small garden, and proceeding to their respective tinguished from that of Chinese manufacture; but daily occupations; from which they returned in the the flavor is inferior, having more of a herby taste. evening, but not broken and bent down with the It is sold at about the same price; but it is now asseverity of their tasks. The condition of the do- certained that it cannot be produced so as to give a mestic slave is perhaps even better than that of the sufficient recompense to the grower, the price of others; his labor is but light, and he is certainly labor being much greater in Brazil than in China: better fed and clothed. I have almost universally to remunerate, it is said that Brazil tea ought to found the Brazilian ladies kind both to their male bring five shillings per pound. and female domestic slaves: this is particularly the case when the latter have acted as nurses. On

MIRACULOUS CASE.

estates where there has been no medical attendant, the island, there is no medical man; and as soon as Though there are both a priest and a lawyer on I have often found the lady of the proprietor attend- I was known to be one, my assistance was solicited ing to the sick in the hospital herself." from all quarters. The first individual I was reIn a literary point of view, this book is respect-quested to visit was a man with a large abscess in able, but not striking. The general reader may the neck, from the suppuration of the right subperhaps feel that the botanical and geological ac- maxillary gland: he could neither speak nor swalcounts rather interfere with the personal narrative; low, and his relatives thought him on the point of though they are not pushed so far as in several death. I opened the abscess, which gave him inworks. The descriptions of the towns on the sea-stant relief; and next day when I called, he was coast, and of some of the excursions in their neigh- sitting up, and able to overwhelm me with thanks borhood, are rather flat, from dealing with scenes for what he conceived to be a miraculous cure. that have already been described; and although the This case so established my reputation that I had features are by no means common, Mr. Gardner more medical practice than I desired. Two of my wants the power to give force and novelty to scenes patients were in the last stage of consumption; but with which we have already been made acquainted. by far the greater proportion of the cases resulted Indeed, he apologizes in his preface, for the circum- from intermittent fever, chiefly arising from destances under which his notes were taken-" for with enlargement of the spleen. Consumption is rangement of the digestive organs, accompanied rare in Brazil; during the whole of my travels I did not meet with more than a half-a-dozen cases. As I would receive no fees, many presents of fish, fowls, and fruit, were sent me.

the most part written during those hours which under other circumstances should have been devoted to sleep." Such, however, are precisely those parts to which the charge of flatness does not apply; and these are by far the larger portion of the volume. When camping out on the mountaintop or in the wilderness-roughing it in his long journies through the interior-observing the very singular mode of life there presented to his notice describing the curious characters that fell under his observation, or giving an account of more tangible things as the nature of the diseases, the arts, or substitute for arts of the people, and the natural productions of the country-Travels in the Interior of Brazil are full of attraction. In short, wherever the subject has sufficient life and interest in itself, Mr. Gardner has sufficient power to present them to the reader; but he wants art to endow the known or the commonplace with novelty and animation by his mode of treating them.

The book, like the country it describes, is full of new matter, and would furnish extracts of a very various and extensive kind; but we must confine ourselves to a few samples. Here is one on a subject which just now possesses an interest from the stir on the tea-duties.

BRAZILIAN TEA.

The avenue [of the Botanical Gardens at Rio] which leads up from the entrance is planted on each side with the pine-like casuarina: it is on a piece of ground about an acre in extent, on the left-hand side of this avenue, that the tea-plants grow which were imported from China by the grandfather of the present emperor. It was thought that the climate and soil of Brazil would be suitable for its cultivation; but the success of the experiment has not equalled the expectations which were formed of it, notwithstanding that the growth of the plants and the preparation of the leaves were managed by natives of China accustomed to such occupations. In the province of San Paulo, a few large plantations of tea have been established; that belonging to the ex-regent Feijó containing upwards of twenty thousand trees. The produce is sold in the shops at Rio, and in appearance is scarcely to be dis

NAVIGATING AGAINST THE WIND.

The canoe was carried down the stream by the force of the current; but in the afternoon, and during the greater part of the night, the sea-breeze blew so strong as to impede our progress. The boatmen, however, adopted a plan to overcome this, which I have never seen elsewhere, nor even heard of; and I will therefore explain it in a few words. Landing at a place where trees grew in abundance, the men set to work and cut off a considerable quantity of branches, which were tied tightly together with cords; one end of a long rope was made fast round its middle, while the other end was secured to the canoe. They then steered for a part of the river where the current was strong, and threw the bundle overboard; which, being heavy from its green state, floated just below the surface of the water, and in this manner being entirely out of the influence of the wind, it received the whole force of the current; by which means the canoe was dragged down at a rate little inferior to that by which we descended during the calm of the day.

