"Bayard Taylor's Central Africa" amount to about 12,000 copies. These sales have, doubtless, been much augmented since the estimates were made. The publishers are famous advertisers that is the chief secret.

The announcements of the English literary press are numerous and interesting. Among them are the following:

Mr. Cyrus Redding, following the example of Jerdan & Patmore, is about to gratify the lovers of gossip with some anecdotes of a career in literature, commencing with the days of Peter Pindar, and associated with the best days of Glasgow's greatest son, Tom Campbell.

"Lady Blessington's Life and Correspondence," in the press, is expected to include Count d'Orsay's Journal, so much admired by Byron thirty years ago.

Mr. Torrens M'Culloch is said to contemplate

a Life of Shiel.

Mary Howitt is engaged in writing a popular History of America, intended to make the reading class of English artisans better acquainted with the History of the United States than they have hitherto been.

Charles Lever announces a new serial.

It is said that Dickens's plan in his new work is to complete it wholly before publication. This will give a unity to this production which is quite foreign to many of his former works.

The "Athenaeum" announces that Mr. Cole has become possessed of a number of Cowper MSS. of great interest-including nine unpublished letters of the poet-three written by his brother John, three by Dr. Cotton, thirteen by Lady Hesketh, two by Mary Unwin, several by Joseph Hill, Mrs. Hill, Ashley Cowper, General Cowper, Lady Croft, Lady Austen, Dr. John Johnson, Samuel Rose, Bishop Madan, Jekyll, Charles Chester, and others, together with a MS. catalogue of the poet's library, taken after his death. The Iowa Conference Seminary (Mount Vernon, Iowa) reports one hundred and sixty-one students. It is young, but promising. It is under the principalship of Rev. S. M. Fellows.

Our "Boston Letter" for the month refers to the Congregational Board of Publication. We find in Norton's Literary Gazette some interesting items respecting its publications. On its list are the Works of John Robinson, Pastor of the Pilgrim Fathers, with a Memoir of that remarkable man, in three vols. ; the Works of Samuel Hopkins, D. D., known as the father of the Hopkinson System," in three vols.; the Works of Joseph Bellamy, D. D., in two vols.; the Works of Dr. Jonathan Edwards, son of President Edwards, in two vols.; the Works of Thomas Shepard, Pastor of the First Church in Cambridge, in three vols., (another volume is to be added;) the Works of Leonard Woods, D. D., late Professor of Theology at Andover, in five vols.; the "Park-street Lectures," by E. D. Griffin, D. D., a work famous in its day; several works by Dr. Gardiner Spring; and the Life and Times of John Penry, an early Pilgrim Martyr. There are several other works on the list of this Society, and also some forty-five "Doctrinal Tracts." The low prices at which these publications are sold is truly remarkable. The

Works of Hopkins, in three large octavo volumes, are put down at $5; those of Bellamy, in two large octavos, at $3 50; those of Robinson, three vols. 12mo., at $3 50; and those of Shepard, three vols. 12mo., $3. Both the list tion of the religious public. and prices are such as must attract the atten

The Newbury Seminary and Collegiate Institute (Vermont) has an effective faculty, headed by H. S. Noyes, and five hundred and twentyone students.

The library of the late Cardinal Mai, valued at $80,000, will soon be disposed of at public auction. It was offered to the Pontifical government for half this sum, according to the terms of the late owner's will, but the purchase was not made for want of funds. Cardinal

Mai was the Librarian of the Vatican, in which he discovered some palimpsests, containing the lost portions of Cicero's famous "Treatise on the Commonwealth," which he deciphered by his great skill and continued application.

The Albion Collegiate Institute and Seminary, (Michigan,) under the presidency of Hon. J. Mayhem, have a strong faculty, and report five hundred and fourteen students for the past collegiate year.

We learn from the Pittsburgh Christian Advocate that a liberal Methodist in Charleston, South Carolina, has given $50,000 as the nucleus of a fund for the liberal education of young men called of God to the work of the ministry, and who are unable to accomplish an education without assistance. The fund is to be administered by the Trustees of Woodford College, under the supervision of the South Carolina Conference. The President of this College is Dr. Wightman.

The Fort Wayne (Indiana) Collegiate Institute, under the presidency of Rev. S. Brenton, reports two hundred and fifty-six students. It has an efficient faculty.

