In June, 1826, a column of butterflies, from 10 to 15 feet broad, was seen to pass over Neuchatel, in Switzerland. The passage lasted upwards of two hours, without any interruption, from the moment when the butterflies were first observed.--_Brewster's Journal_.
A shrub has been discovered in our new Indian countries, from whose stem, when divided, there issues a copious vegetable spring of limpid and wholesome water. The natives know this well, and hence we rarely meet with an entire plant. It is a powerful climber, and is quite new and nondescript.--_Letter from India_.
It is notorious, that, in the last autumn, the remittent fevers in various parts of the country amounted to a species of pestilence, such as has scarcely been known in England from this cause since the days of Dr. Sydenham. Wherever ague had existed, or ever had been supposed possible, in those places was this fever found; so that in all the well-known tracts in Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Kent, Essex, Sussex, Hampshire, &c. there was scarcely a house without one or more inhabitants under fever, with a considerable mortality. In the parish of Marston, in Lincolnshire, it amounted to 25 in 300 inhabitants. The same fevers were extremely abundant in various parts of the outskirts of London, as also in the villages or towns which are connected with it, within a range of from six to ten miles. This was the case throughout the range of streets or houses from Buckingham Gate to Chelsea; in which long line, it is said, that almost every house had a patient or more under this fever, though these were mistaken for typhus, or at least thus misnamed. Then it was also about Vauxhall and Lambeth; and to a great extent among all that scattered mixture of town and country which follows from Whitechapel, from Bishopsgate, &c., and very particularly along Ratcliffe-Highway to an indefinite range along the river. In Lewisham there were in one house nine patients under this fever, which proved mortal to one. We may also enumerate Dulwich, especially subject to this disorder, Fulham, Ealing, and the several other villages along the Thames, as far as Chertsey; and even Richmond, where, as at Lewisham, there was one house where ten individuals at one time were suffering under this disease. Whatever was the pestilence last year, it promises to be much greater in the present one. This is easily judged from the manner in which the season has set in, but still more decidedly from the extraordinary prevalence of ague in the spring; since that which was intermittent fever then, will be remittent in the autumn, or rather, there will scarcely be a definite season of vernal intermittent, but the remittent will commence immediately, increasing in extent and severity as the summer advances, and promising to become, in the autumn, the greatest season of disease that England has known for this century. Dr. Macculloch attributes this alarming increase to _malaria_, on the production and propagation of which he has recently published an essay, the leading argument of which is, "that as the quantity of the poison which any person can inspire is necessarily small, and as this small quantity can be produced by a small marshy spot as well as a large one, it is the same, as to the production of the disease, whether the marsh is a foot square or a mile, provided the exposure be complete; while also any piece of ground where vegetables decompose under the action of water is virtually a marsh, or must produce _malaria_."