SURELY if eclipse expeditions had their mottoes, that of the expedition of this year should be per mare per terram; for it has been per mare per terrain in our case with a vengeance! Probably when we return, the curious individuals who total up in the Times the aggregate number of years those people have lived whose deaths are there recorded, will, in asking us for our autographs, beg also a detailed statement of the number of miles each of us has travelled in the performance of our duty. I fear it will be very difficult to give the information; and if the temperature in the shade be wanted too, the thing will be perfectly hopeless; for, thank goodness, we took the precaution to bring no thermometers; had we done so and looked at them, it might have been all over with us. Let me point my remarks. A week ago I was at Bekul, having travelled I know not how many thousand miles by sea, and having scarcely set foot on land for a month. We were in the jungle, the heat was burning, some of us had fever, and it was opium which enabled me at all events to get through the eclipse, for it was that memorable day just a week ago. Since then, by night and by day, Dr. Thomson, Captain Maclear, and myself, have been—I seek a word, wafted is too weak, jolted is too strong, for some parts of our journey, though ridiculously lacking in expression for others—well, conveyed from Bekul, now in men-carried conveyances, the cunning bearers with their plaintive moaning, by no means unmelodious, keeping step, giving us an idea of the tremendous labour they were undergoing, and reminding us of a certain journey which we must all make once; now on men's shoulders, now in bullock bandy, speed about two miles an hour, thanks to a brutal breach of contract, which has upset my plans terribly, now in Indian railway carriages, average speed ten miles an hour, temperature of carriage at noon unknown, and lastly in the horse transit of the Madras Carrying Company. Oh! that their carriages were as good as their arrangements and the speed of their horses; and, now, here I am shivering, surrounded by hoar frost, with a soupcon of a difficulty of breathing in this higher air after the dense atmosphere of the jungles, but all the same in an earthly paradise with hedges of roses although it is mid-winter, the whole place a perfect garden. I am at Ootacamund, at an elevation of some 7,000 feet with an Australian fauna; and within a few hours I hope to see Janssen, who is still here; Tennant, Herschel, and Hennessy I have unfortunately missed, owing to the breach of contract already referred to.