Professor Owen tells us, in one of his late lectures, that the gorilla approaches man more closely than does any one of the previously known four-handed animals, in these respects;-a shorter humerus, and altogether a shorter arm; a longer and more developed great-toe; projecting nasal bones; and an arrangement of the bones of the feet better fitting the animal to stand erect. The creature seems to live wholly on fruits, nuts, and other edibles of the kind, being indeed a quite progressed vegetarian ; and some of its varieties construct of leaves and branches, a rude dome-shaped shelter high up in trees. It is shy of travellers and even of the negroes, unless when the male-often polygamousis found in the company of his females, or when the old and lonely male is encountered. It shows strong attachment for its young. Its large, deep-set eyeballs, and strongly marked features, give it an expression of great ferocity; it is untameable; and with its massive, muscular chest and powerful limbs becomes, when aroused to attack or to self-defence, an enemy extremely to be dreaded. It can stand tolerably erect, especially when plucking fruits or defending itself; but it prefers the posture of the quadruped. The head is marked by a very prominent bony crest, taking the place of the superciliary ridges, and quite excluding the brain from just above the eyes, and then rising in the middle from over the nose to the crown. But the comparative anatomist has no longer any very sure consolation left him in a few marked protuberances, or variations of form, in the bony framework. Powerful muscles develope exaggerated prominences at their points of insertion. The brain of this creature, however, is much smaller, and thrown farther back, than its face or forehead would indicate. This brute, indeed, shows in most respects great want of intelligence. Instead of bagging the fruits, or bundling the sugar-canes, which it ventures into the settlement to steal, it returns to carry away its prizes one by one; and thus it becomes a prey to the cultivators, who have the opportunity to watch for and destroy it. Hence, the negro common-sense has entitled this fearful foe, as nevertheless, "the stupid old man." Professor Owen is led to conclude, also, that like man, the gorilla did not antedate the existing condition of our globe.

One can not, we think, without peculiar sensations, peruse the entertaining little book of Captain Reid,-entitled "ODD PEOPLE," and consisting in an attempt to daguerreotype for the very large

class of "travellers at home," the peculiar ways, the physical condition and mental stature of certain outrè races of men, who turn up in various localities on the extreme verge of human unenlightenment and stagnation. We shall not be under the necessity of stating many of these instances. The little yellow-brown savages of Southern Africa, the bushmen, seldom attaining a stature of five-feet, and whose manners and mode of living so far out-gipsy the treacherous gipsy races of Europe, afford us an apt illustration. Here, intelligence arises so high as to the digging of wedge shaped pitfalls, covering with the appearance of ground, and consructing fences which shall direct the animals of the region into the snare-a piece of cunning check-mated even by the sagacity of the elephant; or, these means of supply failing, the little men venture in gangs into the country of the farmers or boers; destroying, if overtaken, their booty with poisoned arrows, rather than allow of its recovery; and if successful in reaching a place of temporary abode, feasting to utter repletion, and without the least thought of a providence for the future, on the carcases, until the unwashed bodies are bloated, and bloody, and unctuous, and the supremely happy Bushman, when his supply is exhausted, sinks into a lethargy for days, to awaken to activity again only when diminshing proportions and the gnawings of hunger come imperatively upon him. These men and women-we cannot deny that they are such-recognize no marriage obligations; and though they will dance and chatter all night with as high relish as the veriest scion of royalty, and bury their dead with tokens of respect, they have no government, save a very restricted patriarchal one, of force; and no religion; while the very missionaries fail among them to make themselves comprehended, or to impress the rudimentary heart or head which, in those directions, are the best they have to offer!

Cunning in warfare and the chase, and a degree of skill in the discovery and manipulation of poisons, seem to be among the mental elements most early and strongly developed, that is, after and above the merely sensuous appetites, in all these strange types of humanity. What is the former, we ask, but the rudiment of the policy and savoir faire which still so deeply tincture the individual, social, and political conduct of the most advanced nations? and what the latter, if not under spur of "necessity," the very germinal principle of our multiplied arts?

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Of such a character as we have thus intimated, are the thoughts that have now got themselves resolutely before the world. The question of man, in his physiological relationships, is brought more distinctly to issue than ever before. But grant the worst, that the believers, in a progressing, hence now manifestly fragmentary and distorted, type of soul and man, can claim, does it at all follow that, therefore, the higher and more advanced is authorized in any the least unfairness and oppression toward the lower and more rudimentary man? Does not every approach to imbecility or childhood constitute with the gentleman, the man, and the true Christian, by just so much an additional reason for care and kindly consideration? by so much a stronger safeguard of right? We have utterly failed to perceive how, by the broadest Darwinian assumption, the ideal of, and obligation to truth, or beauty, or justice, nobility, duty, Christianity, or manhood, are in the least shaken; or how any of these elements and ends of our spiritual nature are in the slightest rendered unlike to what they always were.

