• French engineer Napoléon Garella proposes a 76-kilometre Panama canal costing 125 million francs, featuring an 8,550-metre tunnel bored through solid porphyry rock to surmount a 140-metre mountain ridge.
• Portugal's Queen, visibly pregnant, personally presided over the Cortes opening; in the royal gallery an African prince from the Congo — son of a Congolese sovereign — drew attention in his half-oriental costume.
• In the French Chamber of Peers, the comte de Saint-Priest claimed that Argentine dictator Rosas sent his daughter the salted ears of prisoners as gifts, which she displayed in her salon like New Year's presents.

• In Brittany, a curé persuaded a farrier to cut open the corpse of a pregnant woman named Panaget — allegedly beaten to death by her husband — so the foetus could be baptised; the mother enlarged the incision with her own hands.
• A wounded gendarme named Sommier survived a double-barrelled gunshot to the chest only because his service papers in a cardboard cover deflected the charge; the poacher who fired them was later identified and confessed.
• Thieves who robbed a Paris wine merchant hid a basket of Champagne in a vacant lot while fleeing, intending to recover it for their celebratory supper — but rival criminals found it first.

Music

• For the benefit of bass Luigi Lablache, the Théâtre-Italien will stage Cimarosa's Il Matrimonio Segreto on 19 January with soprano Fanny Persiani and tenor Mario in the cast.

• French cashmere shawls that cost 300 francs a few years ago are now sold in Paris novelty shops at 83 francs, with square shawls available for as little as 38 francs — a third of their former price.