although the enterprise was, at the commencement, fully recognised by the colonial authorities at home.

This is a painful story of a few years' misadventure and wrecked fortune, and ingratitude to a man whose honour and integrity, in the face of misfortune, should at least have shielded him from insult. Yet how forcibly does it illustrate the perils which so often beset the restless spirit!

THE PRESENT AND THE PAST.

Sharon Turner, a man of sound, practical sense, as well as a reverential and reflective writer of history, has these pertinent remarks upon the tendency of historians to magnify the Present at the expense of the Past:

Nothing is a greater reproach to the reasoning intellect of any age than a splenetic censoriousness on the manners and characters of our ancestors. It is but common justice for us to bear in mind that in those times we should have been as they were, as they in ours would have resembled ourselves. Both are but the same men, acting under different circumstances, wearing different dresses, and pursuing different objects; but neither inferior to the other in talent, industry, or intellectual worth. The more we study biography, we shall perceive more evidence of this truth.

Disregarding what satire might, without being cynical, lash in our own costumes, we are apt to look proudly back on those who have gone before us, and to regale our self-complacency with comparisons of their deficiencies, and of our greater merit. The retrospect is pleasing, but it offers no ground for exultation. We are superior, and we have in many things better taste and sounder judgment and wiser habits than they possessed. And why? Because we have had means of superiority by which they were not assisted. But a merit which owes its origin merely to our having followed, instead of preceding, in existence, gives us no right to depreciate those over whom our only advantage has been the better fortune of a later chronology. We may therefore allow those who have gone before us to have been amused with what would weary or dissatisfy us, without either sarcasms on their absurdities, or contemptuous wonder at their stately childishness and pompous inanities.

One of our most popular historians indulges to excess in these brilliant antitheses, which in his pages remind one of poppies in corn.

CIRCUMSTANCES AND GENIUS.

This episode in man's history,—this stage in the great struggle of life,-has been thus powerfully painted by a contemporary:

We presume there can be little doubt that circumstances have an effect upon the lives and characters of men; to say any thing else would

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be to contradict flatly the ordinary opinion of the world. Notwithstanding, if one will but look at one's private experience among the most ordinary and obscure actors in the life-drama, how wonderfully, one must allow, character, temper, heart, and spirit, assert themselves. beyond the reach of all external powers! How triumphantly the poor prodigal, to whom Providence has given the fairest prospects, and whose steps are guarded by love and kindness, can vindicate his own instincts against all the virtuous force of circumstance surrounding him, and go to destruction in its very face! Who needs to be taught that ever-recurring lesson? Who can be ignorant that scarcely a great career has ever been made in this world otherwise than in the face of circumstances-in strenuous defiance of all that external elements could do to overcome the unconquerable soul? In the face of such examples, what are we to say to the theory that adverse circumstances can excuse a man born with all the compensations of genius for an unlovely and ignoble life, a bitter and discontented heart, a course of vulgar vice and sordid meanness? Never was genius more wickedly disparaged. That celestial gift to which God has given capacities of enjoyment beyond the reach of the crowd, is of itself an armour against circumstance more proof than steel, and continually holds open to its possessor a refuge against the affronts of the world, a shelter from its contumelies, which is denied to other men. He who reckons of this endowment as of something which gives only a more exquisite egotism, a finer touch of selfishness, a sublimation of envy and self-assertion, and dependence upon the applause of the crowd, forms a mean estimate, against which it is the duty of every man who knows better to protest. Outside circumstances, disappointment, neglect, dark want and misery, have plagued the souls and disturbed the temper of great men before now, but have never, so far as we are aware, polluted a pure heart, or made a noble mind despicable. The bitter soreness of unappreciated genius belongs proverbially to those whose gift is of the smallest; and the man who excuses a bad life by the pretence that this divine lymph contained within it has been soured by popular neglect and turned to gall, speaks sacrilege and profanity.*

OUR UNIMAGINATIVE AGE.

We have now no great poets; and our poverty in this respect is not compensated by the fact, that we once had them, and that we may, and do, read their works. The movement has gone by; the charm is broken; the bond of union, though not cancelled, is seriously weakened. Hence our age, great as it is, and in nearly all respects greater than any the world has yet seen, has, notwithstanding its large and generous sentiments, its unexampled toleration, its love of liberty, and its profuse and almost reckless charity, a certain material, unimaginative, and unheroic character, which has made several observers tremble for the future. . That something has been lost is unquestion

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able. We have lost much of that imagination which, though in practical life it often misleads, is, in speculative life, one of the highest of all qualities, being suggestive as well as creative. Even practically we should cherish it, because the commerce of the affections mainly depends on it. It is, however, declining; while, at the same time, the increasing refinement of society accustoms us more and more to suppress our emotions, lest they be disagreeable to others. And as the play of the emotions is the chief study of the poet, we see in this circumstance another reason which makes it difficult to rival that great body of poetry which our ancestors possessed. We quote the above from the second volume of Mr. Buckle's History of Civilization. We would add, that the suppression of emotions to which the author refers is one great cause of the difficulty of getting persons to speak the truth in the present day: they are ever disguising their feelings, until hypocritical caution becomes habit, and it requires a stronger light than the old cynic possessed to find honest men. The low standard of commercial morality, and the time-serving expediency which so greatly regulates the actions of our rulers and those who make the laws, is traceable to this over-refinement.

