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Waikato Times, Volume I, Issue 46, 15 August 1872, Page 2

A curious incident occurred to the steamer ' Boyut;/ on Uer last voyage from Brazil. It appears that when off Oape Finisterre, May 16, the captain found her speed suddenly diminish although her steam power was kept up. After some time the diminished ipeed was discovered to be owing to a huge vrhale which the cutwater of the ship had struck and penetrated in the centre and was driving •long. • The whale must have been floating on the surface dead or asleep when the ship struck it. The passengers wanted the monster to be hauled on board, but the captain could not afford the time to do so. He therefore basked the ship for some distance, and the leviathan sank.

Are we really desceuded from the monkey ? Professor Langor lately brought under the notice of the Anthropological Society at Vienna rather a startling argument in favour of this view, in the shape of the cranium of a negro, presenting the hitherto unobserved anomaly of five supernumerary teeth. Moreover. three of these, viz., an incisor and two molars, were situated in the lower jaw. By the arrangement of these teeth there are in each row right and left, four large grinders instead of three. Now it is a well-known fact, that the monkeys of the New World have thirty.six teeth, with four nnlars, just as they stood in Professor Langor's negro skull. This is considered strong evidence by the " humane simian M party.

How the Arab ladies perfarae themselves is thus described by Sir Samuel Baker in his work on the Nile:—" In the floor of the hat or tent., as it may chance to be, a small hole is excavated sufficiently large to contain a champagne bottle. A fire of charcoal or simply glowing embers is made within the hole, int ) which the woman about to be scented throws a handful of drugs. She then takes off the clothes or robe which forms her dress, and crouches over the fumes, while she arranges her robe to fall as a mantle from her neck to the ground like a tent. She now begins to perspire freely in the hot-air bath, and the pores of the skin being open and moist, tho volatile oil from the smoke of the burning perfumes is immediately absorbed. By the time tho fire has expired the scentingr process is completed, arid both her person and her robe are redolent of incense, with which they are so thoroughly impregnated that I have frequently smelt a party of women strongly at full a hundred yards distance, when the wind has been blowing from their direction. After a Japanese lover has proven false to his rows, the deserted maiden rises at about two o'clock in the morning, and dons a white robe and high sandaln or clogs. Her coif is a metal tripod, in which are thrust three lighted candles ; around her neck she hangs a mijrror, which falls upon her bosom ; in her left hand she carries a small straw figure— the effigy of her faithless lover —and in her right she grasps a hammer and nail- with which she nails it to one of the sacred trees that surronnd the shrine. Then she prays for tho death of tho traitor, vowing that if her petition be heard she will herself pull out the nails which offend tho god by wounding the mystic tree. Night after night she comes to the shrine> and each night she strikes in two more nails, believing thut every nail will shorten her lover's life, for the god to save his tree, will surely strike him dead. It is a curious illustration of the hold superstition j yet has on the Japanese mind. j