ting-needles, with which they are now sup-etrated with one of these points, would live plied by the civilized traders. These are but about two minutes; a monkey or peccary sharpened at the end and feathered with cot- would live about ten minutes; and a tiger, ton, which just fills the orifice of the tube, a cow, or a man, not over fifteen minutes. and steadies the arrow's flight. The arrows Incredible almost as these statements were, are pushed in at the end held to the mouth, I nevertheless am induced to believe, from and blown through with such force and such what I afterwards learned from other abunprecision that they will strike a man's body dant information, that they were very near at sixty yards, or the body of a squirrel or a the truth. One thing is certain, that death small bird on the top of the highest tree. ensues almost instantaneously when the cirThe ends of these arrows, for an inch or culation of the blood conveys the poison to more, are dipped into a liquid poison, which the heart, and it therefore results that the seems to be known to most of the tribes in time, instead of being reducible to any exthose regions, and which appears to be fatal act measure, depends upon the blood-vesto all that it touches. This liquid poison sels into which the poison is injected. If dries in a few moments on the point of the the arrow enters the jugular vein, for inarrow, and there is carried for years with- stance, the animal, no matter what size, out the least deterioration. He explained would have but a moment to live! to me that a duck, or parrot, or turkey, pen METEOROLOGY-M. Liandier and the Baron de Portal, who have been constant observers of the scintillations of the stars for some years, and the former of whom has recently presented a memoir to the Academy of Sciences at Paris on the subject, have made a discovery which promises to be of great value as a weather prognostic, in addition to the barometer. Taking a telescope, and turning it on a first magnitude star well above the horizon, and throwing the instrument out of focus, an amplified image of the star will be obtained; this image should be about three-quarters of an inch in (apparent) diameter, and if the object glass be made of pure material and properly adjusted, the image will be perfectly round, and composed of concentric rings, the light of which, owing to the scintillation of the star, will be continually varying. On this image, as a background, the appearances which constitute the indications referred to are to be observed. First, appear shadows more or less dark, which dance round the borders of the disc, and finally pass on and cross it. This appearance is caused by clouds in the vesicular state, and from the rate and direction of their passage over the image of the star, the velocity and direction of the currents of air in the higher regions of the atmosphere, more or less charged with moisture, may be learned. But this is not all: from time to time a black point will traverse the image; this has, hitherto, been regarded by telescopic observers, as a sign of fatigued eyesight; but this explanation can no longer be received, and M. de Portal attributes it to the formation of drops of rain in the atmosphere previous to their fall. The facts already arrived at may be thus summed up : 1. On the magnified image of the star, diffuse illuminations, due to scintillation, are first seen, then vibrations and waves, more or less brilliant, shaded or colored, which appear to spread in all directions. 2. If these vibrations be carefully studied, they will be found to traverse the disc in a constant direction, and to be more agitated on leaving than on entering it. 3. These vibrations prove that currents of air are in motion, in the direction they indicate, in the higher regions of the atmosphere. 4. In the interval of some minutes, hours, or days, according to the unsettled or settled state of the weather, these waves will pass from the N.E. to the S.E., and oscillate back again; or else turn through the S. W. and N. to regain their original direction; or again oscillating backwards from the N. regain it through the E. or W. ences. From The Examiner. CHARLES KNIGHT. The English Cyclopædia of Arts and Sci- Quarterly Magazine, established in 1823, being the first publication that marked Mr. Knight's establishment in London. Associated from the first with the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, it was Mr. Charles Knight who projected and submitted to that society the design of its "British Almanac and Companion;" to this day the best almanac published in England, and the WE cannot speak of contemporary litera- most effective antagonist to the ignorance ture within the first month of untaxed paper and fraud of the astrological almanac-makwithout cordial and emphatic recognition of ers, who in those days had the ear of the the long and steadily sustained labors of Mr. common people and whose impudent trading Charles Knight. He, more than any man upon superstition is not yet entirely out of of our day, has been a victim of the tax on date. In 1830, when misguided mobs were knowledge now happily repealed, and it is burning the machinery that found its way he who has done more than any man to turn into use, Mr. Knight's little volume on the the current of cheap literature into whole- Results of Machinery was planned to diffuse some channels, thereby making the repeal better knowledge, and was very widely read. of the paper duty a boon of almost unmixed It was soon