MARVELS OF THE UNIVERSE.

Nothing is more startling, or more likely to be received with incredulity by minds unprepared for their reception, than what are, in common parlance, termed the Marvels of the Universe. The philosophical writers of our day have strikingly illustrated this fact, which should be taken into account in writing of the impedimenta to the progress of science even in our own day. Sir John Herschel has thus forcibly stated the case:

What mere assertion will make any one believe that in one second of time, in one beat of the pendulum of a clock, a ray of light travels over 192,000 miles, and would therefore perform the tour of the world in about the same time that it requires to wink with our eyelids, and in much less than a swift runner occupies in taking a single stride? What mortal can be made to believe, without demonstration, that the sun is almost a million times larger than the earth? and that, although so remote from us that a cannon-ball shot directly towards it, and maintaining its full speed, would be twenty years in reaching it, yet it affects the earth by its attraction in an appreciable instant of time?

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Who would not ask for demonstration, when told that a gnat's wing, in its ordinary flight, beats many hundred times in a second; or that there exists animated and regularly-organised beings, many thousands of whose bodies laid close together would not extend an inch? But what are these to the astonishing truths which modern optical inquiries have disclosed, which teach us that every point of a medium through which a ray of light passes, is affected with a succession of periodical movements, regularly recurring at equal intervals, no less than five hundred millions of millions of times in a single second! That it is by such movements communicated to the nerves of our eyes that we see; nay, more, that it is the difference in the frequency of their recurrence which affects us with the sense of the diversity of colour. That, for instance, in acquiring the sensation of redness, our eyes are affected four hundred and eighty-two millions of millions of times; of yellowness, five hundred and forty-two millions of millions of times; and of violet, seven hundred and seven millions of millions of times per second. Do not such things sound more like the ravings of madmen than the sober conclusions of people in their waking senses? They are, nevertheless, conclusions to which any one may most certainly arrive who will only be at the trouble of examining the chain of reasoning by which they have been obtained.

Professor Airy, however, considers this difficulty to be over-estimated. He observes, that "persons who take great interest in Astronomy appear to regard the determination of measures, like those of the distance of the sun and moon, as mysteries beyond ordinary comprehension, based perhaps upon principles which it is impossible to present to common minds with the smallest probability that they will be understood; if they accept these measures at all, they adopt them only upon loose personal credit; in any case, the impression which the statement makes on the mind is very different from that created by a record of the distance in miles between two towns, or the number of acres in a field."

Now, the measure of the moon's distance involves no principle more abstruse than the measure of the distance of a tree on the opposite bank of a river; and the Professor shows that the methods used for measuring astronomical distances are, in some applications, absolutely the same as the methods of ordinary theodolite- surveying, and are in other applications equivalent to them; and that, in fact, there is nothing in their principles which will present the smallest difficulty to a person who has attempted the common practice of plotting from angular measures.

*

The habit of beholding the spectacle of the sun gra dually sinking, to disappear after a time below the level of

* See Prof. Airy's Six Lectures on Astronomy.

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the sea, this habit, we say, and our astronomical knowledge, have long since familiarised us with the phenomenon which, undoubtedly, would appear inexplicable were we to witness it for the first time, and without being prepared. Who has not in childhood felt this wonder? The ancients were far from being able to account for it: some Greek philosophers regarded the sun as an inflamed mass, which plunged itself every night into the waters of the sea; and they pretended to have heard a hissing noise! We have found the same idea lingering among the credulous peasantry of Sussex. We remember our first nurse, a native of Battle, used to relate that, from the cliffs at Eastbourne, she had seen the comet of 1769 dip its tail into the sea, and that she had distinctly heard the "hissing noise." Such is the persistence of certain impressions, which, monstrous as they are, can only be explained away by reasoning.*

PHYSIOGNOMY.

Sir David Brewster, in his introductory Address to the University of Edinburgh, 1862-3, remarked that one of the characteristics of the age in which we live was its love of the mysterious and marvellous.

I refer (said Sir David) to the so-called science of physiognomy, but more especially to that morbid expansion of it called the physiognomy of the human form, which has been elaborated in Germany, and is now likely to obtain possession of the English mind. In want of any other arguments, our physiognomists assert that it is simply probable that the outer form would be designed on purpose to represent the mental character, and on this ground they dogmatically declare that the expressions of rage, or grief, or fear have been "divinely designed on purpose that the inner mind may be known to those who watch the outer man." The persons who use such arguments and have recourse to such assumptions never propose to make any inductive comparison of a certain number of well-measured forms with the well-ascertained mental phases with which they are associated. Were such experiments made, they would yield no result. No two physiognomists, acting separately, would agree in measuring and characterising the forms and indications of the head, the features, the hands, and the feet of the patient; and no two men-neither the sagacious judge on the bench, nor the shrewd counsel at the bar-could determine his real character were they to conjure with all the events of his life. In this new physiognomy, a head large in the mid region indicates a predominance of the feelings over the other faculties; a proneness to superstition and fanaticism is shown by a little increase in the elevation; and a head large behind evinces practical ability; and, as Dr. Carus says, characterises a race which will give birth to great historic names! Small

See Things not Generally Known, First Series, p. 11.