MISCELLANEOUS.

New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume VI, Issue 504, 1 June 1850, Page 3

MISCELLANEOUS.

It is said to be the intention of Ministers, m the ensuing session, to repeal the window tax altogether. The amount is about £1,500,000 ; but its abrogation will be chiefly hailed by the country ou account of its sanitary tendencies. The repeal of the tax on paper has also been fixed on, because of the intolerable vexation which the excise laws occasion to persons engaged in the paper trade. — Liverpool Albion. A royal commission is about to be issued to inquire and report as to the most eligible lite, or sites, for a cattle market to be held outside the metropolis. C. E. Michele, for many years a principal editor of the Morning Post, has been appoint-Consul-General for Great Britain at St. Petersburgh. The salary of the post is £2,000 per annum. In 1848, the births at Belgium were 120,383 (of which 9,292 were illegitimate), being 2,278 more than in 1847. The deaths 108,287, being 11,881 less than in 1847. The marriages were 28,856, being 4,51 1 more than in 1847. The total population was a a few months since 4,359,090. It will hardly be believed that the whole quantity of gold currency in the world, taking it at its usual estimate of 150 millions, would only weigh 1,150 tons, and that in bulk a Toom twenty feet long, twelve feet wide, and ten feet high, would hold it all. The Sultan has made a preient of a large tract of land in the neighbourhood of Smyrna to M. Lamartine. It is a tract of land several leagues in extent, and nearly uninhabited. There is, however, a large dwelling-house, with all the appurtenances necessary on an Asiatic tarm. A watchmaker in Liverpool has succeeded in drilling a hole thtough a sixpence edgeways. The diameter of the hole in the coin is tbe four-thousandth part of an inch in size, and barely sufficient to admit a fine bair. The Mormons of Deseret (Salt Lake), indulge in polygamy, and hold the doctrine that a man may have as many wives as he can support. It is said that some of the old men there have twenty wives, but that few of the young men have more than five. Died, on the Ist December, Ebenezer Elliott, the " Corn Law Rhymer, 11 at his resi- j dence, Argilthill, near Barnsley. His illness has continued more or less severe, for many months ; yet, up to; the last few weeks, his pawer of'raind was active and clear. He has | left a wife, five sons, and two daughters. A letter from Morlaix of the 16h Dec, , announces the death by cholera of Joseph Moreau, the last surviving brother of the con- ; queror of Hohenlinden. — Times, Mr. Robert Montgomery Martin has calculated that, of £50,000,000 of taxes, two millions and a half of rich people pay £11,530,000 ; eight millions of the middle classes pay £25,440,000 ; and fourteen mil- { lions of the working classes pay £13,030,000.t The original Bear and Ragged Staff, at Cumncr, Berks, has lately been taken down. ! This is the house mentioned in "Kenilworth," where theparties who were concerned in the tragical fate of Ann Dudley, Countess of Leicester, frequently met and partook of a cup of sack from the tap of Giles Gosling, in the days of Queen Elizabeth.

The Nelson Column. — Mr. Carews ah to relievo of the " Death of Nelson," which has been so long in preparation for the Nelson column, was last week thrown open to a private view. The result, as far as may be gathered from the best opinion, and formed after a first and brief inspection, is decidedly favourable. Mr. Carew has avoided both the tortuous ways of allegory and the insipid forms of a classic school. The two favourite moments of composers are generally either that in which the hero is struck down on the quar-ter-deck, or when reclining in the cockpit. In Mr. Carews work Nelson is carried off in the act of issuing his last sea mandate ; the expression of the head with its resigned, though still indomitable energy, is fine, and the, attitude has conscious ease. Captain Hardy, speaking trumpet in hand, is the next commanding figure. Nelson's old grumblers are modelled with great power of hand, particularly one who is clearing the hatchway. The byplay pantomime is not the least skilful part of the composition, whether in the sori row of the doctor, at he leans over the hero, or the sinewy tar who points out to a savage mulatto the marksman who has laid him low. On the whole this large mass of bronze evinces considerable and matured power, as well in the earnestness of its conception as in the style of handling. It was cast in three separate pieces, the joining of which is adroitly concealed by Jthe flying spars and rigging. ; The materials were melted from five mortars

and a 32-pounder, weighing in all five tons. The sculptors commissioned by government to execute the remaining compartments, that is, " St. Vincent," " The Nile," and " Copenhagen," were Messrs. Woodington, Tierneth, and Watson ; the last two had considerably advanced their respective works when they were unfortunately carried off by premature death. It is calculated that it will take at least two or three years before the Nelson Monument is completed. The artist for the four lions has not even been named, there being no tin to cast them with. The cost of the four alto-reliefs is calculated at £4000. — Atlas.

An Amiable Speculator. — In 1785 Mr. Atkinson, said to be an adventurer from the north, was a great speculator. That he acted with judgment may be gathered from the fact of his dying possessed of half a-raillion. A curious, but not a parsimonious man, he occasionally performed eccentric actions. During one of the pauses in a dinner conversation he suddenly turned to a lady by whom he sat and said, " If you, madam wilt trust me with £1000 for three years I will employ it advantageously." The character of the speaker was known ; the offer so frankly made was as frankly accepted, and in three years to the very day Mr. Atkinson waited on the lady with £10,000, to which amount the sagacity of the citizen had increased the sum entrusted to him. — Chronicles and Characters of the Stock Exchange.

