The last Fremont, Ohio, Journal says: It is not generally known that there exists about a mile west of this city, a remarkable underground stream, with a swift current, and no outlet above the surface of the ground this side of Lake Erie. It was discovered several years ago, on a farm north of the Four-Mile House, now owned by widow Sheffer, by a man who was returning from a day’s chopping in the woods. In walking over a slightly sunken place, he noticed a hollow sound, and turning struck the ground with his as. The ax broke through and disappeared, and never has been recovered. Further investigation showed a rock about six feet below. By tracing its course further down, and breaking through the crust, the phenomenon appeared again, and by dropping a piece of wood or other floating substance in the upper apperture, it was soon seen to pass the lower one, showing a strong current. A lead and line let down to the depth of seventy feet, found no bottom. The supply of water is only slightly affected by drought, and a pump set in one of the places above mentioned has furnished the purest water to the whole neighborhood during the late dry season. It is certainly quite a remarkable stream.

Among the products of the country around Pare, in Brazil, are vampire bats, which are so dangerous that the natives are obliged to guard carefully against their intrusion into their dwellings. A letter says that a party of Americans recently had an unpleasant experience with them. They were on an excursion up the Amazon, and at night one of them was bled so badly by a vampire as to awake, in a state of exhaustion, with a face like a corpse. The foot of his hammock and the floor beneath it was saturated with blood, the flow of which was checked with much difficulty. It is this difficulty of staunching the blood which makes the vampire so dreaded–the quantity which the creature requires to satisfy its appetite being comparatively trifling. Some persons seem to be especially liable to their attacks, while others can sleep in a room infested by them nightly with impunity. They only make their attacks in darkness, and a light kept burning in a sleeping-room is an effectual safeguard.

It has been a life-work of more than one to devise a mode of accounting for the world we are in with no agency of any intelligent power above nature, or with as little as possible. This is done, of course, “in the pure interests of science;” at any rate all desire of advocating atheism is disavowed. Some who labor in this line are naturalists; more are not. When the anonymous Vestiges of Creation appeared, the book was received as the work of some profound student of the natural sciences. But the zoologist wished he had known more of zoology; the botanist wondered at his botanical mistakes; and so through the circle. All found him weakest where they themselves were strongest. And the book, which was a nine-days’ wonder, has exerted no permanent influence on either natural history or theology.

It is a little remarkable to see a metaphysician like Herbert Spencer volunteering his aid in generalizing the truths which the botanists and zoologists have discovered, and which they are still tracing out to new discoveries. Is it that he supposes their minds so cramped by their investigations that they cannot or dare not go on to general principles? The amount of acute reasoning that has been expended on the flower of an orchis [sic] or a silkweed, is little suspected by most who are familiar with the subtleties involved in the consideration of an abstruse point in law. Men like Robert Brown and Richard Owen may be safely left to their own work. Nou tali auzilio. We know that there has been men who compiled an Encyclopaedia professedly out of zeal for the diffusion of knowledge, while among themselves they did not hesitate to avow it as the great task of their lives “to crush the wretch;” and that “wretch” was Jesus of Nazareth!

But we have less to do with the motives of Herbert Spencer than with his assumptions and conclusions. And in the outset let it be understood that they refute none of the teachings of the Bible. Could he but find evidence for them he would weaken certain arguments in natural theology, and take off something from the palpable absurdity of every atheistic scheme, but nothing more. It would remove certain results from the immediate to the mediate agency of the divine Contriver. The man who lets loose the ferret against the rats sends his design far beyond where his hands can reach. The zoologist who lays the head of a bird on an anthill uses the voluntary agency of other beings to free the bones form [sic] putrescible [sic] matters.

So, if it be not absurd to thank God for any event whereat we rejoice, how shall we limit his indirect agency? It may be that there is a sense in which he made the Pyramids and the Crystal Palace. And no one can prove that it is beyond the reach of Omniscience to wind up a machine as complicated as this world, so that each casual cog shall mesh in with one of effect even to the determination of where each leaf shall fall in all the life of every primeval forest. And intelligent beings might form part of the vast machine, seemingly as free in their agency as are the bees that swarm into the empty hive which their owner has made fragrant with hickory leaves. This is not our chosen way of explaining what we see, but it is less preposterous than a complicated code of self-enacted laws, and an eternal series of organic beings, which down to this winter, is seen to be in full career of rapid progress. But this interpretation of the Creator’s work excites the same disappointment as if what is treasured as an autograph should proved not a forgery, but the writing of an amanuensis. God is still the author of nature.

