THE BEACH AGAIN. 
Hi 
always insane. Even savages have indirectly surmised 
as much. Humboldt, speaking of Columbus approach¬ 
ing the New World, says: “ The grateful coolness of 
the evening air, the ethereal purity of the starry firma¬ 
ment, the balmy fragrance of fiowers, wafted to him by 
the land breeze, all led him to suppose (as we are told 
by Herrera, in the Decades) that he was approaching 
the garden of Eden, the sacred abode of our first parents. 
The Orinoco seemed to him one of the four rivers which, 
according to the venerable tradition of the ancient world, 
flowed from Paradise, to water and divide the surface of 
the earth, newly adorned with plants.” So even the 
expeditions for the discovery of El Dorado, and of the 
Fountain of Youth, led to real, if not compensatory dis¬ 
coveries. 
We discerned vessels so far off, when once we began 
to look, that only the tops of their masts in the horizon 
were visible, and it took a strong intention of the eye, 
and its most favorable side, to see them at all, and some¬ 
times we doubted if we were not counting our eyelashes. 
Charles Darwin states that he saw, from the base of the 
Andes, “ the masts of^he vessels at anchor in the bay of 
Valparaiso, although not less than twenty-six geograph¬ 
ical miles distant,” and that Anson had been surprised 
at the distance at which his vessels were discovered from 
the coast, without knowing the reason, namely, the great 
height of the land and the transparency of the air. 
Steamers may be detected much farther than sailing 
vessels, for, as one says, when their hulls and masts of 
wood and iron are down, their smoky masts and stream¬ 
ers still betray them; and the same writer, speaking of 
the comparative advantages of bituminous and anthracite 
coal for war-steamers, states that, “from the ascent cf 