A literary discovery of some interest is announced from Paris-that of the greater part of the manuscripts of the celebrated Madame de Maintenon, widow of the burlesque poet Scarron, and wife, by a secret marriage, of Louis XIV. What has been found is entitled "Letter on the Education of Girls," and "Conversations on Education." The two treatises are said to be re

markably well written, and to contain much

shrewd observation. All that has heretofore been known of the original productions of Madame de Maintenon's pen is what has been published by La Beaumelle, but that he has taken the liberty of altering. It is M. Lavallée, aubrought the new papers to light. thor of the "History of the French," who has

Professor Zahn, who has passed not fewer than fifteen years in investigating the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii, is preparing for publication, at Berlin, the twenty-seventh and last part of his great work on the monuments discovered in those towns. The work is one of

the most expensive ever published in Germany, each copy costing 300 thalers, (about $230.) The illustrations are colored by a process invented by M. Zahn himself.

Arts and

AT a meeting of the Natural History Society at Boston, Prof. Wyman remarked that it had probably been frequently noticed by members of the Society, that the common house fly may be freqently seen hanging dead from the ceiling, or attached to any surface on which it may be lying, by a filamentous white substance; and that a white powder, in greater or less quantity, is frequently seen dotted over the neighboring surface. On examining this substance, he had found the insect to have fallen a victim to a parasitic plant growing upon its surface. The white powder proved to be the spores of the parasite. The whole interior of the fly was found to be filled with a similar plant, and probably, from the different way in which it develops itself, of a different species from that on the surface. The internal parasite starts from a spore and grows by elongation from one or both sides of a sphere, this latter remaining in the middle or at one end.

The number of paper-mills in the United States is 750, with 3,000 engines, and a daily product of 900,000 pounds, or 270,000,000 a year, of the value of $27,000,000. Rags to the amount of 405,000,000 pounds are consumed; value, at four cents, $16,000,000. The cost of labor is $3,375,000. A reward of £1,000 is offered by a London newspaper for the discovery of some substitute for rags in the manufacture of paper. Who will gain it?

Antiquity of the Olives of Gethsemane.-In Turkey, every olive-tree which was found standing by the Moslems when they conquered Asia pays a tax of one medina to the treasury, while each of those planted since the conquest pays half its produce; now, the eight olive-trees of Gethsemane pay only eight medina. Dr. Wild describes the largest as at twenty-four feet in girth above the root, though its topmost branch is not above thirty feet from the ground. M. Bove, who traveled as a naturalist, asserts that the largest are at least six yards in circumference, and nine or ten yards high-so large, indeed, that he calculates their age at two thousand years.

The German Kunstblatt speaks highly of a "Taking down from the Cross," by Oscar Begas, exhibited at the Berlin exhibition. The painter is a pensioner of the Academy of that city, and now at Rome. The chief originality of the picture seems to be, that instead of turning the whole into an athletic display, and a study of flesh and muscle, as some of the old masters have done, the artist has kept down these mere adjuncts, and thrown the psychological interest where it should be, on the grief and tenderness of John and the Virgin-Mother.

At a late session of the American Pomological Society, the President submitted the report of a committee appointed at the session of 1852, to consider the subject of erecting a suitable monument to the memory of the late A. J. Downing, stating that a fund of $1,600 had been subscribed for that purpose by gentlemen in Philadelphia, New-York, Boston, Roches

Sciences.

ter, Newburgh, Buffalo, and other places. It is designed to erect the monument in the public grounds at Washington, which Mr. D. did so much to adorn.

A monument has been erected at the grave of Mrs. F. Osgood, in Mount Auburn Cemetery. It is about fifteen feet in height. Surmounting the white marble pedestal is a lyre in bronze, with five strings, four of which are broken at different lengths, to indicate the different ages at which the mother and her three children died. On the top of the lyre is a wreath of laurel eighteen inches in diameter. The whole is said to be simple, light, and graceful.

An old Dutchman, the story goes, on being shown a pieture of the Washington Monument, declined subscribing his mite toward building "a house mit such a big chimney." Whatever may be thought of the patriotism of the excuse, there are some who sympathize with the taste it exhibits.

By interesting accounts from Africa, says an English Journal, we learn that the possibility of a water-communication all across that great continent, from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, is now thought to be no longer doubtful. From the east coast, rivers may be ascended to Lake Ngami, from which a portage of some forty miles conducts to the great stream that skirts the Ovampo Land, explored by Mr. Galton, and finds its outlet in the neighborhood of Walvisch Bay. Here, then, are available channels for exploration.

During the past year, a Magnetic Observatory has been erected within the grounds of the Smithsonian Institution. It principally consists of an underground room, enclosed within two walls, (to insure an equable temperature,) between which a current of air is allowed to pass, in order to prevent dampness. This observatory has been supplied with a set of apparatus for determining the continued variations in direction and intensity of terrestrial magnetism. By an ingenious application of the photographic process, the invention of Mr. Brooks, of England, the instruments are made to record, on a sheet of sensitive paper, moved by clockwork, their own motions. It is proposed to keep these instruments constantly in operation, for the purpose of comparing results with other observations of a similar character in different parts of the world, and also for the purpose of furnishing a standard to which the observations made at various points by the Coast Survey, and the different scientific explorations which are now in progress in the western portions of the United States, may be referred, and with which they may be compared.