Our positive philosopher is very positive in his assertions. The patient naturalist who has sacrificed thousands of eggs in investigating the steps by which the yolk is developed into a chick, does not speak with more confidence of his conclusions from comparison of different eggs of the same hen at known intervals in the process of incubation, than our author does of the development of one species into another, assuming that unknown ages are competent to produce the change. But his whole scheme is unsupported by a single animal change that can be proved outside of human influences.

At the first glimpse any positive evidence of secular change in species might appear unattainable. It is not so. The entire history of many a species, from its origin to its extinction, can be studied in the strata of rock that were formed in part of their remains. None of them began in any other species, none ended in another. So far then as facts are concerned, the geographical discoveries of Lemuel Gulliver are on a level with the biological science of Herbert Spencer.

It is the first step that costs. The benighted traveler often has found as much difficulty in securing the first faint flame as in making all the rest of his watch fie. “Protoplasm, manifesting life, and yet showing no signs of organization,” is his starting point. Where do we find it? Who has seen it? Does it belong to the organic world–without organization? We wish to know more about this life without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days nor end of life. Is its life that of a crystal? Or is it merely geometricity, like the movements of animated oats, or the rose of Jericho? It is certainly a pity that this important abutment, whence the flying bridge must start, was not made firm beyond a peradventure. True it is sufficient that the protoplasm should have lived seventy million years ago. But are not the causes which then originated it still in action? Its very next door neighbors, protophytes and protozoa, are now by no means scares nor is their existence problematical. Strange that this protoplam should be so little known!

From these simple living cells, the theorist’s course in comparatively easy. Each living thing is an assemblage of facts; the prototype of scores, the humming bird of thousands or millions. A very skil[l]ful selection and arr[a]ngement is made of many that carry conviction with them. Grand that the Creator did make protoplasm and no other living thing, that he further enacted a complicated code of laws that execute themselves in some incomprehensible ways, and the order of being and development, may as well be, as Mr. Spencer would have it, as in any other way.

But that wonderful code of laws! Here are the yolks of two eggs. One is from the nest of an eagle, there other from that of a grouse. They are almost a liquid, but are, in fact, a conglomeration of delicate cells. But of course thee can be no very essential difference between them. The anatomist can find none at all. Outside influences must determine the shape of the creatures to come from them. No so. From one shall be developed a fierce eye, a hooked beak, and terrible talons; from the others a timid, defenseless bird. Nay, more; the offspring shall bear individual resemblance, not only to the parent within whose body its original substance took shape, but also to another parent with whom its connection must have been infinitesimal. The atheistic philosopher would have it that all the causes of these developments were wrapped up in that semi-fluid globe which cannot even keep its shape when laid on a plate. All the markings of a million of feathers in the egg of a peahen! For an uncreated law this is indeed wonderful–incredible.

But the development theory implies that accidental differences between parent and offspring may be perpetuated to succeeding generations. If any such peculiarity favor fecundity, tenacity of life, facility of securing food or escaping from enemies, it increases the number of descendants; and if the contrary, it diminishes the number of the survivors. And when the law of the survival of the fittest shall have culminated in an omnivorous animal of the size of the whale, that can leap as many times its length as a flea, with the cuirass of the crocodile, the tenacity of life of the tortoise, capable of outflying the condor and outswimming the salmon, as prolific as the rab[b]it, as cunning as the fox, with the intellectual power of Aristotle, the pertinacity of Grand, the eloquence of Demosthenes and the piety of Brainard, this globe will have reached maturity. We do not understand why this has not happened may millions of years since.

The absence of this all-prevailing supremus is not the only thing inexplicable in our theory. Of plants there should be just as many species as there are combinations of temperature, soil, moisture and other modifying circumstances; and, as two climates shade into each other, so should every two neighboring species. It should be as impossible to arrange them into distinct species as to classify absolutely the lumps of coal in a bin.

