkinson, they appear to be singularly frequent and furious. The true hurricane, cyclone, or typhoon, however, is restricted to very special regions, and its production (as explained in Meteorology) is the result of conditions requiring the ascent of locally-heated columns of air or vapour, with a free in-draft from all sides. Accordingly they are limited at sea to those situations where (under the necessary conditions as to latitude) currents of heated water exist. Where (as in the Gulf Stream) the current is limited in breadth by a well-defined boundary, within which the water is very much warmer than the sea on either side, they follow, with what may well be called considerable precision, the general course of the current: describing parabolic curves in their progress, having the island of Bermuda for their focus. In the Indian and China seas they appear in the neighbourhood of the warm currents; but these currents being much more diffuse and ill-defined than in the case of the Gulf Stream, the region over which they

prevail is correspondingly ill-defined; and in the China sea this is still more markedly the case, though bearing a very obvious relation to the warm water currents skirting the east coasts of Asia.

Earthquakes, of course, habitually infest countries adjacent to active volcanoes, such as Sicily and Calabria in Europe, and the neighbourhood of the Andes in South America, where they are stated by Humboldt to be so frequent that their occurrence, unless severe, is no more regarded than that of a shower in Europe. Java, Sumatra, Japan, and the islands of the Eastern Archipelago, are also exceedingly subject to such visitations. But, besides these, there are districts which, for geological reasons less apparent, being out of the vicinity of any active volcanic vent, are infested with frequent earthquakes. They may, however, be for the most part traced for an origin to mountain chains in which either unequivocal evidence of long extinct, and therefore possibly still dormant, volcanic power can be adduced, or which stand out as grand original axes of upheaval. Thus the whole of Upper India, and a large portion of Western India, from the Himalayas to the mouth of the Indus, is very liable to earthquakes, evidently referable to the Himalayan range as an axis of emanation, and proving clearly that the forces which originally upheaved these mountain masses are still active, though their energy may perhaps be expended in maintaining them at their present elevation. Between 1800 and 1842, no less than 162 earthquakes have been recorded in these districts. In 1843, 23 were observed, and since that time 4 or 5 annually. In the peninsula of India they seldom occur below 15° N. latitude.

Traceable to the neighbourhood of volcanoes not quite extinct, or which, within historic times, have shown signs of activity, we find Greece, Turkey, Asia Minor, Syria, and Palestine, with the district adjacent to Elbruz and the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus, noticeable as earthquake regions. Antioch was the centre of one of the most terrible and destructive earthquakes on record in A.D. 526, and Syria was visited no longer ago than 1837 with an earthquake extending over 4,000 or 5,000 square miles of country.

The south-eastern districts of North America, along the ranges of the Appalachian and Alleghany Mountains, are liable to frequent earthquakes. More than a hundred have been noticed in the last two centuries, which, to judge from the direction habitually taken by their oscillatory motion, would seem to owe their origin to some deep-seated centre of action beneath the line of the great Mexican volcanoes. By one of the more recent of these, the whole valley of the Lower Missis

sippi was violently agitated, and its levels permanently altered. Lastly, quite beyond all reference to any reasonably distant source of volcanic power, we find a district of very limited extent in the county of Perth, near Comrie, in Scotland, where a year seldom passes without a shock, though never severe enough to do any material damage.* In the Cape districts of South Africa, too, still more remote from any such centre of action, slight shocks are far from unfrequent. Generally speaking, what may be called the earthquake belt of Europe is conterminous, or nearly so, with the zone of newer igneous formation and extinct volcanoes.

On the other hand, vast regions, chiefly extensive alluvial plains, or the low districts which extend out to great distances from the principal mountain chains, enjoy an immunity from earthquake shocks, as, for instance, America east of the Andes, and the great plains on the north-east of Europe and the north of Asia. Where historical evidence is deficient, we have often proof, from the continued upright position of ancient monuments, both natural and artificial, of the absence of at least any great earthquake since their erection, or since their attaining their present form, and that, too, in situations where such complete exemption could hardly have been expected. Thus in Mexico, on the Mimbre River, near El Paso on the Rio Grande, we find described and figured by Bartlett, rocks, which could not possibly have resisted even a very inconsiderable shock. On the west coast of Greenland (much of which is of volcanic origin) the same conclusion may be drawn from the existence of a remarkable slender pillar of rock 200 feet in height, figured by Dr. Kane under the name of Tennyson's Monument. An ancient column in the country bordering on the Indus, said to have been erected by Alexander the Great as the landmark of his Indian conquests, has been in like manner appealed to in favour of an exceptional degree of stability in its site in a region generally much subject to agitation. Pompey's Pillar affords similar evidence for Egypt during the last eighteen centuries, though its prostrate obelisks testify no less distinctly to earlier concussions. The Pierre Botte, in the Isle of Mauritius, offers a similar testimony. From the immense weight and singularly slender support of the block on its summit (perched on a pillar of rock 1,500 feet above the sea), it must have been precipitated by a very moderate shock iven to its base.

In 1860 a shock of an earthquake was felt in several places in Kent, sufficiently powerful to set bells ringing, and to throw down loose articles in dwelling-houses.