MORALS IN THE INTERIOR: CRATO.

Scarcely any of the better class live with their wives: a few years after their marriage they generally turn them out of the house to live separately, and replace them by young women who are willing to supply their place without being bound by the ties of matrimony. In this manner the people have two houses to keep up. Among others who are living in this condition, I may mention the Juiz de Direito, the Juiz dos Orfaos, and most of the larger shopkeepers. Such a state of immorality is not to be wondered at when the conduct of the clergy is taken into consideration: the Vicar, (Vigario,) who was then an old man between seventy and eighty years of age, is the father of six natural children; one of whom was educated as a priest, afterwards became president of the province, and was then a

senator of the empire, although still retaining his a clear insight into his modes of thought. Bacon's clerical title. During my stay in Crato, he had arrived there on a visit to his father, bringing with him his mistress, who was his own cousin, and eight children out of ten he had by her; having at the same time five other children by another woman, who died in childbed of the sixth. Besides the Vigario, there were three other priests in the town, all of whom have families by women with whom they live openly, one of them being the wife of another person.

From the Examiner.

Bacon: his Writings, and his Philosophy. By
GEORGE L. CRAIK, M.A. In three Vols. (Vols.
I and II.)
Charles Knight and Co.

BACON belongs to the class of great men whose greatness most readers are satisfied to believe upon the authority of others. This is true not only of the reading public, but of real readers and thinkers. The incorrect estimates of Bacon's character and powers, made by men of the greatest name in science and literature, would have been impossible had they consulted his works for themselves, instead of consulting biographies, table-talk, and catalogues raisonnés.

Mr. Craik's book, which forms part of Mr. Knight's weekly series of cheap publications, is well adapted to make this most pregnant of writers more generally and correctly known. The two volumes which have already appeared, are devoted the first to the moral, theological, and historical works of Bacon; and the second to those two parts of the Instauratio Magna which may be considered as complete, the "De Augmentis Scientiarum" and the "Novum Organum." The third volume will gather up the fragments of the remaining few parts of that projected whole. With respect to these, Mr. Craik justly observes: "the later portion of the work upon the actual composition of which the author cannot be said to have entered, seems to have floated somewhat vaguely before his own eye."

method of apprehending truths was neither ratiocinative nor inductive; it may with most propriety be called intuitive. A quickness of sensibility to impressions, almost amounting to the morbid, enabled him to take in more of external nature, in its finest relations and most delicate meanings, than other men; while a large and retentive faculty of comprehending, enabled him to have all his rich hoard of ideas forever consciously present to his mind. He was not much of a dialectician-(his "Colors of Good and Evil" are meagre enough ;) he was nothing of a mathematician; and his knowlgularly deficient. He speaks with contempt of the edge of physical science was, even for his age, sinnew views of Gilbert and Copernicus, and with indifference of the discoveries of Galileo. His views, indeed, expanded with his years, but the mould in which they were first cast remained unaltered. His method of exposition corresponded to that of his conception. It was an announcement, not a demonstration of truths. With regard to facts, it was historical; with regard to principles, simply enunciative. The full and delicate richness of sentiment, which, with him, facilitated apprehension, contributed to render his doctrine at once fascinating and impressive. Bacon's mind may with most justice be called oracular. It saw what truths it discerned, instinctively; and it announced them authoritatively.

ties are most fully developed, and his power of rich enumeration and illustration most strikingly condensed.

His works, theological, historical, and moral, are such as were to be expected from a mind so constituted. The history of Henry VII. and the fragment of that of his son, are full of sagacious political remark. Bacon saw the events of the ages of these two monarchs as a whole, not by the process of abstraction, but of aggregating imagination. He has presented what he discerned with such fulness and distinctiveness, that reasoning minds can deduce principles from them. His theology is the current theology of the day. His was not a critical mind, to detect inaccuracies or inconsistencies; but a rich imaginative mind, to impart vitality to the dry logical forms of others. But it is in his The method adopted by Mr. Craik has the advan-essays-his labors of love-that his peculiar facultage of combining, in one book, the uses and attractions of a life of Bacon; a complete bibliography of his different works; a history of each from its first conception to its finished form; a distinct exposition of their scope and tendency; a selection of their most beautiful and instructive passages; and a general estimate of the philosopher and his writings, at once characterized by logical acumen, and a deep, just sense of imaginative grandeur. Mr. Craik appears to have taken nothing upon trust where it was in his power to examine for himself. He has corrected many errors in the bibliography of Bacon's works, and in their author's history, which have been contentedly copied by successive critics and biographers for more than two hundred years. He has set right many readings in the too carelessly edited English works of the great thinker, and he has indicated many inadequacies of translation even in the best (bad enough) translations of his Latin works.

