GAETA.

Otago Witness, Issue 497, 8 June 1861, Page 10

GAETA.

■mc work of destruction. No part of the whole mass of town, fortress, and hill has entirely escaped the ravages of the artillery which thundered at it from the land side. Where the cannon-ball did not hit point blank, there the bombshell fell with dire effect. The besicgei-3 reckon that they fired, during the whole siege, about 56,000 shots ; 13,000 in one day alone — the 22nd of January. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that you may almost tell the effect of each projectile ; you almost come to the conclusion that not one of them has been hurled in vain. The seige of Gaeta is, I believe, the first instance in which rifled cannon has been applied on a large scale to the battering of walls and bastions. The Pietlnioutesc, as 1 told you, had reared 80 of these new war engines on their battcrie3, and no man who has not seen it can believe the havoc they have caused. I have already described to you the condition of that part of the town I had already visited, that narrow slip stretching from the town gate to' the Royal Palace. The houses in this part may be said to be either altogether blown away or struck up all of a heap ; the batteries lining the sea, before these houses, and even, in some instances, the casemates under them are a mass of crumbling ruins. The Royal Palace, and the higher and lower town before it, are still standing ; but there is hardly a building, lofty or lowly, whether jutting out or shrinking back, that may be said to be unscathed. I saw several villanous holes through the roof of the Catholic Church, find more than one of its windows smashed out of all shape. As I ascended the hill, the road, the ground, the fencing walls, the whole mass nearly up to the summit was, here and there, ploughed up, levelled down, torn asunder, destroyed, with a violence exceeding all I could imagine as the effect of mere human contrivance. The whole hill, up to the foot of Roland's Tower, was strewn with projectiles, and fragments of projectiles. The round tower itself was hit in more than one spot, and, although a small battery of four rifled cannon, reared by the Neapolitans on the" hill ci-est, had not suffered, 3'et there was evidence that no inch of ground within the peninsula of Gaeta might.be considered as safe from the enemy's fire. E walked half way down the hill to the Queen's battery, and there I ma}*- say that one out of four of the pieces were dismounted, and the parapets were everywhere grievously damaged; bu^ I proceeded to the lower bastions, which . had evidently borne the brunt of the attack, and there is no exaggeration in saying that the original design of the works is scarcely any longer to be recognised, so miserably gabions, sandbags, walls, parapets, cannon, affuts, and the ground they stood on have been blown, and, as it were, winnowed together. I have seen such havoc caused in an Italian vineyard or garden by some furious hail-storm, where a few stumps of trees are all that remain of what was half an hour before a rank mass of luxuriant vegetation ; but could not, I repeat, believe that a fortress or part of it could be " crumpled up as'ojd piece of paper" as I saw Gaeta yesterday. There is a bewildering/appalling in the sight of po extensive a wreck; the buildings, stone houses, barracks, sheds, chapels, fountaiiici, snvill suburbs, convents, and churches which are scaitcred here and there between and behind thcee lower bastions, have been in many instances not only crushed and pounded to mere fhnpeless fragments, to atoms, but they have been actually swept away." Stone or brick, iron or mud, the softest' or 1 the hardest material, equally gave way; the projectile seemed to bring destruction with it in the very wind that encompassed it. Its effect was npt battering merely,' but "blasting.

On Tuesday, 12th March last, in his place in the House of Commons, Mr. Adderley asked the Under- Secretary of State for the Colonies whether .any arrangement had been v proposed to the New Zealand (Government as *to the proportion pf.the expense of the. present native war, which was to be charged on the Colonial Treasury; and whether fhere had been such an offer made as that. the, expenses of .whatever., local militia ( might be raised should become a charge on the Colonial Treasury 1 but that all expenses incurred by the employment of British troops should be borne by the Imperial Treasury ? In reply, Mr, C. Fortescue said no arrangement as to the distribution of the expenses of the war had been made. The dispatch of the necessary reinforcements had not been accompanied with any such arrangement. It would, he said, be impossible to come to such an arrangement in present circumstances ; but his noble friend (the Duke of Newcastle) had taken an opportunity of conveying to the Government of New Zealand his repudiation of the idea that the whole expenses of the war were to fall on the Imperial Government. He had also instructed the Governor to refuse to issue from the commissariat chest any contributions for the expenses of colonial forces, 'except on condition of future repayment by the Colonial Government.

A Scotch View of Mr. Spuegeon and his Services. — Yesterday, an outrage on religion, a I shock to right feeling, and an insult to the Deity, were combined in .-the- scene witnessed at the Corn Exchange. Yesterday, the' thoughtless, from sheer want of thought, the idle, from idlest curiosity, the pious, from mistaken zeal, the irreverent, from sympathy with an irreverent youth, patronised, by their presence, and rewarded with then: silver, the man who, with a temerity that inspires the reflecting with awe, does his high handed sacrilege at the altar, and, with merry pun and flippant jest, makes merchandise of the things of his Father's house. Yesterday, in this Christian town, and in the face of its sober Presbyterian feeling, a grown boy, full of reverend irreverence, and with little to commend him beyond the fact that he dare do, in the name of his Maker, things from which devouter men shrink back appalled, had the temerity — and, rightly viewed, an awful altitnde'of temerity it was — to charge for the preaching of redemption, "to the reserved seats two shillings," to other seats " one i shilling," and to the promenade " sixpence." Is not the high name of religion traduced ; are not the vital interests of our faith endangered ; is not the public sentiment scandalised by the effrontery which, in a pecuniary aense, makes of a service an exhibition, and of the pulpit, laboura a performance ? Soberly, seriously, sorrowfully,, we ask those who patronised yesterday's outrag© on the counsels of Him who said reproachfully, "Make not my Father's house a house of merchandise," whether it is in the power of open and professed scoffers to do religion one tithe so much injury as is done by a single preaching on the terms ''reserved seats two shillings!" — Dundee Advertiser. Tub Doom hanging over the Tuilekies. — It ia a curious circumstance, worthy at least of being indicated, that during the SSO years the Palace of the Tuileries has tieen a royal dwelling, no French sovereign has died within its walls. In connection with this fact another may be mentioned. Ever since 158S every French "sovereign who has made the Tuileries his abode has been compelled, at some time or other, to quit the shelter of its roof. Whether the present occupant of the'building will share the fact of his predecessors is a question which, for the present, it is well, perhaps, to leave to those who have faith in omens and prognostics. The Period in which Coal was Formed.— Of the lapse of time in the formation of our coalfields we cannot have the faintest conception ; it is only measured by Him with whdm a thousand years are aa one day. But the magnitude of the time is not surpassed by the boundlessness of the providential oare which laid up these Terrestrial ; treasures in store for His children, whom He was afterwards to call into being. Let me there- ' fore dismiss this profitless subject with one illus- ! tration. Mr. Maclaren, by a happy train of rea- ■ soning, for which I refer the reader to his" Geology of Fife," arrives at the .conclusion that 'it would require a thousand years to form abed of I coal one >ard thick. Now, in the South Wales coal ' field there is a thickness of coal of more than thirty yards, which would have required a period of 30,000 years for its formation. Jf we now, assume that the 15,000 feet of sedimentary materials was : deposited at the average rate of two feet in & centuy; corresponding to the rate of subsidence, it would have required 3,807,000 year 3to produce this coalfield.— Hull's Coal Fields qf Griat Britain.