code of laws, and an intelligent governor having full power appointed over their district. This would be a good beginning, and then, to complete the work of reformation, the country must be thrown open to colonization, inducing emigration by certain privileges and grants of land.

Among these natives the Yuracares are the true wild men of the woods; they dress in bark shirts, and use the bow and arrow; their faces are painted in stripes of red, blue, and green; feet, arms, and legs are bare. Their general appearance is most savage. On hunting expeditions a woman attends them, and when a turkey talls, or a fish is caught, they are tossed to her, and she builds the fire and cooks them, when they encamp for the night. Seating themselves in a circle, they enjoy the feast. Before the break of day they are on their feet again; not a word is spoken to wake up other animals. As soon as the ring-tailed monkey opens his eyes, the watchful Indian draws his bow and down falls the screaming animal, twisting, turning, and calling for help. The Indians stand perfectly quiet, knowing that his fellows of this curious family will rush to his rescue, and as, one by one, they crawl down to see what has happened, the silent arrow flies through the trees, when the screaming is terrible. While the wild turkey is shaking the dew from his wings on his roosting-place, the sure-aimed arrow strikes him down; and the tiger scenting the Indian's resting-place approaches it, but an arrow meets him inside the foreshoulder, and penetrates his heart in his dying agony.

In the ponds, or lakes, long stakes are driven into the muddy bottom, and little pole bridges are fastened to them. Here the Indians stand silently watching the bottom, with their arrows pointing into the water. As the fish are pierced and thrown upon the shore in quick succession, the excitement becomes very great, and whenever one of them missed all shouted aloud with laughter. These Indians are much more cheerful than those further up the mountains; their manners and customs more original and striking, never having been changed by the influences of the white man.

As the sun shines upon the streams, the fish begin to make their appearance, and the Indian taking his stand on the rocks in the river, shoots with a keen eye, and

the sure arrow is drawn up with a fish sometimes a foot long. The Yuracares are half civilized, and the Creoles carefully treat them kindly; they are a wandering tribe, own nothing but their bows, arrows, a little yuca, and a few ears of corn, and have no gold ornaments. Animal food is so plentiful among them that they are not compelled to cultivate the soil for a living. Their province embraces the sides of the mountain ridge, from its summit to the foot, and hence the climate is cold, temperate, warm and hot. The Yuracarean has a beautiful and uninterrupted view of the San Mateo valley, until his eye reaches the lofty Andes. This trioe is scattered along the eastern base of the Andes, in little bands from seven to seventy, and their whole number is said to be (1855) six hundred. They are less under the control of the Church than other tribes. Their country is the most inviting in all Bolivia for the cultivation of the soil, well wooded and watered and within the rain belt.

Vinchuta is the eastern commercial emporium of Bolivia, but, strange enough, foreign goods come over the Andes, instead of up the rivers from the Atlantic. Cottons, glass-ware, cutlery, etc., traverse the Cordilleras over rocky roads and barren plains, then over the Andes range and down terrible roads to this commercial port, a distance of eight hundred miles. The people seem to be ignorant of the advantages which a direct route to the Atlantic would secure, instead of the old and round-about way of the Pacific. An elephant reached the tablelands of Bolivia, having walked through the Cordilleras, sixteen thousand feet above the Pacific Ocean. When he reached the suspension bridge, the tollman shut his gate, but his keeper, a Yankee, made him swim the stream. There were many places on the mountains where the rocks had been cut to allow the passage of a mule, but even here the elephant scraped back and sides through.

MAN FEARS PROSPERITY.-There is an instinct in the heart of man which makes him fear a cloudless happiness. It seems to him that he owes to misfortunc a tithe of his life, and that which he does not pay bears interest, is amassed, and largely swells a debt which, sooner or later, he must acquit.

