Littell's Living Age/Volume 138/Issue 1786/Miscellany

Judging from his report, Signor D'Albertis appears to have carried out his recent expedition in the "Neva" up the Fly River, New Guinea, under very great difficulties. He experienced constant hostility on the part of the natives, and was much troubled by the conduct of part of his crew. In many parts the natives were found to be very numerous, and on one day he estimates that he saw two thousand on the banks. On that occasion he passed a large village where there were more than five hundred people on the bank, whom he describes as "beautifully dressed with white feathers, and their bodies painted in many colors." They wore white shells for purposes of ornament and protection, and had "head-dresses of white feathers of cacatua and red and yellow Paradise bird." Signor D'Albertis discovered a large tributary entering the Fly River from the north-east; but, owing to the various troubles he met with, he was not so successful as he expected with his natural-history collections, but he obtained eight hundred skins of birds, comprising probably two hundred species, of which he hopes that twenty or twenty-five may prove to be new.

The glaciers of the western Himalayas, according to measurements recently given in the Tour de Monde, far surpass in extent any hitherto examined outside of the polar regions. In the Mustagh range, two glaciers immediately adjoining one another possess a united length of sixty-five miles. Another glacier in the neighborhood is twenty-one miles in length, and from one to two miles in width. Its upper portion is at a height of twenty-four thousand feet above the level of the sea, and its lower portion, terminating in masses of ice two hundred and fifty feet in height and three miles in breadth, is sixteen thousand feet above the sea. Nature