does not know." Those sea-lights have been explained by a diversity of causes; but the singular brilliancy of the Red Sea seems owing to fish spawn and animalculæ, a conjecture which receives some corroboration from the circumstance that travellers who mention it visited the gulf during the spawning period—that is, between the latter end of December and the end of February. The coral-banks are less numerous in the southern parts. It deserves notice, that Dr. Shaw and Mr. Bruce have stated-what could only be true, so far as their own experience wentthat they observed no species of weed or flag; and the latter proposes to translate Yam Zuph "the Sea of Coral”. '—a name as appropriate as that of Edom.

RECENT PRICES OF SLAVES.

Prices of course vary at Constantinople aco.rding to the vigilance of Russian cruisers, and the incorruptibility of Russian agents at Trebizonde, Samsoon, and Sinope. The following is the average price in Circassia :

A man of 30 years of age, £10

10 to £30

20

14 18

150

8 12

99

The annexed cut is a sketch of an Abyssinian lady, tattooed in the height of the fashion. The following extract from that interesting work "Parkyns's Abyssinia" gives a good account of the custom as it prevails in the larger cities there, and of the manner in which the operation is performed. "The men seldom tattoo more than one ornament on the upper part of the arm, near the shoulder, while the women cover nearly the whole of their bodies with stars, lines, and crosses, often rather tastefully arranged. I may well say nearly the whole of their persons, for they mark the neck, shoulders, breasts, and arms, down to the Engers, which are enriched with lines to imitate rings, nearly to the nails. The feet, ankles, and calves of the legs, are similarly adorned, and even the gums are by some pricked entirely blue, while others have them striped alternately blue and the natural pink. To see some of their designs, one would give them credit for some skill in the handling their pencil; but, in fact, their system of drawing the pattern is purely mechanical. I had one arm adorned; a rather blind old woman was the artist; her implements consisted of a little pot of some sort of blacking, made, she told me, of charred herbs; a large home-made iron pin, about one-fourth of an inch at the end of which was ground fine; kit or two of hollow cane, and a piece of straw; the two last-named

items were her substitutes for pencils. Her circles were made by dipping the end of a piece of a cane of the required size into the blacking, and making its impression on the skin; while an end of the straw, bent to the proper length, and likewise blackened, marked all the lines, squares, diamonds, &c., which were to be of equal length. Her design eing thus completed, she worked away on it with her pin, which she

dug in as far as the thin part would enter, keeping the supply blacking sufficient, and going over the same ground repeatedly to ensure regularity and unity in the lines. With some persons, the first effect of this tattooing is to produce a considerable amount of fever, from the irritation caused by the punctures; especially so with the ladies, from the extent of surface thus rendered sore. To allay this irritation, they are generally obliged to remain for a few days in a case of vegetable matter, which is plastered all over them in the form of a sort of green poultice. A scab forms over the tattooing, which should not be picked off, but allowed to fall off of itself. When this disappears, the operation is complete, and the marks are indelible; nay more, the Abyssiniaus deciar that

they may be traced on the person's bones even after death has barod them of their fleshy covering."

BULGARIAN FISHERMEN.

The following interesting account of the Bulgarian fishermen on the shores of the Black Sea is taken from the translation of a narrative of

boat excursion made in 1846 by M. Xavier Hommaire, along part of the northern coast of the Black Sea:

"The fishermen are, almost without exception, Bulgarians-a population at once maritime and agricultural, very closely resembling, in race and costume, the Bretons of France and they enjoy a monopoly of all the fisheries in the Bosphorus and the adjacent parts of the Black Sea. Their elegant barks appeared on stated days and hours, shooting along with extraordinary rapidity through the waters of the Gulf of Buyuk Déreh, which appears to be their head-quarters, and sustaining the test of comparison even with the famous caiques of Constantinople. The most important object of their fishery is a delicious kind of small thunny,

called palamede. They are Bulgarians, also, who own the singular fisheries which form such admirable subjects for the artist's sketch-book. They are found throughout the Bosphorus, from Bechiktusch and Scutari to the light-houses of Europe and Asia. They might be called dog-kennels, but rickety and worm-eaten with antiquity, and are suspended by means of cords, pegs, and tatters to the top of an indescribable framework of props. There on high, petrified in motionless and uninterrupted silence, in company with some old pots of mignionette (where will not the love of flowers find a home!), a man, with the appearance of a wild beast or savage, leans over the sea, at the bottom of which he watches the passage of its smallest inhabitants, and the capricious varia. tions of the current. At a certain distance is arranged, in the form of a square, a system of nets, which, at the least signal from the watcher, fall on the entire shoal of fish. A contrivance yet more primitive than these airy cells, if not so picturesque, was that of simple posts, which we encountered some time before in the channel of the Bosphorus, rising about fifteen feet above the surface of the water. Half-way up is perched, crouching (one cannot see how), something having the human form, and which is found to be a Rulgarian. For a long time I watched them without being able to make them out, either pole or its tenant; and often have I seen them in the morning, and observed them again in the evening, not having undergone the least change of posture.