And there are some special difficulties. Does the working-bee transmit no sterility to her offspring? Ad did she inherit it from her prolific royal mother? The worker-ant is a similar puzzle. A still more remarkable one is the honey-making ant of Mexico. Certain neutrals secrete hone till they become shapeless living honey-bags. These the rest of the colony regularly destroy for food when other supplies fail. But their parents had no such peculiarity, and they transmit it to no descendants. By what modification of her wondrous law of descent–partus NON sequiter ventrem–is this peculiarity of the aunts transmitted to their nieces? Mr. Spencer finds no difficulty in arranging the animal creation into groups and imaginary series, each species of which might look like an improvement on the one supposed to have preceded it. But he makes no effort to prove that these species came into existence in any such order. And just here the facts are dead against him. For, granting that the creation of the present world was simultaneous, there is no question previous worlds had existed on this globe: they were furnished with life very different from ours. But it is far from true that there can be perceived any course of improvement from the “‘prentice hand” to the wonderful perfection ultimately displayed. The very reverse might be shown with much more plausibility.

The earliest of animals known till lately was a shell-fish called lingula prima. But it was not a poor helpless thing like the oyster. The Brachopods[sic], of which it was one, is the highest of mollusks, and after a wide prevalence in successive worlds is now almost extinct. The first reptiles that lived on this globe were not limbless snakes doomed to wriggle and crawl as they might, but mighty lizards before whom our creation would tremble. They walked, they swam, they flew. Birds to which the ostrich was but a chicken, have left their tracks in the sandstone. The elephant genus once traversed the snows of Siberia and Alaska; now it is reduced to two tender species in India and Africa. In short, it appears rather as if this globe had been spectator of successive interferences of creative power, as each organic form waxed old and ready to vanish away. And in each we love to trace, not the result of blind animal antagonism, but the mind of a Creator, a revelation of God to man. God grant that we read not the book of revelation in vain!–Zion’s Herald.

One of the most interesting items that we have learned from the whale men who have cruised the Arctic ocean the past summer, is the discovery of extensive land in the middle of that ocean, which may yet prove to be a polar continent. The existence of this land has long been known, but owing to the impassible ice barriers along its shores, of its extent and character nothing very definite has been known until this season. Baron Wrangell, the famous Russian explorer, first communicated to the world the knowledge of its existence as he learned it from the Siberian Indians, and it is simply marked on most Arctic charts, “extensive highlands.” It should be stated that the past summer has been the mildest and most favorable for whaling ever known by our oldest whalemen. One master says that he did not see a piece of ice as large as his hand till he reached the Straits, and even beyond that, up to 72 degrees the sea was generally free from floating ice. The weather, for the most part, haas been exceedingly mild, with southerly winds prevailing, which tended to meld the ice or drive it northward. As a result of the favorable state of the ocean and weather the ships have gone further north this summer than ever before, some having reached as high as 73 degrees 30 minutes.

Captain Long, of the bark Nile, who seems to have examined the land attentively, having cruised along the entire southern coast, has drawn a sketch of its appearance. It is quite elevated, and near the centre has an extinct crater cone, which he estimated at 2,480 feet high. He named Wrangell’s Lank, after the noted Russian explorer. The west point he named Cape Thomas, after the seaman on his ship who discovered it, and the southeast point Cape Hawaii. The names given by Capt. Long are so exceedingly appropriate that we doubt not geographical societies in Europe and America will adopt them, and call this land Wrangell’s Land. Captain Long has prepared for us an account of this interesting discovery, which we insert here:

Honolulu, Nov. 5, 1867.

Sir: During my cruise in the Arctic Ocean this season, I saw land not laid down on any chart that I have seen. The land was first seen from the bark Nile on the evening of the 14th of August, and the next forenoon at 9:30 the ship was eighteen miles distant from the west point of the land. I had good observations this day, and made the west point to be in latitude 70 degrees and 40 minutes north, and in longitude 170 degrees and 30 minutes east.–The lower part of the land was entirely free from snow, and had a green appearance, as if covered with vegetation. There was broken ice between the ship and land, but as there were no indications of whales, I did not feel justified in endeavoring to work through it and reach the shore, which I think I could have done without much danger. We sailed to the eastward along the land during the 15th, and part of the 16th, and in some places approached it as near as 15 miles.