In the first volume we have separate sections devoted to the "Essays," the "Wisdom of the Ancients," and the "Apothegms" and other moral works; as well as to the "Theological and to the Historical Works." The essays offered the most fertile field for quotations illustrative of Bacon's manner; but the theological and historical works must be taken in combination with them, to afford

Mr. Craik, in remarking on his first essay ("Of Truth,") has admirably expressed a just estimate of Bacon's style:

"The first thing that will strike every reader is its fulness of matter. Jonson, as we have seen, has said of Bacon's speaking, that his hearers could not cough or look aside from him without loss; neither can his readers remit their attention for a sentence, or for a clause of a sentence, without missing a portion of the thought. We do not speak merely of the vividness and pregnancy of the expression; that is another thing. What we mean is, that the flow of the reasoning or reflection never pauses, never diminishes. True or false, one new thought, one new view, succeeds another as fast as it is possible to exhibit them. Nor is this true only of the Essays, where the style is more formally aphoristic and economical. other writings are less pointed and epigrammatic; but the packing of the thoughts is nearly as close everywhere. Every word indicates a working, teeming mind. Much of what is said, indeed, may be merely ingenious; some portion of the abundance may be even incumbering, and would, we may think, be better away; but there, at any rate,

His

constantly brought in for proof and argument as well as for illustration. Not that this forms any objection to the force or soundness of the reasoning. In moral exposition, which is totally different in its nature from mathematical demonstration-as different as a piece of music is from the multiplication table-what is at all times principally wanted, almost the one thing needful, is the spirit and pulse of life; if that be present in sufficient strength, the manner in which it shows itself, or the source whence it is obtained, is of little consequence.

it is, never-failing and seemingly inexhaustible, at | so, indeed, that this sort of enrichment may be the least the richest intermixture of wisdom, fancy, said frequently to enter into its substance, and to and ingenuity in succession, often a combination constitute his thoughts rather than to clothe and and interfusion of all the three. decorate them. Metaphors, similitudes, and analo"Then there is the uncommonness and charac-gies make up a great part of his reasoning-are teristic air of nearly all the thoughts. It might be supposed that after any true thing has once been said, and generally felt and accepted, it would pass into common property, and cease to be recognisable as the thought of an individual. But it does not so happen. An original thought never loses its stamp of originality. If it has been struck out in an illiterate and unrecording age, it spreads indeed everywhere among the people, but it retains its distinctive shape of a peculiar utterance, a proverb, and, after having been repeated for a thousand years, it shows like a flash of fire among other words every time it is used. It is the same with an original thought in a book. It always remains new, fresh, and striking. A mere scientific truth may become a commonplace; it is something truth as a kind of daylight, and falsehood or fiction entirely separate from the mind of the discoverer; but a happily expressed thought is a fragment of the mind which first gave it such expression, and will always continue to be something unlike what any other mind would have produced.

"We do not admit, therefore, that there is anything false or hollow in Bacon's manner of reasoning, because he deals largely in figurative illustrations. When in the above essay he represents

to a mind without imagination, what in the world of sense the man who sees is to him who is blind. The latter may have a tolerably correct notion of anything he can touch and handle; but the former alone can embrace the grand panorama of nature." Equally just are the general remarks with which the section devoted to the Essays closes :