followed by his popular work on good to the million. Mr. Knight completed" Capital and Labor" and the "Rights of a few weeks ago, and within the rules of the Industry." Gratefully we should look back, tax, the two-and-twenty volumes of that ex- from this day when good and cheap journals cellent English Cyclopædia, into which the vie one with another in diffusing innocent "Penny Cyclopædia" has now been recast. amusement and welcome instruction, to the Its present form was imposed on him by the days of thirty years ago, when there was no paper duty, which made it entirely hopeless All the Year Round, no Chambers's Journal, to project a new edition of the "Penny Cy- no rivalry of publishers to overwhelm a willclopædia" itself. The revised issue was ing public with their cheap and wholesome planned therefore in four divisions. Each is literary fare, and when the forced beginning a complete work, having distinct claims on of what now appears to be so natural was a large special class of readers, while the four made against much discouragement by Mr. together now constitute a general Cyclopæ- Charles Knight in the establishment and dia singularly accurate and full, of which the management of his famous Penny Magazine. two-and-twenty volumes-eight given to With woodcuts not only attractive and inArts and Sciences, six to Biography, four to forming, but at that time wonders among Geography, and four to Natural History-cheap literature for their good art in drawcost only twelve pounds. Now that its reprints may be on untaxed paper, this admirable work and others that preceded or are concurrent with it will, we trust, bring their late worldly reward to one who, having been for forty years a most unwearied laborer for the instruction of the public, toils yet with the determined vigor of youth when his years are threescore and ten. With the "Plain Englishman," a cheap and wholesome miscellany, revised and published forty years since in antagonism to the frivolous and scurrilous flying sheets that were then cheap and popular, Mr. Charles Knight began a career in which he has persevered with a manly determination to this hour. That miscellany was planned and published, we believe, at Windsor; Knight's ing and wood-cutting, with sound thought also and wit and knowledge in it, for which able writers had been fairly paid, Mr. Knight's magazine was sold for a penny under the heavy discouragement of a paper duty then no less than threepence on the pound. It was reduced to three half-pence in 1837. The paper duty at last killed the Penny Magazine. After a long struggle Mr. Knight has himself said, in a little pamphlet to which we shall presently refer, that in 1846 he was obliged to retire from the Penny Magazine, although it had a sale of five-andtwenty thousand copies. He could not compete with the cheap issues of trash, ill written and ill printed on bad paper, when to the cost of a thousand a year for good literature there was added the tax of six hun dred a year upon the paper of that Penny | being two reams, or thirty-five pounds of Magazine alone. paper. The edition consumed 50,000 reams, But Mr. Knight's work, always to the one having a total weight of £1,750,000. Of good end, was incessant. Under the title of this weight of paper £700,000 paid duty "A Store of Knowledge for All Readers," before 1857 at 3d. per pound; the rest paid -his care throughout was rather for ALL the reduced duty of three half-pence just readers than for the few,-he published in abolished. The tax, therefore, upon that 1841 a collection of treatises in various de- single work was, so far, £15,312. But the partments of knowledge by several authors. tax fell also to the extent of another £437 It was in the same year that he began the on reprints and balancings of stock. The issue of those papers illustrative of "Lon- tax on the wrappers to the monthly parts don," which, collected into six large volumes, amounted to £500, and on the milled boards adorned with pictures, form a standard rep- used in binding there was a paper tax that ertory of pleasant information that connects involved loss of another £300. Here was historical and literary knowledge with the a demand by the Excise of £16,500 for a Englishman's daily walks about the streets work planned so generously in the public of his own capital. interests that on free paper it could only He was then working, also, with a fine en- have paid its expenses. Mr. Knight was thusiasm, at the great English poet; had actually fined to that extent for his enterbegun to scatter his fresh copies of Shak-prise; and to much more than that extent. speare through the land in a pictorial edi- He calculated-and we trust now that the tion, and had made a praiseworthy attempt duty is removed, within a year or two if no to connect home interests with the poet him- protective policy be compassed by the paperself by a carefully studied imagination of his makers, to see his calculation verified-that actual life. While working thus he began the reaction of the tax on trade and prices in 1843 to spend, as a publisher, energy and increased the first cost of producing the capital upon a new form of cheap literature material by a fourth. The sale of the “Cy-the "shilling volumes," which for one clopædia" began at 55,000 and averaged hundred and twenty-six successive weeks 20,000 under the low duty. Had the duty gave every week a new and cheap volume to not been lowered the enterprise must have the public by some writer of sound ability. been abandoned when