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years, in the midst of poverty! Such wonderful perseverance almost amounts to a ruling passion.

PHENOMENON AT THE POWERSCOURT FALL.

The Powerscourt Fall, of which the annexed is an engraving, is formed by the river Dargle, and is situated in the county of Wicklow. When the river is full, it presents a very grand appearance. The stream precipitates itself over a nearly perpendicular cliff, 300 feet in height, and falls into a natural basin or reservoir, encircled by rocky masses of considerable magnitude, whilst the whole

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scene is backed by mountains. This fall exhibits rather a singular phenomenon, in the different degrees of velocity with which the water descends in different parts of the cascade. Thus, on one side, the water may be observed to pour down with considerable velocity; while, on the other side, the fall, in the upper part, presents the appearance of a continued stream of frothy foam, gliding slowly down the face of the cliff, though the lower part moves with greater velocity. This circumstance is, however, readily accounted for; being, in fact, mainly attributable to the comparatively small body of water which forms the cascade. The water, on the one side, that which descends with the greater velocity (and this forms by far the larger portion of the cascade) meets with no interruption in its descent, but falls, almost from the top, to the bottom in an unbroken sheet.

On the other side, however, the cliff in the upper part deviates from the perpendicular, and the consequence is, that, owing to the slope or inclination of the rock over which it flows, the progress of the water is checked in that particular part, though lower down, where the cliff is again perpendicular, it regains its velocity. If the body of water in this cascade were greater, this phenomenon would

not occur.

HOW CHESS ORIGINATED IN INDIA.

By the unanimous consent of all nations, chess holds the first placo among social amusements. The history of this game has exercised. many

able pens. According to Sir William Jones, it is decidedly of Hindoo invention. "If," says he, in a learned memoir on this subject inserted in the second volume of the Asiatic Researches, "evidence were required to prove this fact, we may be satisfied with the testimony of the Persians, who, though as much inclined as other nations to appropriate the ingenious inventions of a foreign people, unanimously agree that the game was imported from the west of India in the sixth century of our era. It seems to have been immemorially known in Hindoostan by the name of Cheturanga, the four angas, or members of an army, which are elephants, horses, chariots, and foot-soldiers; and in this sense, the word is frequently used by epic poets in their description of real armies. By a natural corruption of the pure Sanscrit word it was changed by the old Persians into chetrang; but the Arabs, who soon after took possession of their country, had neither the initial nor the final letter of that word in their alphabet, and consequently altered it farther into shetranj, which presently found its way into the modern Persian, and at length into the dialects of India, where the true derivation of the name is known only to learned. Thus has a very significant word in the sacred language of the the Brahmins been transformed by successive changes into aredrez, scacchi, echees, chess, and by a whimsical concurrence of circumstances given birth to the English word check, and even a name to the exchequer of Great Britain.

Of the origin of this game various accounts are given. Some Hindoo legends relate, that it was invented by the wife of Ravanen, king of Lanca, or Ceylon, to amuse her husband with an image of war, when Rama, in the second age of the world, was besieging his capital. The high degree of civilization which the court of Ravanen had attained at so remote a period is worthy of notice. An ancient Hindoo painting represents his capital regularly fortified with embattled towers. He there defended himself with equal skill and valour, whence he and his subjects were denominated magicians and giants. Ravanen seems to have been the Archimedes of Lanca; and his science must have appeared supernatural to the invader, Rama, and his wild horde of mountaineers, who were termed in derision satyrs or apes, whence the fable of the divine Hanooman.

According to another account, the occasion of this invention was as follows:-Behub, a young and dissolute Indian prince, oppressed his people in the most cruel manner. Narsir, a Brahmin, deeply afflicted by his excesses, and the lamentations of his subjects, undertook to recal the tyrant to reason. With this view he invented a game, in which the king, impotent by himself, is protected only by his subjects, even of the lowest class, and frequently ruined by the loss of a single individual. The fame of this extraordinary invention reached the throne, and the king summoned the Brahmin to teach him the game, as a new amusement. The virtuous Brahmin availed himself of this opportunity to instil into the mind of the young tyrant the principles of good government, and to awaken him to a sense of his duties. Struck by the truths which he inculcated, the prince conceived an esteem for the inventor of he new game, and assured him of his willingness to confer a liberal

remuneration, if he would mention his own terms. Nassir demanded as many grains of wheat as would arise from allowing one for the first square, two for the second, four for the third, and so on, doubling for each square of the sixty-four on the chess-board. The king, piqued at the apparently trivial value of the demand, desired him somewhat angrily to ask a gift more worthy of a monarch to bestow. When, however, Nassir adhered to his first request, he ordered the required quantity of corn to be delivered to him. On calculating its amount, the superintendents of the public granaries, to their utter astonishment, found the demand to be so enormous, that not Behub's kingdom only. but even all Hindoostan would have been inadequate to the discharge of it. The king now admired the Brahmin still more for the ingenuity of of his request than for the invention, appointed him his prime-minister, and his kingdom was thenceforward prosperous and happy.