as a candlelight, we contend that he expounds an idea and impresses a conviction as distinctly and completely as could have been done by the soberest and most colorless statement. Nay, much more distinctly and effectually; for there is a life and "Bacon's manner of writing has been described power in the figure that the plain statement would by his chaplain and first biographer in the following not have had, awakening a corresponding life and terms: In the composing of his books he did power of conception in the mind of the reader. rather drive at a masculine and clear expression Nor is an imaginative manner of thinking, or a figthan at any fineness or affectation of phrases, andurative style, inconsistent with soundness of judgwould often ask if the meaning were expressed ment or correctness of exposition. The highest of plainly enough; as being one that accounted words all truths have been expounded poetically. Many to be but subservient or ministerial to matter and of the highest truths cannot be conceived at all not the principal. And, if his style were polite, it except imaginatively. A mind of imaginative was because he could do no otherwise. Neither capacity is in the region of thought and reasoning was he given to any light conceits, or descanting upon words, but did ever purposely and industrionsly avoid them; for he held such things to be but digressions or diversions from the scope intended, and to derogate from the weight and dignity of the style.' What is here said of his avoidance of all mere verbal conceits is true, and the fact merits especial attention as notably discriminating the wit of Bacon from that of every other English writer eminent for that quality in his age. Probably nothing resembling a pun, or any quibble of that class, is to be found in all that he has written. Nor does he torture thoughts more than words; having once given the thought full and fitting expression, he lets it alone and passes on to the next. Yet the characteristic of his writing is preeminently wit, understood in the largest and highest sense, as the perception and exhibition of things in their less obvious relations. Upon no topic is he ever trite, or a repeater of what has been said by others; he cannot quote a verse of Scripture without giving it an interpretation of his own. And yet the peculiar view that he takes of everything never, or very rarely, appears forced or unnatural; if it be the last that would occur to an ordinary thinker, it looks as if it were the first that had occurred to him.

"Much of this comes of the real originality of Bacon's manner of thinking; but the effect is also in part owing to his great oratorical skill or art of expression. The manner of his writing is as striking and uncommon as the matter. Or rather, | we should say, the arraying and apparelling of his thoughts is as brilliant as the thoughts themselves. He has no passion; but no man had ever more of mere ingenuity and fancy that belong to eloquence. His style is all over color and imagery; so much

"It will be admitted by all that these Essays of Bacon's do at least, as he himself says of them, come home to men's business and bosoms." They are full of that sort of wisdom which is profitable for the guidance of life, and to which every reader's experience of himself and of others responds. This they are, it is needless to say, without having anything of vulgarity or triviality; on the contrary, nearly every thought is as striking for its peculiarity and refinement as for its truth. But, with all their combined solidity and brilliancy, they are not much marked by any faculty of vision extending beyond actual humanity. Their pervading spirit, without being either low or narrow, is still worldly. It is penetrating and sagacious, rather than either far-seeing or subtle. The genius displayed in them is that of oratory and wit, rather than that of either metaphysics or the higher order of poetry. The author has a greater gift of looking into the heart of man than into the heart of things. He is observant, reflective, ingenious, fanciful, and, to the measure that all that allows, both eloquent and wise; but, it may be from the form or nature of such compositions not admitting of it; he can hardly be said to be in these Essays very eminently either capacious or profound.

"Of its kind, however, though that kind may not be the highest, the writing is wonderful. What a spirit of life there is in every sentence ! How admirably is the philosophy everywhere ani

1

mated and irradiated by the wit; and how fine a balance and harmony is preserved between the wit and the sense, the former never becoming fantastic any more than the latter dull! The moral spirit, too, though worldly, is never offensively so; it is throughout considerate, tolerant, liberal, generous; and if we have little lofty indignation, we have as little violence, or bitterness, or one-sidedness. It is not a morality with which any tendency to enthusiasm or fanaticism in such matters will sympathize; but yet it is not wanting either in distinctness or in elevation, any more than in a reasonable charity. Prudence is no doubt a large ingredient; | but principle is by no means absent. Nor does much appear to be introduced in these Essays for mere effect. At any rate, the quantity of idea, of one sort or another, in proportion to the space, is almost without example, at least with so little apparent forcing or straining, so easy and smooth a flow. Brilliant as the light is, it is so managed as to fall softly upon the eye, to satisfy rather than to dazzle. One new or uncommon thought is presented after another in more rapid succession than in almost any other book; and yet the mind of the reader is neither startled nor fatigued, so consummate is the rhetorical art."

The first volume of Mr. Craik's book will probably be the most attractive; the second is out of question the most original and valuable. The Instauratio Magna, had it ever been completed, would have been the aggregate of Bacon's thoughts as they existed in his own mind. "In his letter to Father Fulgentio," says Mr. Craik," written in 1623 or 1621, after speaking of the zeal and constancy with which he had cherished the scheme of his Instauratio Magna through so many years, he proceeds: For I well remember that forty years ago I composed a juvenile work about these things, which, with great confidence, I graced with the swelling title of The Greatest Birth of Time.' This would be when he was in his twenty-third or twenty-fourth year."