Whitefield, Asbury, Bunting, Olin, Fisk, Emory, and a host of others, living and dead, spent a large portion of their time in bringing the public mind to its proper appreciation. Their monuments are seen in the literary institutions that bear their names, in the intelligent, cultivated, thinking thousands of the Church, and in the broad and still expanding views of the clergy and laity. Those who have imagined that the liberal education of woman conflicts with the proper discharge of the duties of her sphere, and that the paths of science should be trodden only by their sons, are giving place to men of nobler minds; and before the light emanating from those defenders of the Christian woman's rights, the seminaries that are springing up in every part of the land, such darkness is fast disappearing. Ingenuity, exhibited in schools as well as in sewing and washing machines, is largely assisting in bringing in another and more glorious era for woman. Hood's Song of the Shirt will still be sung, but we trust ere long it will be struck only as a memento of the past. To hasten this, let the claims of female education be universally acknowledged, an education mingling the useful with the sweet, the ornate with the solid, thus improving both

head and heart, and in the end fitting her to preside with honor at the domestic board, and act her part with modesty and grace in the social circle. We are no longer without the facilities for such an end. For many years the young men have enjoyed such advantages; only lately, however, have they been afforded our young ladies. Within the last ten years, as if by magic, there have arisen academies and colleges for females such as do honor to our country.

The great valley of Virginia, one of the fairest spots in the Union, blessed with the purest air and most healthful springs; land of the mountain, plain, and river; land of the waving forest and waving field; land of the fertile soil, the genial sky, and browsing flocks and herds; land of glorious scenery, rich minerals, and noble men, stretching out in all the beauty and fertility that might be expected in a land once the bed of a vast lake, is not deficient in educational facilities. Here, in the center of this delightful valley, with the lofty Alleghanies far away in the north, and the gentler heights of the Blue Ridge in the south, in Winchester, the most ancient town in the Virginia Valley, noted for its beautiful scenery and historic associations, as well as for the refined and ele

gant hospitality of its citizens, is situated one of the most flourishing seminaries of the South, the Valley Female Institute. It was founded in 1854, is under the patronage of the Baltimore and East Baltimore Conferences, and is endowed by the Legislature of Virginia with full collegiate powers. It is under the control of Rev. S. P. York, A.M., and George La Monte, A.B., gentlemen eminently qualified for the positions they occupy, assisted by an efficient corps of instruction, demonstrated by the complete success of the institution and the confidence of the community. There are three departments: the Preparatory, Academic, and Collegiate, embracing one, two, and three years respectively. The course of study includes the customary solid and polite English branches, with the ancient and modern languages, music, and painting.

During the past year a number of conversions have taken place in the Institute. Would that all of our schools were centers of religious light, disseminators of true piety, where the great text-book of the great Teacher was held up to the young as the foundation of true wisdom; where science, art, and all knowledge, sanctified by the Cross of Christ, were again sent forth for the evangelization of mankind. Would that over the portals of every institution in our land were inscribed, in letters of living fire,

"Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, And the man that getteth understanding. She is more precious than rubies, And all the things thou canst desire are not to be compared to her."

This representative of our growing Methodism in the Valley of Virginia, the Valley Female Institute, is doing a noble work, exerting a powerful influence over the intellects and hearts of the rising generation, fitting young ladies to become not only intelligent women, but women of comprehensive minds and personal piety. It constitutes an important post in the great educational system of the Church, a literary and moral Gibraltar; assisting not merely in wreathing our daughters' fair brows with laurels of literary distinction, but in encircling them with neverfading leaves from the tree of life; and helps to cement the foundations of the Church, already, by the wisdom of our fathers, under God, laid deep and strong and broad.

A

THE SILENCE OF SCRIPTURE.

MONG the heresies of our day by

which some have been unloosed from their moorings and moved from the sure anchorage of truth, the fallibility of inspired Scripture is pre-eminently formidable. Bibliolaters though we may be called, we take our stand upon the infallibility of "the oracles of God." And our bibliolatry is so intense that, claiming infallibility for the utterances of inspired Scripture, we claim infallibility, no less, for its silence. It is silent, not from mistake, nor inadvertence, nor negligence, nor undesigned omission, but from inspiration. The same Spirit who taught Moses, and Matthew, and Paul what to write, taught them also what to omit. The declaration of Dr. Wordsworth in reference to one point of this silence, we extend to every point on which silence is maintained. "This silence of Scripture is inspired;" and because inspired, instructive.

