PALINGENESIS. I LAY upon the headland height, and listened To the incessant sobbing of the sea In caverns under me. Beneath what midnight skies, whose constellations And watched the waves, that tossed and fled and Amid what friendly greetings and caresses, glistened, Until the rolling meadows of amethyst Melted away in mist. What households, though not alien, yet not mine, What bowers of rest divine; To what temptations in lone wildernesses, What famine of the heart, what pain and loss, The bearing of what cross! SHORT ARTICLES.-Hailstones, 205. Notes on a Trip to Ireland in 1862, 205. A Posthumous Message, 215. Sydney Smith and Rogers, 215. An Unconscious Postscript, 215. A Polite Rebuke, 215. All in the Downs, 240. Lines to a Wild Duck, 240. ˆA new Method of curing the Headache, 240. 66 POSTAGE.-Hereafter we shall pay postage on 'The Living Age" only when Six Dollars is paid in advance for a Year. Persons paying a smaller sum must pay their own postage. FIRST SERIES LIVING AGE, 36 vols., Morocco backs and corners, $90 a Set. 66 66 Cloth Binding, 72 66 We have, at last, with great regret, sold the stereotype plates of the First Series of The Living Age, to be melted by type-founders. We have a small number of copies of the printed work remaining, which we shall be glad to receive orders for so long as we can supply them. Persons desirous of buying odd volumes or numbers, to complete their sets, would do well to order them without delay. PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY LITTELL, SON, & CO., 30 BROMFIELD STREET, BOSTON. For Six Dollars a year, in advance, remitted directly to the Publishers, THE LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded free of postage, where a year is so paid in advance. When payment is made for less than a year, we do not pay postage. Complete sets of the First Series, in thirty-six volumes, and of the Second Series, in twenty volumes, handsomely bound, packed in neat boxes, and delivered in all the principal cities, free of expense of freight, are for sale at two dollars a volume. ANY VOLUME may be had separately, at two dollars, bound, or a dollar and a half in numbers. ANY NUMBER may be had for 13 cents; and it is well worth while for subscribers or purchasers to complete any broken volumes they may have, and thus greatly enhance their value. I see the shadow of her dainty head On curtains that pray her hand may stir, 'Till all is dark; and then I seek my bed To dream I dream of her. Where, when this body sleeps to wake no more, Like the swift moon that slides from cloud to And find unreal all it saw before, And real all that seems. -Transcript. From Good Words. reaching the middle part of the level coun NOTES ON ANIMAL LIFE IN A PRIMEVAL try, spreads out into a lakelike expanse, five FOREST. BY THE AUTHOR OF "THE NATURALIST ON THE miles broad, and finally creeps into the trunk stream by a narrow channel a couple of hunTHE little town of Ega, on the Upper dred yards wide. The population of the town Amazons in the heart of South America, (about twelve hundred souls) consists chiefly originally a mission village of the Jesuits, of half-castes and Indians; many of the forbut now a thriving Brazilian settlement, lies mer being educated persons, ambitious of pretty nearly in the centre of the most exten- being thought civilized and fond of showing sive unbroken forest on the surface of our hospitality to strangers. Few pure whites globe. It requires little effort of imagination, reside in the place, but amongst these are even to those who have not travelled beyond four or five stray Frenchmen and Italians the limits of Europe, to form some general who are settled here and married to native idea of what such a realm of arboreal vegeta- women. To complete our brief description tion must be, lying within a few degrees of of the place, it is necessary to mention that the equator, bathed all the year through in it ranks as a city and is the centre of a coan atmosphere like that of a forcing-house marca or county; add that, although the for plants, drenched by tropical rains and remotest county town in the Brazilian empire heated by a vertical sun. The total length (distant twenty-eight hundred miles from of this vast forest from west to east, is 1260 Rio Janeiro), the authority of the central miles, its breadth varying from 600 to 800 government is as much respected, and the miles. Towards the east, indeed, it contin- municipal, educational, military, and ecclesiues 700 miles further, terminating only on astical details of management as closely obthe shores of the Atlantic. This easterly served as though it lay within a few miles portion, however, or that which clothes the of the capital. valley of the Lower Amazons, I exclude from the present description, since it is, in one part, much broken and contracted in breadth by large tracts of open grassy land. The forest of the great plain of the Upper Amazons has sufficient compactness and peculiarity to be treated of as a separate area. But as there is no complete break of continuity, the statement of Humboldt (who had a glimpse of the immeasurable wilderness only from its western commencement, in Peru) still holds good, to the effect that a flock of monkeys might travel amongst the tree-tops, were it not for the rivers, for two thousand of the sun only at rare intervals, where some miles in a straight line without once touching ground; namely, from the slopes of the Andes to the shores of the Atlantic. At the top of the grassy slope on which the town is built, rises a compact wall of foliage, with a small narrow gap in its midst; the leafy barrier is the frontier line of the forest, kept from encroaching on the few acres of cleared space only by the inhabitants doing constant battle with the powers of vegetation, and the gap is the entrance to the only road by land that the townspeople possess. A few minutes' walk under the shady arcade, and the traveller finds himself in the heart of the solitude. The crowns of the tall trees on both sides meet overhead, and admit the rays forest monarch has been uprooted by the storm. The path leads to a few small plantations belonging to the poorer inhabitants, and at the distance of about a mile dwindles into a mere hunter's track, which none buta native can follow. Beyond this point, all traces of the presence of man cease, the land untrodden and unowned,-and so it continues for hundreds of miles. It is in the region of the Upper Amazons that the most characteristic features in the animal life of this great wilderness are to be seen and no better station for a traveller's head-quarters can be found than our little settlement of Ega. I made it my chief place of residence during four years and a half, To enable my readers to form some idea of employed in investigating the natural his- the animal life harbored in the warm and tory of the district. It is built within the teeming shades of this great wilderness, I mouth of the Teffé, one of the large tributary will invite them to accompany me, in imagistreams flowing from the south,-a river nation, on an excursion into the untrodden of clear, dark-green water, which, after a solitudes lying beyond the mouth of the Teffé. course of some two or three hundred miles, on | Let us accept the invitation kindly offered by |