1597; the substance of the "Two Books of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning," published in 1605; and a part of the treatise of the "Wisdom of the Ancients," published in 1610. Of the third part only fragments have appeared: "A History of the Winds," with prefaces of five similar histories intended to complete that part, in 1622; a "History of Life and Death," one of these his histories, in 1623; and the "Ten Centuries of Sylva Sylvarum," published by his chaplain, Dr. Rowley, in 1627, after his death.

From this retrospect it will appear that the projected work was to have been a digest of all its immortal author knew; that this desire to speak out everything within him had been strong and powerful with him from extreme youth to extreme old age; and that his knowledge increased in quantity with his years rather than rectified in quality. From the formula of the schoolmen he never wholly emancipated himself, and the value of the original efforts of his great scientific contemporaries he could not appreciate. Mr. Craik observes :

"For a considerable time after what is called the revival of letters in the fifteenth century, the imitation of the ancient models was the only thing attempted or dreamed of by the most aspiring genius. The habit of thought was universal; in everything men only looked to the mighty and glorious past. And the immense superiority of that past might almost be said to justify them; it was little to be wondered at that the writers and philosophers of classic Greece and Rome should be looked back to as almost a race of superior beings by all the generations that had succeeded them. Least of all was a thought of questioning their authority likely to occur to that generation upon whom the sunlight of their genius first reemerged in full effulgence from the clouds that had obscured it for a thousand years. But by the time that Bacon's great work appeared, in the early part of the seventeenth century, this all-believing reverence "The "Novum Organum" was published in for antiquity had long begun to pass away. The 1620, when Bacon had nearly attained his sixtieth true spirit of scientific inquiry had fairly reawakyear. It is only the second part of the Instauratio ened, and discoveries which had already wrought a Magna; but it is prefaced by four prolegomena, complete revolution in physical science had been the first of which contains an exposition of the made by Copernicus, by Tycho Brahe, by Kepler, whole contemplated work. A "Distributio Operis" by Galileo, by Bacon's own countryman, Gilbert, follows, in which intimation is given that it is to and others. Bacon, indeed, does not appear to have consist of six parts. The first was to exhibit been aware of this; he speaks with contempt "the sum or universal description of that knowl- repeatedly of the new views both of Gilbert and of edge or doctrine, in possession of which the human Copernicus; the others, we believe, he nowhere race is up to this time." The second, the " Novum mentions. But that makes no difference it is Organum," was to contain helps for the interpre- indisputable that the very thing which he is suptation of nature." The third was to comprehend posed to have been the first to teach, men were "the phenomena of the universe;" that is, experi- already busy doing in all directions. And of the ence of every kind, and such a natural history as illustrious succession of inventors and discoverers might serve for a foundation on which to rear a who have since appeared in every department of system of philosophy. The fourth, "Scala Intel- the field of science, it is equally certain that very lectus," was to be "a particular and expanded few, if any, have either been distinguished as stuapplication of the second part." The fifth was dents of Bacon's writings, or can reasonably be entitled "Anticipations of the Second Philosophy; supposed to have even indirectly acquired much and the sixth," The Second Philosophy, or Active knowledge of the spirit or principles of what is Science" and in these two Bacon seems to have called his method. Where is the case in which it had in view a new practical or ethical system. can be clearly or even probably made out that any But all was merely an expansion of the Greatest discovery of mark has been arrived at through that Birth of Time. The second part, "Novum method, followed more closely than it would necesOrganum," the art of interpreting nature, was sarily have been in the particular instance alpublished, as already intimated, about the author's though Bacon had never expounded it or had never sixtieth year. The first part, "De Augmentis lived? If the history of all the great inventions Scientiarum," was published three years later. and discoveries of the last two hundred years were But with it were incorporated the " Fragment to be traced, we doubt if the proportion of them of the Colors of Good and Evil," published in that would be found to be fairly attributable to the

66

inspiration of Bacon would turn out to be much more considerable than that of the great poems of the last two thousand years that may be attributed to the inspiration of Aristotle."

taste for the pursuits of accurate science, with patience to master, and power to estimate, the value of its driest formulæ.

From youth until now, Humboldt has been a Mr Craik's remarks upon those who would attrib- wanderer on the face of the earth. An overmasterute to Bacon the progress of modern physical sci-ing instinct had taught him that actual observation ence, are felicitously, though not very reverently, expressed :

alone could be relied upon. He was among the first to penetrate regions which have since become familiar to us. The Andes are the only limits of his travels in the west; the confines of Russia and China in the east. No kind of knowledge has been unacceptable to him, He studied the statistics of Mexico and its antiquities; the mineralogy, meteorology, and botany of South America, have equally engaged his attention. Man; all nature, animate and inanimate; whatever could be known; had attractions for his inquiring spirit. Nor was this mere desultory curiosity. He regarded the universe as a whole. He recognized the unity and inter-dependence of all the multifarious objects of knowledge he had garnered into his mind.