On the 16th the weather was very clear and pleasant, and we had a good view of the middle and eastern portion of the land. Near the centre, or about in longitude 180 degrees, there is a mountain which has the appearance of and extinct volcano. By approximate measurement I found it to be 2,480 feet high. I had excellent observation on the 16th, and made the southeastern cape, which I have named Cape Hawaii, to be in latitude 70 degrees 40 minutes north, and 178 degrees 15 minutes west. It is impossible to tell how far this land extends northward, but as far as the eye could reach we could see ranges of mountains until they were lost in the distance; and I lear from Captain Biven, of the ship Nautilus, that he saw land northwest of Herald Island, as far north as latitude 72 degrees.

The first knowledge of the existence of this land was given to the civilized world by Lieutenant Ferdinand Wrangell, of the Russian navy (who I find in 1740, was an admiral in the same service). In his expedition from Nishne Kolymsk, in the consecutive years from 1820 to 1824, he obtained information from the Techuktsch that in clear days in the summer season, they could see land north from Cape Jakan.

From the appearance of this land as we saw it, I feel convinced that it is inhabited, as there were large numbers of walrus in this vicinity, and the land appeared more green than the main coast of Asia, and quite as capable of supporting man as the coast from Point Harrow to the Mackenzie river, or the northern parts of Greenland, which are in a much higher latitude. There is a cape a little to the Westward of Cape Jakan, which has a very singular appearance. On the summit and along the slopes of this promontory there is an immense number of upright and prostrate columns some having the appearance of pyramids, others like obelisks, some of them with the summit larger than the base. The character of the surrounding country, which was rolling with no abrupt declivities, made these objects appear more singular. They were not in one continuous mass, but scattered over a large surface, and in clusters of fifteen or twenty yards, with intervals of several hundred yards between them.

While at anchor near this place, Captain Philips of the Monticello, came on board, and drew my attention to a large black place on the slope of one of the hills, and said he thought it was coal. It glistened in the sun, and appeared like a large surface which had been used as s deposit for coal. It was about one and a half miles in length and on-half mile in breadth, the country surrounding that being covered with vegetation. From 170 east, there were no indications of animal life in the water. We saw no seals walrus, whales, or animalculae in it. It appeared almost as blue as it does in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, although there was but from fifteen to eighteen fathoms of water in any place within forty miles of the land. I think the position I have assigned to this land will be found correct as Mr. Flitner examined my chronometer on my arrival and found it only one and a half miles in error.

I have named this northern land Wrangell’s Land as an appropriate tribute to the memory of the man who spent three consecutive years north of latitude 66 degrees and demonstrated the problem of this open Polar Sea, forty-five years ago, although others of much later date, have endeavored to claim the merit of this discovery. The west cape of this land I have named Cape Thomas, from the man who first reported the land from the masthead of my ship, and the southeastern cape I have named after the largest island in this group. As this report has been hurriedly prepared, I would wish to make more extended observations on the subject, which may be of benefit of other cruisers in this direction, if you will allow me room in your paper on some future occasion.

Yours, very truly,

Thomas Long.

Many theories have been set up as to the origin, objects and purposes of the Western mounds. They seem to rise and fall in accordance with the ingenuity of the numerous writers on the subject. A curious and novel idea has been made public by a St. Louis Judge, relative to the mounds on the American bottom. He argues that the locality of St. Louis and its environs was once the bed of a great lake, supplied by the Missouri and Mississippi, with an outlet at Niagra Falls. In the course of centuries the barriers of the lakes at the falls were worn away, as the present falls (the outlet at Erie) will in time be. The great lake was thus drained, and the region became cultivatable. But it was a dangerous region. When the ice ran and the driftwood came down the narrow passage below would gorge, and the river would stand back on the former bed of the lake. To remedy this, a race of people far superior to the present Indians–probably the ancesters of the Aztecs–built the mounds as places of refuge for themselves and their flocks and herds, when the water rose. They were evidently built for practical purposes, and are clearly artificial formations. They were not intended for tumuli (burial places), as no skeleton or weapon has been found in any of them, except one skeleton, and that was wrapped in a Macinaw blanket. If we take into account the “wear down” of all these mounds for a thousand years, and count the numbers on both sides of the river, it is easy to see they were once capacious enough to furnish places of refuge for all the inhabitants of the valley and their flocks and herds and provisions. Whoever looked from the dome of the Court House (continues the Judge) and saw the ferryboats taking the inhabitants of the American bottom from the mound on that side of the river, at the last great overflow, will at once see the plain, practical purpose of these mounds.–Philadelphia Press.