Dr. Little, of Utica, has taken out a patent for a machine to feed paper to printing presses. It is said that if it were possible to run the press at a sufficient rate of speed, it would feed 100,000 sheets per hour. Consequently, a press having eight cylinders would be able to print 800,000 sheets per hour.

BUNYAN'S BIRTH-PLACE.

But these impressions, though vivid, were evanescent. In the society of his village companions, they were soon effaced and forgotten; and according to his own confession, until his marriage he was a very ringleader in almost all manner of vice and ungodliness; not only incurring the penalties denounced against sin in the world to come, but also, had not a miracle of grace prevented, rendering himself obnoxious to the laws of his country.

While, however, he sinned without remorse, and even took pleasure in the sins of his companions, to observe the inconsistencies of religious professors gave him the heartache; and in subsequent years he remembered, as further proofs that God had not forsaken him as he had forsaken 'God, several instances of providential interposition on his behalf. Four times he was rescued from deathtwice by drowning, the third time by a poisonous reptile, the fourth time by a musket-shot. The last two incidents are sufficiently remarkable. "Being in the fields," he narrates, "with one of my companions, it chanced that an adder passed over the highway; and I, having a stick in my hand, struck him over the

back; and, having stunned him, I forced open his mouth with my stick, and plucked his tongue out with my fingers ;" an act of desperateness not less illustrative, in the innocuous issue, of God's mercy, than, in the rash doing, of Bunyan's constitutional hardihood and energy. The fourth instance of providential escape forms a singular comment on the saying attributed to William of Orange, that "every bullet hath its billet." "When 1 was a soldier," observes Bunyan, alluding to the siege of Leicester, in 1645, and consequently when he was not more than seventeen years old, "I, with others, were drawn out to go to such a place to besiege it. But, when I was just ready to go, one of the company desired to go in my room; to which, when I had consented, he took my place; and, coming to the siege, as he stood sentinel, he was shot in the head with a musket bullet, and died."

These facts, how much soever they excited gratitude in the review, produced but little impression on their occurrence. The progressive formation of Bunyan's religious character may be dated from marriage, which he seems to have contracted at the early age of nineteen. The young woman who became his wife was portionless; and they began housekeeping without so much as a dish or a spoon. But she was the child of a godly father, from whom she inherited "The Plain

Man's Pathway to Heaven" and "The Practice of Piety." In these two books, (and especially in the former, which contains very powerful invectives against prevailing sins, and is written in a style at once nervous and picturesque,) the lowly couple used to read together; and when daylight failed them, she would entertain him with reminiscences of her father's house, his piety in word and deed, and his habit of

reproving vice both in his own family and among his neighbors. These peaceful exercises, although, in Bunyan's later view, they did not reach his heart, begot some desire to reform his life. From this time he became a zealous ritualist. To adopt his own language, he fell in very eagerly with the religion of the times; going to the venerable abbey church of his native village twice a-day; adoring, and that with great devotion, all persons and things belonging to the place, from priest to clerk, from altar to surplice; and counting the sacred functionaries most happy, and, without doubt, greatly blessed. Had he but seen a priest, though never so sordid and debauched in his life, his spirit fell under him; and in short, the whole order so bewitched him that he felt as if he could lie down at their feet. While in this frame of mind, it occurred to him, that, if he could but trace his descent from the peculiar people of God, his soul would be safe and happy; and, on learning from his father that they were not of the Hebrew race, he experienced a deep feeling of disappointment. In the multitude of his thoughts within him, he does not ap

pear to have once adverted to the incarnate Saviour. His first clear sense of the evil of sin is referred to the impression made upon him by a sermon against Sabbath-breaking; a practice in which he continued to indulge, notwithstanding he had become a diligent frequenter of church. These avowals are worthy of notice; for the person and offices of Jesus Christ were often adverted to in the services, which, moreover, included a large reading of the New Testament Scriptures, and of the scarcely less evangelical Psalms of David, embracing also the solemn recital of the Decalogue.

By methods, certain though gradual, however, and in spite of frequent relapses, Bunyan was being led to clearer and more Scriptural views; for, though the impression of the sermon wore off while he was at dinner, and he betook him to his afternoon sports on Elstow Green with unabated delight, his serious thoughts returned as quickly as they had vanished, and with augmented force. day," he relates, " as I was in the midst of a game of cat, and, having struck it one blow from the hole, just as I was about to

"The same