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Sitting Magistrate - S. Lord, Esq
Assize of Bread, the Loaf of 2lbs. 5½d.
Average Prices of Articles at yesterday's market : -
Wheat 9s. 7d. per bushel ; maize 4s. 3d. per ditto ;
new barley 5s. per ditto; potatoes 9s. per cwt;
eggs 1s. 6d. per dozen; butter 1s. 6d. per lb. ; fowls
3s 6d.
On Tuesday night last a remarkably audacious
burglary was perpetrated in the dwelling house of Mr.
Nichols, adjoining the King's Wharf; which must
have occupied a considerable length of time. The
first attempt was upon the back store doors, failing in
which, and finding no access into the back of the
house, they conveyed a heavy ladder over the wall to
the street front, and making their way into an upper
window by the ladder, got into a small store-room
from whence they took a chest of hyson skin tea, and
a quantity of men's slops; which they afterwards
conveyed across the wall into the yard, where they
replaced the ladder, and left the empty tea chest, to-
gether with an empty egg basket, which they had
also robbed of its contents.
A fortnight ago we gave an account of a rapacious
insect of the snail order, distinguished by the name of
the houseless snail or slug, which had totally laid
waste a number of gardens in Castlereagh street, and
among others that of Mr. Williams, rope-maker, who
had persevered in an experiment to destroy them by
the use of lime water poured over the earth every night
soon after the diminutive spoiler appeared upon
the surface of the soil. Mr. Williams has perfectly
succeeded in ridding his bedless garden of the slug;
but has since experienced a disaster only differing
from the former in this respect; that a more diminu-
tive species of the same animal in countless thousands
occupies his well, which is perhaps in that quarter
more valuable than a garden ; the only description
we can give of it, and which may be relied upon,
is, that their chief difference in external conformation
from their terrestrial predecessors is in point of size ;
those of the garden measuring about an inch ;
and those of the aquatic swarm not measuring more
than an eighth of an inch, and far too minute to be
examined without a microscope. In drawing a bucket
of water from the well, the numbers astonish, yet the
water is itself as clear as crystal. A number of these
lived several days in a goblet ; their colour on the back
varying in different individuals of the tribe from a dark
brown to a light mixture of grey. It has no resem-
blance to the leech whatever; its motion in the water
is always progressive ; in the place of the eyes there
were uniformly two very diminutive white specks, but
the microscope was not good enough to shew whether
they contained orbs: the same with the teeth, though the
lips are mostly distended widely as they move in curves
through the water, gliding over, under, and across
each other, without offering molestation. The mites
exuded from a fly that had been many hours dead,
and which made their way through a puncture in the
side with a pin which was only designed to lift it in among

the swarm, lived 12 or 14 hours among them, & were
never assailed by their more powerful associates, whose
greatest harm would appear to be in the total spoiling
of a useful well, and doubtless, in hot weather, be-
coming from their number a putreseent nuisance,
which a little lime might prevent. They exist but a
few minutes out of the water. The snail is o[v]iparous,
and if this be of the species, the egg must have been
too minute for observation ; several were excluded in
the goblet, but were not distinctly visible, until they
had attained a third of their growth.

$