The following incidents are narrated in the life of Rev. Dr. Wayland, just published, of his own mother:

One or two circumstances in the life of Mrs. Wayland were sufficiently remarkable to merit recital. No explanation of them is attempted. At the time of their removal to America, it was the design of Mr. Wayland and his wife to return in a few years to visit the relatives whom they had left behind, especially the mother of Mrs. W. This purpose they often spoke of to each other. But one morning, after they had been some years in the country, she said to him on waking, “I do not wish to return to England. My mother is dead.” No previous intimation of her ill health had been received. He, unknown to her, made a minute of the time of her declaration; and a subsequent arrival brought the news of the event, which had occurred at about the time at which her mind was thus impressed.

When her son–the subject of this memoir–was expected home from New York, after attending medical lectures there, during the winter of 1814-15, Mrs. W., who was sitting with her husband, suddenly walked the room in great agitation, saying “Pray for my son; Francis is in danger.” So urgent was her request that her husband joined her in prayer for his deliverance from peril. At the expected time he returned. His mother at once asked, “What has taken place?” It appeared that while coming up the North River, on a sloop, he had fallen overboard, and the sloop had passed over him. He was an athletic swimmer, and readily kept himself afloat till he could be rescued. Was it the unspeakable power of a mother’s love that imparted a vision more than natural?

Mr. Palmer, in his “Anecdotes of Elephants,” relates the following: “A troop of elephants were accustomed to pass a green-stall on their way to water. The woman who kept the stall took a fancy to one of the elephants, and frequently regaled her favorite with greens and fruits, which produced a corresponding attachment on the part of the elephant toward the woman. One day, the group of elephants unfortunately overturned the poor woman’s stall, and in her haste to preserve her goods she forgot her little son, who was in danger of being trampled to death. The favorite elephant perceived the child’s danger, and taking him up gently with his trunk, carefully placing him on the roof of a shed close at hand.”

An amusing anecdote is given by Captain Williamson of an elephant, named ‘Pangal,’ which showed remarkable sagacity. This animal, when on a march, refused to carry on his back a larger load than he thought was right and proper. He would pull down as much of the burden as reduced it to the weight which he conceived it was fair for him to bear. One day the quarter-master of the brigade became enraged at the apparent obstinacy of the animal, and very cruelly threw a tent pin at his head. A few days afterwards, as the elephant was on his way from camp to water he overtook the quarter-master, and, seizing him in his trunk, lifted him into a large tamarind tree, which overhung the road, and left him to cling to the branches, and get down in the best way that he could.

Porus, a king of India, in a battle with Alexander the Great, being severely wounded, fell from the back of his elephant. The Macedonian soldiers, supposing him to be dead, pushed forward in order to despoil of his rich clothes an accoutrements. The noble and faithful elephant, however, standing over the body of its master, boldly repelled every one who dared to approach. And, while the enemy was at bay, took the bleeding monarch up with his trunk, and gently placed him again on his back. The troops of Porus came by this time to his relief, and the king was saved; but the faithful elephant died of the wounds which he received in the heroic defence of his master.

Ludolph says that an elephant was one day ordered to launch a ship. The animal attempted to pull the vessel into the water, but it was beyond its strength. “Take away that lazy beast, and put another in his stead,” cried the angry keeper. The noble animal on hearing this redoubled his efforts, fractured his skull, and fell dead on the spot!

The Louisville Journal of Monday has the following:

Mrs. Carter who lives on Green street, between Ninth and Tenth, as a son about seventeen years of age, who is so accustomed to walking in his sleep that his mother has found it necessary to have him sleep in the same room with her, so that he may be watched over. Yesterday morning, however, about two o’clock, he arose in his sleep, and was not discovered in time to prevent him from leaping over the balustrade of the back porch, in the third story of the house, to the pavement below, a distance of about twenty-five feet. After this freak the family rushed down stairs, expecting to find him lying there a bruised and mangled corpse, but all their searching was in vain. Pretty soon a vigorous pull was made at the door bell, and the door was opened, when in stalked the somnambulist “as large as life,” and inquired “what’s the matter?” A surgeon was immediately called, and the young man was found to be not seriously injured, he having only a few slight bruises on each arm. It is said that he did not awake until after the physician had made his examination.