What conseqences, broad and deep, follow from this idea of derivation of the highest, from the lowest human; as before that, of the human from the beneath-the non-human! What ages on ages, unrecorded, almost now inconceivable, have meanwhile flown forever away! What ceaseless struggle-what crushing total of failure, sorrow, and death-what universe of victorieswhat slow, insensible modification, betterment, outgrowth! How the poet's wail becomes a revelation of all that has ever been, and rolls back, faintly echoing the same voice of toil, the same woe, the same ever unsatisfying realization, from peak to peak of the fading centuries and eons !

For, in the new light, if it be light, man stands at once at a certain status in an endless evolution-at a certain plane or stage of an ascent, or descent, as the case may be. Humanity in any form is no finality: it is a phase. We are what we were not; and we shall be what we are not. This does not change aught that, was, or is now, above us, or below us. It does not in the least change man himself. It may in time change to some required and healthful degree, no further, his estimation of himself—that is, for all purposes of the state in which he is-not to any important degree for purposes of that better state to which he aspires. For whatever has been the mode of the work of creation, its re

་ས་ཡང་གཉས་

sults constitute another and a wholly different question. At some time, and in some way, there has been "breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life;" at some time, and in some way, he has become a living soul." It is but fair that he estimate himself now by present inventory, and not by destructive distillation and an analysis backward to ultimate beginnings. He finds within himself "that longing after immortality" which is the best assurance of its own satisfaction. He finds that every flaxen-haired, bright-eyed child breaking anew into the world of conscious thought, frames an ideal of life and of mankind that warrants, without much effort of imagination, the belief in the coming of a time when, not only in that state of being beyond the grave, but in that which corporeal man here lives, the era of fraternity, and virtue, and true nobility of soul, shall be fully attained. For if the past shows enlarging thought in man, not less does it show a steady and certain amelioration of customs, of habits, of life, of ideals, of laws, penalties, and incentives, and a persistent agitation towards the purification, enlargement, intelligence, and soundness of religious faith. And in this latest attempt at an outstretching of the reason and ken of man into a lost past, an attempt which some have so eagerly interpreted into a degradation of manhood and an extinction of Deity, still from out the very midst of the play, and rolling over the battlements of atheism, are heard judgments like that of Professor Owen, and which gain their deepest force from the fact that to them the greatest hearts of men instinctively respond: "The highest generalizations of the science of organized bodies, like the Newtonian laws of universal matter, lead to the unequivocal conviction of a great First Cause which is certainly not mechanical"-which is, therefore, certainly a benevolent Intelligence.

Finally, to assert all that we have felt ourselves warranted in asserting here, of man as a race, does not necessarily involve any very exalted estimate of his present average developement, or activities, or any certain confidence in respect to his immediate tendencies. This is an aspect of our theme which, if at all, must receive attention at another time. We live in a world which has repaid, often with the deepest pain the hearts that have most earnestly sought its well-being--a world which awarded martyrdom to Jesus and Socrates, and which still bestows, on occasion, its crowns of thorns. We live in a decade in which, above all

others in history, gold has accumulated among the foremost nations of our globe, and in which, certainly, the manifested soul and honor, and reflection, of those same nations threaten us with incessant proofs of a dwindling and disappearance in a corresponding ratio. We "stone the prophets," and jeer the poor unfortunate who' cleaves to his integrity and his selfhood, if to do so involves a devotion to pursuits not rendering their immediate equivalents in stocks or bank accounts. We glorify the man who sweeps the very horizons of the nation with some wave of excitement, however empty its purpose, however false or even fatal the return he proposes and bestows for the popular adulation and subserviency. And thus, we are in danger of growing into a quick, active, scheming, multifarious thought, from which, by very necessity of such agitation, all broad, comprehensive, truly consistent, far-sighted and deep intellectual use, proficiency and achievement, shall be as the rule excluded. Thus should we, sorrowfully enough, culminate in the feverish activity of a really thinning brain; and in a most unfounded pride, ignoring the quieter, nobler, and more far-reaching purposes and accomplishings of human intelligence; above all, belittling man, and dwarfing rather than enlarging, as should continually occur, our sentiment of humanity, and our ideal of the work of life.

ART. VI.-1. History of the Ottoman Turks. By E. S. CREASY. 2 vols. London : 1856.

2. The Sultan and his People. By C. OSCANYAN, of Constantinople. New York: 1857.

3. The Czar and the Sultan. By ADRIAN GILSON. New York: 1853. 4. The Turks in Europe. By FRANCIS BOUVET. New York: 1853. 5. Chrétiens et Turcs. Par EUGENE POUJADE. Paris: 1859.

THERE is no nation of modern Europe whose annals are more full of interest than those of the Ottoman Power-none whose rise, and progress, and gradual decline, are so interwoven with the history of Europe, for many centuries, and with the fate of other nations which have either sunk beneath its victorious legions, or been elevated by its decay. At this moment, its status is the turning point of the peace of Europe, and its future destiny is the great problem which European statesmen find it so hard to solve.