in mid-career. As it Several of the works contributed to that se-was, the interest of the paper duty paid on a ries have earned a standard character, and Mr. Knight's own contribution to the series of a life of Caxton-he also supplied a Volume of Varieties-was not a publication that will be readily forgotten. While this was being done the "Penny Cyclopædia" was in course of issue. Commenced in the first week of 1833, it was not completed, with its supplement, till 1846. Although nominally issued under the superintendence of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, upon Mr. Charles Knight alone fell all its pecuniary responsibility. In 1850, when about to commence that modified re-issue which was a few weeks ago brought to its close, Mr. Knight showed, in a little pamphlet to which we have already referred, how heavily the paper tax had weighed upon his enterprise. He especially referred to the "Penny Cyclopædia" in that pamphlet called "The Struggles of a Book." A Copy of the Cyclopædia and supplement contained, he said, 15,764 pages, large back stock with a falling demand involved loss of another £3,000. Under the higher duty it needed a sale of 36,000, under the lower duty of 30,000, to give the "Penny Cyclopædia" commercial success. As the sale really was, had there been no tax on the paper the work would have paid its expenses, leaving no profit, but no loss to its conductor. Mr. Knight, therefore, paid to Government, out of his own means, the tremendous fine of between twenty and thirty thousand pounds for an enterprise that should have brought him wealth as well as honor. Of an abridgment of this Cyclopædia, as the "Popular Cyclopædia" in twelve volumes, fifteen thousand were sold. Determined to bring knowledge to the public door, Mr. Knight fixed upon this "Encyclopædia” a price that, as the same pamphlet tells us, would, under the paper duty, give him a return for his outlay of 1 1-2 per cent if a thousand copies were sold annually. In twenty years, Mr. Knight then urged as an | whatever else we might cite would show the argument against that tax on knowledge, he same mind working, with an energy that had spent eighty thousand pounds on copy- few men have equalled, in the same direcright and editorial labor, and fifty thousand tion. For the last ten years Mr. Knight pounds in paper duty. has been working at the revised issue of his How little Mr. Charles Knight was to be Cyclopædia, which has grown somewhat deterred from a right course by such obstruc- beyond its first intention into a worthy suction the rest of his labors show. He was cessor, instead of a weaker reproduction, of still working at the national poet, issuing the work that the tax killed. But during his "Library Edition of Shakspeare;" re- the same period, or during the last five years printing Shakspeare again in his cheap of it, Mr. Knight has been laboring also at "Cabinet Edition," and again in one cheap the magnum opus of his literary life. His volume as the "Stratford Edition." Thus ambition has been to advance liberal thought he has been of all men the most active in and right knowledge in England by a Hisdisseminating throughout England the text tory of England, so written as to engage of the truest poetry our language furnishes. popular attention, giving the succession of we pass with a word over his "Pictorial events in the detail necessary to their full Half Hours of London Topography;" his perception, and with his own high interpre"Half Hours of English History ;" and his tation of their relative importance. He is "Half Hours with the Best Authors." the last man who would see in English HisTheir fine purpose is manifest. When tory the kings and queens instead of the Mr. Dickens first established Household people. With the attraction of a graceful, Words, Mr. Charles Knight was by his side, and contributed to its earlier volumes, some delightful essays, very noticeable for their high literary merit, which were reprinted in the two volumes entitled "Once upon a Time." But still we have overlooked labor upon labor. Two massive volumes, profusely illustrated with four thousand woodcuts, gave in their text a large popular to issue monthly, without break or sign of treatise upon natural history under the title of the "Pictorial Museum of Animated Nature." It was followed by a "Pictorial Gallery of Arts," planned on the same scale, and turning also to the best account many of the woodcuts accumulated during years of eager toil for instruction of the public. We have not run through all the roll of Mr. Knight's services to literature, but varied, and often picturesque style; with a profusion of good woodcuts that speak to the eye itself, and always carry information of some kind; with generous sympathies giving a soul to every chapter, and with the singleminded earnestness that has grudged no labor of preparation for his task-Mr. Charles Knight continued during four years or more, weariness, substantial parts of an original History of England, which now occupies seven handsome volumes. There remains only an eighth volume, shortly to form an independent issue, to complete a work that many able men might have been proud and happy to regard as the one achievement of active literary life. A GOOD EDITOR.