We have two other varieties of this insect here, which I intended to have sent you, but they have accidentally escaped. One is quite small, and the other three or four times the size of the common kind. Should I be able to get hold of either of them again this season, I will send them. J. Van Buren.

Clarksville, Ga., July 15, 1851.

"Notes on North Americ Agricultural, Economical and Social," by Professor

Johnston. Edinburgh and London, 1851. It has ever been the fortune of the people of the United States, to be patronised by an itinerating race of English, Scotch, or Irish travelers, who, in "a laudable spirit of inquiry," come over among us, as they themselves asserted, "to judge candidly, and without prejudice, of our people and their institutions;" and after receiving the hospitalities and attentions of those to whom they had condescended an acquaintance, and fatigued with their exactions, to return home, and most heartily, and with a right good will, abuse us, always in general, and quite frequently, in particular, in a written book of travels. It were bootless either to classify or name the shoal of scribblers running down the catalogue, from "Tommy Moore, the Irish Rhymster," to Charles Dickens, of "International Copy-right" notoriety - all equally celebrated, if not in the literary merit of the books themselves, yet altogether so for the kind temper and generous motives of their philanthropic labors!

The literary foreigner has threaded our country to ascertain "who reads an American book?" - the politician and pamphleteer, to earn his pension at home, in the noble object of spying out the nakedness of the land in our lack of institutions "time honored in Old England;" - a vulgar, gossipping old woman, to gather material for a lively and scandalous book; - and a clever, termigant play-actress, to get a rich husband, and "kick up a fuss generally," - which in one way or other they have managed to accomplish, no doubt with singular satisfaction to themselves, and the exceeding joy of sundry among their equally honest and self-satisfied country people at home.

Such travelers were chiefly of the common line; traveling to write, and writing to pay. But we have now to notice one of another kind, ostensibly a traveler in the way of his profession. Agriculture and her sister arts, within the last twenty years, have attracted a larger share of the public attention than formerly, in a great portion of the United States, as partaking in the general progress of the day; and among the British authorities which our inquiring cultivators have sought to instruct them in their labors, and aid in their investigations, the published writings of a Scotch Professor - Johnston by name - in a small Chemico-Agricultural department of a university, so styled, in the city of Durham, have been consulted. Awakened to a notion that where a plausible book had made some impression for our benefit, the author of that book could make a more emphatic impression by his own presence, the managing department of the New York State Agricultural Society, extended, some three years since, a sort of invitation, or hint, to the aforesaid Professor, that he should come over to the United States and deliver a course of lectures on "Chemistry as applied to Agriculture," for a compensation, which, after a sufficient amount of professional coquetry on his own part, he accepted.

In due time, therefore, it became known that in the month of August, of the year 1849, "James F. W. Johnston, M. A., F. R. S. S. L. E., & F. G. S., C. S., etc. Reader of Chemistry and Mineralogy in the University of Durham" - we quote the title page of his book - arrived at Halifax, and spending some time in the Provinces of Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, in four weeks thereafter entered the United States, and arrived in the city of Syracuse, in the state of New-York, on the 11th day of September; and on the 13th, at the great andelivered my address, in a large open tent, to several thousand people, by whom it was warmly and kindly received."

Now, we intend to deal fairly with Professor Johnston. A man of respectable attainments - a chemist by profession - a lecturer in a school of some local celebrity, by occupation - and in the connection which his subject of teaching has to the agriculture of his own country, a farmer and a horticulturist, in theory at least. - and as a matter of course, supposed to be a gentleman in manners, we had, in our simplicity, supposed that we should obtain much information at his hands. We hoped - although against heavy odds, we admit - that our country, in the observations made upon it by an intelligent and truth loving spirit, would be fairly examined - so far as examined at all, and that if he presumed to indite a book of two stout volumes upon us and our institutions, both our people and their country would, at least, be treated with justice. It will be seen in what way and manner all these have been done.

We say presume to write a book upon the people of the United States and its institutions. Not that these subjects are so lofty and abstruse that they may not be touched by the pen of a foreigner, and that foreigner not a first class man either, by any means; but it is a matter of some presumption we humbly submit, for a closet man, cooped up for the greater part of his professional life within the walls of an ancient Saxon town, to take a broad leap across the Atlantic, "steam" over a portion of the bays and rivers, and lakes; trundle over a few of the railways of a country thousands of miles in extent; dive into a chemical laboratory here; attend a private entertainment there; partake in a set, or a casual conversation elsewhere; and make a thorough examination of nothing. - all within the space of four months, and then square himself deliberately to the composition of a work which he is to put forth with all the authority and self-complacency of a teacher in the sciences, physical, political, and ethical, as applied by a people, and to a country he had never before seen! This, at least, would be called presumption in an American who should dare to take such liberty with Old England, or any part of Great Britain, although somewhat less extensive in territory and population, than the United States. But it may be called condescension by the modest author himself, to the less enlightened curiosity of his "trans-atlantic cousins."