The claim of the Hindoos to the invention of chess has been disputed in favour of the Chinese; but as they admit that they were unacquainted with the game till 174 years before Christ, and the Hindoos unquestion ably played it long before that time, the pretensions of the latter must naturally fall to the ground.

DISORDERS CURED BY FRIGHT.

Fabritius makes mention of a gentleman, with whom he was familiar, who, being unjustly suspected, was tortured upon the rack, and, when released, found himself quite cured of the gout, which was, before this violent remedy, rather troublesome Again, we have instances of disorders being cured by fright. We find, in the Journal de Henri IV., that, "On Friday, June the 9th, 1606, as Henry IV. of France, and his Queen, were crossing the water in the ferry-boat of Neuilly, the Duke of Vendome being with them, they were all three in great danger of being drowned, especially the queen, who was obliged to drink a great deal more than was agreeable to her; and had not one of her footmen, and a gentleman called La Chatagnieraie, who caught hold of her hair, desperately thrown themselves into the water to pull her out, she would have inevitably lost her life. This accident cured the king of a violent toothache; and, after having escaped the danger, he diverted himself with it, saying he had never met with so good a remedy for that disorder before, and that they had ate too much salt meat at dinner, therefore they had a mind to make them drink after it."

THE WINGLESS BIRD OF NEW ZEALAND.

One of the chief wonders of the world of Ornithology is the Apteryx, a bird which is found only in New Zealand, and even there, is rapidly becoming extinct. It is a creature so strange, that no imagination could have fancied a bird without wings or tail, with robust legs, and with claws which are suited for digging, and are actually used in forming excavations, in which this singular bird lays its eggs, and hatches its young. If the Apteryx were to become extinct, and all that remained of it, after the lapse of one or two centuries, for the scrutiny of the naturalist were a foot in one Museum, and a head in another, with a few

conflicting figures of its external form, the real nature and affinities of this most remarkable species would be involved in as much obscurity and doubt, and become the subject of as many conflicting opinions among the ornithologists of that period, as are those of the Dodo in the present day. The Apteryx is not larger than a full-grown fowl, and has only a rudimentary wing, so covered with the body feathers as to be quite concealed; the terminating slender claw may, however, be discerned on examination. The bill is long and slightly curved, having the nostrils at the extremity; its feathers, the sides of which are uniform in structure, do not exceed four and a-half inches in length, and are much prized as material for mantles or cloaks by the chiefs. It is a nocturnal bird, using its long bill in search of worms, upon which it principally feeds; it kicks with great power, and burrows at the root of the rata, at the base of

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which tree is also found the extraordinary Sphæria Robertsia, a species of vegetating caterpillar. Retaining the form of the caterpillar, the fungus pervades the whole body, and shoots up a small stem above the surface of the ground, the body of the caterpillar being below the earth in an erect position. The Apteryx frequently leans with its bill upon the earth-one of its chief characteristics-and thus, when viewed from a distance, appears to be standing on three legs.

By the natives of New Zealand, these birds are called Kiwis, from the cry they utter, and they are frequently caught by a cunning imitator of their tone, who, when they approach, dazzles and frightens them with a light previously concealed, and throwing his blanket over them thus secures them.

A FLOATING CITY.

It is the

One of the most wonderful cities in the world is Bankok. capital of Siam, and is situated on-or rather in-the great river Meinam. Our engraving represents a portion of this unique metropolis, and we find the following graphic account of it in a volume of recent travels -"The capital of Siam! Did you ever witness such a sight in

your life? On either side of the wide, majestic stream, moored in regular streets and alleys, and extending as far as the eye can reach, are upwards of seventy thousand neat little wooden houses, each house floating on a compact raft of bamboos; and the whole intermediate space of the river presents to our astonished gaze one dense mass of ships, junks, and boats, of very conceivable shape, colour, and size. As we glide along amongst these, we occasionally encounter a stray floating house, broken loose from its moorings, and hurrying down the stream with

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the tide, amidst the uproar and shouts of the inhabitants and all the spectators. We also observe that all the front row of houses are neatly painted shops, in which various tempting commodities are exposed for sale; behind these again, at equal distances, rise the lofty and elegant porcelain towers of the various watts and temples. On our right-hand side, far away as we can see, are three stately pillars, erected to the memory of three defunct kings, celebrated for some acts of valour and justice; and a little beyond these, looming like a line-of-battle ship amongst a lot of cockle-shells, rises the straggling and not very elegant palace of the king, where his Siamese Majesty, with ever so many wives and children, resides. Right ahead, where the city terminates, and the river, making a curve, flows behind the palace, is a neat-looking-fort,

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