being almost as light as cork. Before spectrum analysis was discovered, it was supposed the lithium salts were very rare; but the wonderful spectroscope reveals their presence in almost all waters, in milk, tobacco, and even in human blood. A very strange plant is the tobacco plant. How singular, that atoms of the rarest and most remarkable of all the metals— caesium, rubidium, and lithium — should be found in this pungent weed! When volatile lithium compounds are heated in flame, they impart to it a most magnificent crimson tinge; nothing in ordinary pyrotechny can compare with it. If one six-thousandth part of a grain of lithium be present in a body, the spectroscope shows it when it is volatilized, or burned."
M. de la Rive makes an interesting communication to the Academy of Sciences, in Paris, upon the electrical state of the globe. We will give a summary of it after a few considerations.
"Perfect instruments are of an extreme delicacy; the least thing deranges them and makes them valueless. It is the same with choice organizations. Persons whose moral and physical characters are uniform, moderate, always the same, who fall into no extremes, who are rarely subject to slight variations of health and strength, but who, whenever they are indisposed, are so in earnest, — these persons, whose thoughts and feelings move always upon the same diapason, possess a quantity and intensity of life nearly uniform, ever the same, which changes but slowly and with difficulty, but which, when once modified and enfeebled, is also with difficulty restored. These temperaments are bad conductors of life. They guard it well; but if circumstances unfortunately arise to enfeeble it, it can only be restored with much difficulty.
"There are vulgar and common natures having no sentiment of poetry, made to live uniformly, without excesses of any kind. It is on this account they are commonly called good characters. But there is another category of individuals. See that man, full of force, of joy, of enthusiasm. Life animates all his fibres; existence is for him only happiness and success. But observe him to-morrow — even to-day, perhaps. Dejection contracts his features; a profound melancholy shades his expression. How much sadness in his physiognomy! Apprehension, indecision, the most complete vacuity, has seized hold of him. He sees only bitterness on the earth; happiness has disappeared. And, what is strange,