"The notion of any one seriously setting about a philosophical investigation by means of Bacon's three tables of Essence and Presence, of Declination, and of Degrees, is ludicrous. It reminds one of the project for improving speculative knowledge by practical mechanical operations, of the professor in the Grand Academy of Lagado, the frame with the forty iron handles, by which the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labor, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study. It might almost indeed be suspected that Swift here had Bacon in his eye. Other things in the irreverent satire seem to glance at the very words of the illustrious author of the Instauratio Magno; as when the professor is made to declare that his invention had employed all his thoughts from his youth,' and to say 'he flattered himself that a more noble, exalted thought never sprang in any other man's head.' At any rate, the description of the invention is hardly an exaggeration of what appears to have been Bacon's own notion of the efficacy of his Novum Organum, or new instrument of discovery. It was to be almost literally a machine in men's hands. It was to level intellects, and enable the weakest to do the work of the strongest. So far from its requiring any guiding idea or anticipa-terly, too, the immense number and variety of his tion in the mind of the experimenter, it was to make all inventive sagacity unnecessary and useless."

But an intellect so ambitious of grasping all, could not be expected to find time to master the details of each. Humboldt has thus been driven to delegate much to assistants. Yet in this respect, even more than by his self-labor, he has also been useful. He has given an impulse to many minds that without him might have remained inert. At the same time it may be admitted, that to his own works this method has been unfavorable. They are often fragmentary, being full of references to what his coadjutors are doing. They are often inaccurate when calculations have to be made. Still pushing onward, he takes little pains to ensure correctness in others by his own inspection. Lat

pursuits must have rendered it impossible for him to gain time for condensation. And this has sometimes impressed a character of diffuseness on his Yet will Bacon always remain one of the noblest labors. They are new material, rather than finand most fertilizing teachers of mankind. The ished works. He is, with all his genius, a "grand "Novum Organum," the most valuable part of baron" in science: patronizing, and sometimes his Instauratio, is an exposition of the futility of appropriating. He has a strong dash of the their labors who seek to expound nature by a mere "philosophe des salons." Gratified to find his conlogical process. It is the protest of a grand origi-versational attractions acknowledged, he indulges nal intellect, which, having attained to truth by its in gossip and compliments. instinctive sagacity, has faith in its own discover- Still, from the share he has had in communicating ies. It is an assertion of an intelligent and truthful man's right to be believed when he tells what he knows, without cavils as to the means by which he attained knowledge. It is a vindication of the superior value of vital thoughts over the dry husks of logical formula. And the sensibility and imagination with which Bacon informed his meditations, combined with his condensed and massive utterance, render him one of the most inspiring and invigorating of writers. He is immeasurably our greatest philosopher, and divides with Shakespeare the pride and glory of our nation.

From the Examiner.

Cosmos: Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe. By ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT. Vol. 1. Translated under the superintendence of Lieut.-Col. EDWARD SABINE, R. A., For. Sec. R. S. Longman and Co. and John Murray. THIS is the kind of work for which the genius of Humboldt is best adapted. It is impossible to overrate the impulse he has given to physical and natural inquiry. With the apt and amiable sentiment of a St. Pierre, he has combined the graphic power of a Dampier. To these qualifications he has added

form, impetus, and direction to modern science; for the universality of his sympathy with every effort of the intellect and imagination; from the skill and perseverance with which he has made himself the connecting link between the patrons and the professional followers of science;-Humboldt must be regarded as one of the most influential minds of an age fertile in great intellects. He belongs to the same class in these respects as Goethe and Voltaire. Fragmentary and often desultory though his writings may be, they are full of passages of deep and pregnant thought, and intense poetical beauty.

Cosmos, the first volume of which is before us, has more of condensation than his other recent pubinferences, and conjectures which have occupied his lications. It is the result of the observations, life; it is a condensed statement of the appearance which the universe presents to him who has looked at it from so many points of view; and the manner, and all the details of the work, are informed with that fine artistic touch, that delicate perception, and exquisite enjoyment of the beautiful, which are the predominating features of his mind.

We give a few extracts, with the intention of simply indicating, for the present, the style of the work.