Melancholy and Fatal Accident. — On Tuesday afternoon, the body of L. H. Sbadwell, Esq., barri«ter-at-law, and second son of Sir Launcelot Sbadwell, Vice-Chancel-lor, was discovered in a ditch which divides Barnes Elraes Park, the residence of his father, from an adjacent farm. The deceased occupied a sleeping apartment in a lodge which is about a quarter of a mile distant from the mansion occupied by the family ; and he was last seen alive on Sunday night, when he left the house about half-past nine o'clock, to walk across the park to this lodge. The night was not only dark, but there was at the time an intense fog. It having been ascertained in the morning that he bad been absent from his i customary sleeping place dnring the night, a ! search was instituted, and on Tuesday the body was discovered in the ditch already mentioned, in which the water was not more than two feet six inches deep, but the deposit of mud was still deeper. Dr. Willis was sent for, and made an external examination of the body, which, it should be stated, was dressed, with the exception of the feet, which were naked. There was no trace of the shoes, but afterwards socks were found in his pockets. His trousers and other portions of his dress had been much torn, apparently by the brambles at the side of the ditch, which the deceased had evidently caught at to save himself, if possible, in his descent. A ring and other valuable property were on his person, showing that the deceased had not been the victim of robbery. The general? supposition as to the cause that led to the death is, that the deceased, on leaving the mansion, diverged from the right path, owing to the heavy fog, and fell into the sluice connecting the lake with the river, the tide being then up, and being a most fearless swimmer, it is presumed he swam out into the river, and then landed on the towing path, and in endeavouring to regain the park he inadvertently fell into the ditch, where it is evident his struggles had been most terrific to extricate himself. — Illustrated London News, Dec. 15. The Christian Times thus announces a medical discovery, which should be known to every humane and intelligent master mariner, and acted upon by every surgeon or surgeon superintendent on board ship ; — " It has been ascertained that the true source of scorbutic disease, as ie shows itself in our ships and prisons, is the want of potash in the blood ; that salted meat contains little more than one half the potash in fresh meat ; and that while an ounce of rice contains only 5 grains of potash, an ounce of potato contains 18 75 grains, which accounts for the great increase of the disease since the scarcity of the potato. In patients under this disease, the blood is found to be deficient in potash : and it has been ascertained by repeated experiments, that whatever be the diet, such patients speedily recover if a few grains (from twelve to twenty) of some salt of potash be given daily. Limejuice is regularly ordered in the navy as a specific for the disease, and the reason of its efficacy is not the acid, but the amount of potasb, being 8*46 grains in an ounce. On ! these facts it seems possible to found a slight, but very salutary improvement in the navy. Let a portion of lartrate of potass be ordered regularly to be mixed with, the limejuice that is given out for use ; and let arrangements be made for boiling the salt meat in steam. A large portion of the salt would thus be eliminated, and the food made more wholesome. A similar course might be adopted in workhouses and prisons. If so simple a remedy is in our hands, it is criminal to neglect it,"

Bee Hunting in Central America.-— Bee hunting is a favourite amusement and profitable occupation of the Indians at most times of the year, but it is mostly for a few weeks before Easter that they employ themselves in that way, on account of the comparatively high price they can obtain for wax at that time in the towns and villages ; it being then in great request for tapers and candles to be devoted to the graven images of their religion. I say their religion for though in the towns they pi of ess to be of the purest kind of Roman Catholics, yet they grovel to saints, carved and painted as grotesque as a good Guy Fawkes in London on the fifth of November ; and the only religion they have been taught is to pray to these caricatures, and to the Virgin, but above all, to make them presents and burn candles before them. In Central America there are several sorts of bees, of different sizes, and with a slight variation, of colour, but all agreeing in their habits ; some are almost as large as the European bee and some very much smaller than the smallest house fly ; but they are all, without any exception, stingless. They all form their hives in hollow trees, and bee-hunting consists in following a bee from its feeding ground to its domicile. A man ought to have a good eye to line a bee, as the North Americans call it, and he ought to know something of the habits of the insect. A bee on a prairie or savannah may be flying irregularly from spot to spot, and is never followed beyond the first flight ; but when a bee rises in the air to the height of fifteen or twenty feet, and then flies in a straight line, the-bee-hunter knows it is well laden and is making its way home. As long as the ground remains open and clear dt trees, it is not difficult for a sharp active fellow to follow the bee, at least to the nearest cover, unless the sun is in his face ; but it is very difficult and almost impossible to follow it when it gets into the forest, as it flies over the underwood, and there is hard enough work getting through the underwood, without watching an iusect overhead. The tree nearest to the spot where the bee entered the wood is then marked, together with the line it took inside the wood. If there are three or four bee-hunting, most likely each has lined his bee to the cover's edge, and also marked its direction. They then go to one of these marked spots, and walk a few yards apart straight into the forest, in the direction marked out, watching for any hollow tree they may pass, and also for a few small birds that frequent the vicinity of hives, to pounce on the little bees. The Indians call them " honey birds," or rather " honey mouth" (Boca Miel). The object of ihe search is soon found, being ge-^ nerally within two hundred yards from the edge of the wood, unless the bees, as they sometimes do, build near a river's side for the sake of the water. The hunter has always with him his hatchet, a large gourd for the honey, and a sort of havresac for the wax. There are very few axemen so handy as a woodman of Central America ; and in a very short time a fine tree is hewed down for the sake of a little wax and honey. In some places bees are so very numerous that they alight in numbers on the hands and face, and as they are very small are often taken for sand-flies, and are brushed off or killed ; and they emit, when crushed, a most fragment smell, — Byam's Central America