. In steam-voyaging, we may expect that means will be
adopted to avert, or at least assuage, the terrible calamities of
conflagration and shipwreck--better acquaintance with the principles
of spontaneous combustion, and with the natural law of storms, being
of itself a great step towards this important result.

One of the latest wonders in practical science, is a plan for cooling
the air in dwellings in hot climates; by which persons residing in
India, and other oppressively warm countries, may live habitually in
an atmosphere cooled down to 60 degrees Fahrenheit, or the ordinary
heat of a pleasant day in England. The very ingenious yet simple means
by which this is to be effected, will form the subject of notice in
our next number. Meanwhile, we may observe that the discovery is due
to Mr C. Piazzi Smyth, astronomer-royal for Scotland; and if perfectly
successful in practice, of which there can be no reasonable doubt, it
will have a most important effect in extending European influence over
the globe.

The extension of the English language over the civilised world is a
curiosity of the age. French, German, Italian, and other continental
tongues, seem to have attained their limits as vernaculars. Each is
spoken in its own country, and by a few fashionables and scholars
beyond. But the language which pushes abroad is the English; and it
may be said to be rooting out colonised French and Spanish, and
becoming almost everywhere, beyond continental Europe, the spoken and
written tongue. Long the Spanish enjoyed the supremacy in Central
America; but it has followed the fate of the idle, proud, combative,
and good-for-nothing people who carried it across the Atlantic, and is
disappearing like snow before the sun of a genial spring. The sooner
it is extinct the better. Already the English is the vernacular from
the shores of the Atlantic to the Pacific, wherever civilised
settlements are formed. As large a population now speaks this nervous
language in America as in Great Britain; and this is only an
indication of its progress. By means of a rapidly-increasing
population, the English language will in twenty years be spoken by
upwards of fifty million Americans; and if to these we add all within
the home and colonial dominion, the number speaking it at that period
will not be short of a hundred millions. What an amount of
letter-writing and printing will this produce! And, after all, how
small that amount in comparison with w