What hours of spell-bound delight do these two volumes lock up, yet
we hope but for a short season, from all who would vary "life's dull
round" with romantic lore.

* * * * *

NATURAL HISTORY.

The remarkably attractive Number of the _Magazine of Natural History_
for the present month enables us to checker our sheet with a page or
two of facts which will be interesting to every inquiring mind.

Hail at Lausanne.

"At Lausanne, on the 14th of July, 1831, about 8 P.M., we witnessed
one of those hail-storms which, every summer, cause such ravages in
the south of Europe. A great proportion of the hailstones were as
big as hen's eggs, and some even bigger: seven nearly filled a common
dinner plate. They were mostly oval or globular; but one piece,
brought to us after the storm, was flat and square, full 2 in. long,
as many broad, and three quarters of an inch thick, with several
projecting knobs of ice as big as large hazel nuts. This mass exactly
resembled a piece of uniformly transparent ice, but the oval and
globular masses had the same conformation as has often been described
in these hailstones, and on which Volta founded his ingenious but
untenable theory of their formation. In the centre of each was a
small, white, opaque nucleus, the size of a pea, and evidently one of
the hailstones usually seen in England, to which the French give the
name of _gresil_, confining the term _grele_ to the larger masses of
ice now under our observation. This nucleus of _gresil_ was
enclosed in a coat about half an inch thick of ice considerably more
transparent than it, but still somewhat opaque, as though of snow
melted and then frozen again, and externally the rest of the mass was
of ice perfectly transparent, and as compact and hard as possible,
resounding like a pebble, and not breaking when thrown on the floor.
The inhabitants of Lausanne, aware that the cinereous and puffed up
appearance of the clouds charged with this tremendous aerial artillery
portended more than a mere thunder-storm, had adopted the precaution
of closing their Venetian shutters; but such windows as were deprived
of this protection had almost every pane broken: and much damage was
done to the tiles of all the houses, and to the gardens and vineyards;
but less than might have been expected, owing to the short duration of
the storm, which did not last longer than seven or eight minutes, and
to the circumstance of the hailst