American. So far as regards the slave, we may quote from Mr Stirling :

"The elevation and the emancipation of the Negro must go hand in hand. Now, the ennoblement of the slave can only be effectual by reversing those influences which have degraded him. High motives of action must be substituted for low ones. Free will must rule instead of force, and voluntary contract take the place of the cowhide. By giving the slave an interest in his labour, we shall stimulate his energies, and raise him in his own esteem. His labour will cease to be a degrading and irksome drudgery. The idea of property, with all its civilizing influences, will be awakened within him, and the consciousness of voluntary exertion will gradually lead to that development of the power of will which lies at the root of all human ennoblement."-Letters, p. 240.

The elevation of the slave, however, during the time he is a slave, is not the quarter to which we look for amelioration. We look rather to the elevation of the free coloured American. If the men of African blood be capable of standing on a footing of equality with the white races, the coloured American must prove it by the actual, tangible, realized fact. He must become a man of education, a man of wealth, and a gentleman. If he can do so, he has won the battle of his race; if he cannot do so, in a free country, and with the fair field of honourable competition. open before him, then we should be compelled to conclude, that there was some inherent inferiority which nothing can eradicate, and that he must remain, even if free, a hewer of sugar canes and a drawer of molasses. The Jew-against whom prejudice during the middle ages in Europe was incomparably stronger than the vulgar prejudice of present Americans against the yellow and black complexions-has won his place in European society; but won it, not by the elevation of the Jews of Poland, or of the old clothesmen of London, but by the manful competition of the Rothschilds, fairly launched in the open market of the world, and winning the battle of mercantile life; taking the guineas from the very teeth of the christian Jews, and daring them to their faces in a free encounter in the lists of money. Let the coloured Americans do the same in any department whatever of man's social existence; let them do it in the fear of God, as the highest duty they owe to their race, and Providence, that fails not to the brave, will show them at length the fruits and harvestings of their endeavours ripening in the respect of the world. No race has worked so hard for its place as the Anglo-Saxon; none has paid down the price of success with such constant and untiring punctuality, in all quarters of the globe, and under all circumstances of earth or ocean. Is it,

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then, too much to ask, that those to whom the Anglo-Saxon accords full freedom, with all its hard-won benefits, bought by centuries of unflinching toil, shall not be entitled to assume social equality until they have at least proven themselves worthy workers in the world's great cause? Let the coloured American once win his place, and the Anglo-Saxon will secure it to him in perpetuity, in the midst of a civilization which the dark man could not have attained without the white man's aid. Already this process is at work, and the next generation will see a vast change in the position of the coloured American. Lawyers, doctors, editors, manufacturers, and others, on the way to the higher platforms of society, are now seen clothed in the cloud of Africa-painted black by nature for nature's purposes, but not the less endowed with the immortal spirit of man, that may live for ever.

Sixth, Christian civilization. Modern civilization is so essentially the result of Christianity, that we cannot separate the one from the other. Paganism can civilize man up to a certain point-it can make him an artist-but it leaves the moral world a wilderness, with fiery serpents in it. Civilization is the outward and worldly expression of the spiritual truth of Christianity; and Christianity and civilization are both essentially antagonistic to slavery. This is proven by the historic course of Christianity, which has gradually lifted the veil from the eyes of nations, and gradually swept slavery out of the older societies of Christendom. It is useless to aver, that, in the Slave States, Christianity appears under a corrupted form, and even preaches slavery. It does so; but the preaching of a few half-educated and interested men, placed in the worst of circumstances, can no more affect the historic evidence, that Christianity bears freedom on its wing, than the secession of a few renegades to the Moslem faith can prove the decay of Christianity, and the advance of Mohammedanism. Take up a map of the world, and plant your finger on the Christian countries, one after another: you have planted them on the countries where slavery has been abolished. Plant your finger on the countries where slavery is thoroughly rooted out and forgotten: you have planted your finger on the countries that are most peculiarly Christian. Nor has this result been the impulse of accident: it has been the universal and constant tending of Christianity to elevate man as man-to draw him upward into intelligent freedom, where he shall be able to rule and guide himself under the administration of just laws, framed by the living conscience of society for the welfare of all. Christianity is so fatal to the very essence and being of slavery, that slavery dies before it; and though a Christian nation may begin, like Bishop Meade of Baltimore, by preaching slavery, it

will infallibly end, like Bishop Meade, in the emancipation of its slaves. The historic course of Christianity is in no degree affected by the utterances of a few tortuous-minded men, who seek for sophistry to defend a surrounding evil. The progress of Christianity is independent of all such local and temporary hindrances. It will sweep slavery, not only out of the States, but out of the world itself. Its very nature is to make man a free spirit, under the laws of God. Christianity walks with the seed of truth in one hand, and the seed of freedom in the other; and she sows broadcast the two together, as the twin blessings with which she endows the earth.