"On returning to our encampment, the commandant of the fort, to whom we paid a visit, gave us a very different report of the fishermen of the morning, whom he described as an assemblage of all the vagabonds of the neighbourhood. Convinced even that the fact of their having fallen in with us must have inspired then. with the project of coming to prowl by night round our camp, he wished us to accept some of the men in his garrison as a guard."

HORSES OF THE ARABS.

Arabs make intimate friends of their horses, and so docile are these creatures that they are ridden without a bit, and never struck or spurred. They share their owner's diet, and are as well cared for as a child. They divide their horses, however, into two kinds: The one they call kadischi, that is, horses of an unknown birth; the other, they call kochlain, that is, horses whose genealogy is known for thousands of years. They are direct descendants, so they say, of the stud of Solomon. The pedigree of an Arabian horse is hung round his neck soon after his birth, which is always properly witnessed and attested.

The following is the pedigree of a horse purchased by a French officer in Arabia :-" In the name of God, the merciful and compassionate, and of Saed Mahomed, agent of the high God, and of the companions of Mahommed, and of Jerusalem. Praised be the Lord, the Omnipotent Creator. This is a high-bred horse, and its colt's tooth is here in a bag about his neck, with his pedigree, and of undoubted authority, such as no infidel can refuse to believe. He is the son of Rabbamy, out of the dam Labadah, and equal in power to his sire of the tribe of Zazhalak; ae is finely moulded, and made for running like an ostrich. In the

honours of relationship, he reckons Zuluah, sire of Mahat, sire of Kallac, and the unique Alket sire of Manasseh, sire of Alsheh, father of the race down to the famous horse, the sire of Lahalala; and to him be ever abundance of green meat, and corn, and water of life, as a reward from the tribe of Zazhalah; and may a thousand branches shade his carcass from the hyæna of the tomb, from the howling wolf of the desert; and let the tribe of Zazhalah present him with a festival within an enclosure of walls; and let thousands assemble at the rising of the sun in troops hastily, where the tribe holds up under a canopy of celestial signs within the walls, the saddle with the name and family of the possessor. Then let them strike the bands with a loud noise incessantly, and pray to God for immunity for the tribe of Zoab, the inspired tribe."

DILEMMA.

Protagoras, an Athenian rhetorician, had agreed to instruct Evalthus in rhetoric, on condition that the latter should pay him a certain sum of money if he gained his first cause. Evalthus when instructed in all the precepts of the art, refused to pay Protagoras, who consequently brought him before the Areopagus, and said to the Judges-"Any verdict that you may give is in my favour: if it is on my side, it carries the condemnation of Evalthus; if against me, he must pay me, because he gains his first cause." "I confess," replied Evalthus, "that the verdict will be pronounced either for or against me; in either case I shall be equally acquitted: if the Judges pronounce in my favour, you are condemned; if they pronounce for you, according to our agreement, I owe you nothing, for I lose my first cause." The Judges being unable to reconcile the pleaders, ordered them to re-appear before the Court a hundred years afterwards.

ORIENTAL EXTRAVAGANCE.

Mr. Forbes has given a curious picture of the kind of magnificence affected by Asuf ul Dowlah, who succeeded his father on the throne of Oude. This nabob was fond of lavishing his treasures on gardens, palaces, horses, elephants, European guns, lustres, and mirrors. He expended annually about £200,000 in English manufactures. He had more than one hundred gardens, twenty palaces, one thousand two hundred elephants, three thousand fine saddle horses, one thousand five hundred double-barrel guns, seventeen hundred superb lustres, thirty thousand shades of various forms and colours; seven hundred large mirrors, girandoles and clocks. Some of the latter were very curious, richly set with jewels, having figures in continual movement, and playing tunes every hour; two of these clocks only, cost him thirty thousand pounds. Without taste or judgment, he was extremely solicitous to possess all that was elegant and rare; he had instruments and machines of every art and science, but he knew none; and his museum was so ridiculously arranged that a wooden cuckoo clock was placed close to a superb timepiece which cost the price of a diadem; and a valuable landscape of Claude Lorraine suspended near a board painted with ducks and drakes. He sometimes gave a dinner to ten or twelve persons, sitting at their