-A good editor, a compe- | Times to Moore, "find any number of men of tent newspaper conductor, is like a general or poet-born, not made. Exercise and experience gives facility, but the qualification is innate, or it is never manifested. On the London daily papers, all the great historians, novelists, poets, essayists, and writers, have been tried, and nearly all have failed. We might say all; for after a display of brilliancy, brief and grand, they died out literally. Their resources were exhausted. "I can," said the late editor of the genius to write for me, but very seldom one man of common sense." Nearly all successful editors have been men of this description. Campbell, Carlyle, Bulwer, and D'Israeli failed; Barnes, Sterling, Phillips succeeded; and DeLane and Low succeeded. A good editor seldom writes for his paper; he reads, judges, selects, dictates, directs, alters, and combines; and to do this well, he has but little time for composition. To write for a paper is one thing-to edit a paper another. From The Spectator. MR. OLMSTED ON THE SLAVE STATES. * The form in which the richer Cotton States receive their accumulating wealth is, new THIS book is a compendious recast of importations of slaves. The breeding states, Mr. Olmsted's invaluable volumes on the on the other hand, while they estimate their Slave States-volumes full of acute, pithy, wealth by the value which they might realand significant delineations which bear in ize if they sold all their slaves to the richer every line the stamp of an honest and unex-cotton-planters, practically do apply much aggerating, but close and clear-sighted of this costly slave labor to occupations like study of those States. To those who have tobacco-planting, ordinary farm labor, and read Mr. Olmsted's volumes as they aphousehold service, which bring back no propeared, there will be little that is new in portionate returns. In fact, therefore, so far this recast; but works so faithful and dis- as they keep the slaves at work on their own cerning deserve a form as convenient as their estates instead of selling them to the cottonsubstance is weighty; and to have the three planters, they are losing the interest on their former volumes well condensed, and con- money-value. A slave who, if sold to the nected with a single and copious index, is a South, would command twelve hundred dolboon for which no genuine student of the lars, and so gain the owner, if invested in Southern institutions will be unthankful.. All Northern commerce, one hundred and twenty we can propose to ourselves is to draw atten- dollars annually, is retained at work which tion to the most important results fully es- perhaps does not yield four or three per cent tablished by Mr. Olmsted, giving, wherever on that value, or from thirty-six to fortyit is possible, brief individual illustrations eight dollars annually; so that the Northern from his book, in order to bring the signifi- Slave States, so far as they are cultivated at cance of his inferences more broadly before all, practically fritter away their resources our readers. when we consider that of the 500,000,000 acres of the Slave States, not more than one per cent, or 5,000,000 acres, are devoted to this remunerative cotton culture at all, and that of this one per cent certainly not a quarter is cultivated with that energy and capital, and with that yield of profit which practically determines the cost of slaves, we may estimate with some degree of accuracy how gigantic a mischief the whole system on the effort to retain for unremunerative First, then, in the Southern States, the home-work a kind of labor which they estivalue of capital and labor is determined al-mate by its value in a foreign market. Now, most exclusively by reference to a standard which is only appropriate in a very small portion of the territory, and even there only to a very small fraction of the land, capital, and labor of that portion-we mean the value of those cotton-lands which are cultivated at the best profit. It is a familiar truth with economists that in all professions where very high prizes are to be obtained, the general rate of profit is far below the average of other professions. This principle is. The Slave States are, in fact, a gigantic governs the cost of labor in the Slave States. The value of all slaves is measured with relation to the value of a good field hand on a cotton plantation of far more than the average—though less than the maximum -rate of profit. This is so, even in the Border Slave States, where no cotton is grown. For even there the possibility of realizing the value of a slave-estate by selling all the strong hands "down South," is one with reference to which the proprietors uniformly estimate their available wealth. * Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton King dom: a Traveller's Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States. Based upon three former volumes of Journeys and Investigations by the same Author. By Frederic Law Olmsted. Two vols. Sampson Low. lottery, in which only the very few draw prizes, yet in which, buoyed up by speculative hope, all pay much more than the proper cost of their individual chance of a prize. The cotton culture can only be profitably pursued with large gangs of laborers, experienced overseers, and on rich lands. Rich lands, indeed, are plenty, but capitalists rich enough to purchase large gangs of laborers, and skilful enough to provide proper superintendence, are few. Yet all pay for their slaves at a rate which is so high as to be only really profitable to these few; and in the Border States this costly labor, so far as it is employed at all, is employed on work on which it is in fact thrown away. The result is, that only those planters are really rich in |