It is scarcely necessary to say, that we are not now concerned with all the countless points on which this silence exists, but only with such as are contrary to the expectation we might à priori have entertained, when the general object of revelation was borne in mind.

and

1. On no point am I more curious than the origin of the world in which I live. How-when-came this material system into being? The oracles answer: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light there was light." And the narrative proceeds with the simple record of a progressive work of creation, occupying six days. "Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them." But stay, Moses. Is this all? I have You have left many questions to ask? many points of deepest interest unsettled. In these last days a new science has been developed. The geologist tells me that the earth is of far higher antiquity than is indicated in your cosmogony. He has dug into its bowels, and the testimony of its rocks and strata and remains is irrefragable. This earth of ours is more than six thousand years old. Is this first announcement of the oracles of truth-" In

the beginning God created the heavens and the earth"-an account, not of the original creation of matter, but simply of the arrangement of matter, created in remote ages, into this present form and system? Or is this announcement-" In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth"-the simple and solitary record of the original creation of matter? and are we to put between the first and second verses of Genesis an interval of vast duration, sufficient for the action of all those second causes to which the phenomena of geology are to be traced? The Hebrew scholar can philologize over the verb rendered "created." Geologists theorize and differ. The infidel watches the controversy, in eager hope to gather from the geological argument a new and irresistible weapon against Moses and the Old Testament. A line would have superseded controversy, by giving us the date of the creation of matter and of the world's birthday. A single chapter might have been a text-book for geologists, detailing the story of rocks and strata, of megatheria and icthyosauri, of volcanic forces, and of those mighty convulsions and changes on which now we can offer but conjecture. "The oracles of God" are dumb, Scripture is silent.

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2. "There is no subject within the whole range of knowledge,” says Sir David Brewster, so universally interesting as that of a plurality of worlds. It commands the sympathies, and appeals to the judgment of men of all nations, of all creeds, and of all times; and no sooner do we comprehend the few simple facts on which it rests, than the mind rushes instinctively to embrace it." And this eminent philosopher has written a volume to prove this plurality. Are there then more worlds than one? Is the Moon, are Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn inhabited? Are the fixed stars as many suns, each of which illuminates a world? And, if there be a plurality of worlds, by what beings are they inhabited? men? or beings of higher-or beings of lowerpowers? Beings with "minds of superior or meaner capacities than human united to a human body?" or beings with "minds of human capacities united to a different body?" And has sin found entrance among them? And are they interested in the death of the Son of God-the Saviour who was "found in fashion as a man,"

and trod this globe, and died for the human race? Or is "the earth really the largest planetary body in the solar system, its domestic hearth, and the only world in the universe?"

These inquiries are of deep interest. They have engaged the minds of theologians and of astronomers. But, whether we side with Sir David Brewster or with the writer against whom he took the field, the prefatory assertion of the latter is true, that "revealed religion contains no doctrine relative to the inhabitants of planets and stars."

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On the plurality or non-plurality of worlds the oracles of God" are dumb, Scripture is silent.

3. Again. The Bible reveals to me the existence of a race of angels. Some of them, I learn, are yet standing in the purity and the happiness in which they were created. These do the high behests of their Creator, and, by his appointment, "minister to" the "heirs of salvation"

among men. Their agency is continually presented to us in the inspired records, as servants to the saints and executioners of Divine vengeance; smiting, now the hosts of a Sennacherib, now a Herod in his pomp. Others have fallen from pristine uprightness and glory, and are "reserved in everlasting chains, under darkness, unto the judgment of the great day." But when were they created? What their nature? How did revolt find entrance among them? What was their offense? I see the ladder set up between earth and heaven, on which they ascend and descend, as ministering to Jacob; I behold them as the glorious "train" of Jehovah, and listen to the song of the seraphim: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts!" I gaze on them, as clustering in their shining cohorts around Sinai, and as grouped in myriads around my returning Lord. I am admitted to the interview between Gabriel and the lowly Mary; 1 learn that "for the devil and his angels"

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everlasting fire" is "prepared." My daily spiritual conflict is against their principalities and powers;" but on their creation, their nature, their sin, a Milton has sung with sublime and too daring flight, but "the oracles of God" are dumb, Scripture is silent.

4. THE EXISTENCE OF EVIL-evil, moral and physical. It is intertwined with the world's history. It is before me, in the