Such are the causes that are working out the demolition of American Slavery; and the result we regard as altogether indubitable. Slavery is doomed, and must die. The future is, of course, inscrutable; but we shall venture to hazard an anticipation. The next census of 1860-will so alter the position of North and South, of Free States and Slave States, that the election of an anti-slavery President, in 1861, may be reckoned as not improbable. Should an anti-slavery President find himself installed in the chair at Washington, the slave question must be brought to an issue, so far as the extension of slavery is concerned. If slavery can then be confined to limits, and no longer allowed to enter new territories, its domestic demolition becomes a matter of detail, as it cannot be perpetuated if confined to definite boundaries.

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ART. VI.-1. Memoir of John Dalton, D.C.L., F.R.S., Instit. (Acad. Sc. ;) Paris; Socius, President of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, etc., etc.; and History of the Atomic Theory up to his Time. By ROBERT ANGUS SMITH, Ph.D. F.C.S., Sec. to the Lit. and Phil. Soc. Published also as Vol. XIII. New Series of the Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester. Pp. 298. Lond. 1856.

2. Memoirs of the Life and Scientific Researches of John Dalton, Hon. D.C.L., Oxford; LL.D., Edinburgh; F.R.S.; President of the Literary and Philosophical Society, Manchester; Foreign Associate of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Paris; Member of the Royal Academies of Science of Berlin and of Munich, and of the Natural History Society of Moscow, etc. etc. By WILLIAM CHARLES HENRY, M.D., F.R.S., Fellow of the Chemical and Geological Societies, and Corresponding Member of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Turin. Printed for the Cavendish Society. P. 250. Lond. 1854.

3. The Life and Discoveries of Dr John Dalton. By GEORGE WILSON, M.D., etc., etc. (Brit. Quarterly Rev., Vol. I., p. 157, Feb. and May 1845.

AMONG the great men who have illustrated the passing century, there is no brighter name than that of John Dalton. Among the Watts, the Cavendishes, the Herschels, and the Youngs of his own country, he occupies a distinguished place; and foreign nations have not hesitated to crown him with the honours which they so readily and so impartially concede to original genius. It is always instructive to trace the steps by which "Industry and Genius" lead their possessors to brilliant discoveries; but there are cases of a peculiar interest, where the provincial sage has been ill equipped for his arduous enterprise, or where the path of research has been encumbered with the failures of unsuccessful rivals. Ingenuity and patience may sometimes procure for the apprentice philosopher the materials and the instruments of study, which an academical or more opulent rival can command; but the sage who first reaches the goal, and carries off the prize, is often doomed by contemporary injustice, and the ignorance of the historians of science, to wear for a while a mutilated laurel. From both of these misfortunes Dalton was destined to suffer. Without pecuniary means he was compelled to carry on his researches under the harness of professional labour, and with the cheapest and most imperfect apparatus; and when he had

triumphed over all the difficulties which had beset him, and achieved a European reputation, his claims to originality were keenly contested by the very rivals whom he had outstripped in the race of discovery. But though thus pursued under difficulties, the studies of Dalton had a prosperous issue. The laws of proportion and combination, the foundation and the nucleus of the Atomic Philosophy, with which he enriched the science of chemistry, were as firmly established as if he had occupied the most favoured position; and, while his competitors in discovery have received their meed of praise, his independent claims have been ratified by the acknowledged arbiters of European fame.1

In no event of his career has Dr Dalton been more fortunate than in the biographers who have appreciated his labours, and in the fellow-citizens who have done honour to his name. Within a comparatively brief period since his death, three eminent individuals have published Memoirs of his Life and Discoveries, and in the wealthy and enterprising city which he adorned, a massive tombstone of granite has been placed over his grave, a statue erected to his memory, and a new street inscribed with his name.

Dr William C. Henry, one of his pupils, and the accomplished son of the late Dr Henry, was appointed by Dr Dalton his literary executor, and in a well written volume has given an interesting sketch of the life of his friend, and an able account of his writings and discoveries.

Considering chemical literature as demanding a more minute history of the Atomic Theory, up to the time of Dalton, than has been given in the works of Dr Kopp and Dr Daubeny, Dr Angus Smith has been induced to draw up a New Memoir of its Author, and to make the distinctive feature of the volume a history of our ideas of matter, bearing on modern chemistry, until the time when Dalton flourished. This important task has been ably executed, and the future historian of chemistry will find valuable materials in Dr Smith's excellent work.

So early as 1845, before any of these biographies were undertaken, and only a few months after the death of Dalton, Dr George Wilson, drew up for the "British Quarterly Review," an able article on his Life and Writings. This brief memoir was, for nine years, the only biography of the philosopher, and the only just appreciation of his discoveries; and we need hardly say, that it does much honour to its distinguished author.

John Dalton was born at Eaglesfield, a small village 23 miles

"Much," says Dr Smith, "has been said of the Atomic Theory. Some have given credit to Dalton, some have taken it from him; most writers have even confusedly mixed him up with others."-Memoirs, p. 3.

2 The first meeting-house of the Society of Friends in England was erected in this village.