continuous with that of the Amazon, and is of the same forest nature. So low is the water shed between the plains of these two rivers, that they afford the very rare spectacle of a natural communication between the great river systems; the Orinoco sending off a branch, the Cassaquiare, about one hundred and twenty miles long, which joins the Rio Negro, and so unites the streams. The possibility of this was at one time disputed; but Humboldt set the question at rest, by actually passing from one river to the other by means of this branch. The sources of the Orinoco are also unknown, but their supposed locality is famous for the fabled El Dorado. Alas! the golden mountain is but a rock of micaceous schist, and there is a terrible swamp in the way even to his delusive object! The largest body of fresh water in the whole world is found in Lake Superior, the first of a series of lakes connected with the St. Lawrence river system. These lakes are the most interesting feature connected with the physical geography of North-America. The upper three appear to have an average depth of about one thousand feet, whilst their surface is less than six hundred feet above the level of the Atlantic; so that their bed is four hundred feet below it, indicating a depression in the continent of above seventy thousand miles in extent. There is one parallel to this in the Old World, in the Dead Sea, which occupies a hollow more than one thousand feet below the sea-level. The most noteworthy river of the Old World is the Ganges. Amid the inaccessible snow-clad hights of the Himalaya it takes its rise, unseen and unexplored by man. Like the boast of the Douglas family, that its race was never known but in the plenitude of power, the Ganges appears at once from a chasm in a perpendicular wall of ice, as a very rapid stream, not less than forty yards across. Includ ing the Bramahpootra, it has a course of sixteen hundred and eighty miles, and has a delta of about two hundred miles in each direction. Its force, during the rainy season, is sufficient to counteract even the terrific impulse of the tides; and the quantity of solid matter conveyed to the delta by its waters is almost inconceivable. It has been roughly calculated that, during the four months of rain, enough mud is conveyed to outweigh fifty-six masses of granite, each as large as the great Pyramid of Egypt; and that, if "a fleet of eighty Indiamen, each freighted with fourteen hundred tons of mud, were to sail down the river every hour of every day and night for the four months continuously, they would only transport from the higher country to the sea a mass of matter equivalent to that actually conveyed by the waters of the river." The same authority (Professor Ansted) adds, that "the Sunderbunds, an innumerable multitude of river-islands, forming a wilderness of jungle and forest-trees, mark the extent to which such alluvial mud has been accessory in producing the present appearance of the mouths of these rivers." A host of mighty rivers would claim our attention, did our limits permit; their phenomena are, however, so allied, (although each has its own special interest,) that we may dismiss them with one reflection. Vast as are the floods that pour down these rivers, they all seem to be but inconsiderable remains of the immense masses of water belonging to a former age. Humboldt gives many illustrative proofs of this position, chiefly derived from the marks of aqueous action on rocks now far above the water-level. In a savannah near Uruana (Orinoco basin) there rises an isolated rock of granite, which exhibits, at an elevation of between eighty and ninety feet, a series of figures of sun and moon and various animals, which are said by the natives to have been done by their forefathers in former times, when the waters were so high that their canoes floated at that elevation-a statement confirmed by the evident marks of watery action on the rock. Perhaps the fact that on the first enunciation would appear the most startling, in connection with such volumes of water as these, would be that it all proceeded from the atmosphere-that all streams have their source, directly or indirectly, from the invisible vapor or moisture dissolved in the air. The mind in vain attempts to realize actually the possibility of this; and it is only by observation, argument, and induction, that we can compel ourselves to recognize its truth. This moisture descends chiefly in the form of rain and snow, the distribution of which is extremely unequal, and involves points of absorbing interest. On some parts of the earth rain never falls, or, at intervals of years, in very small quantities. Such are the deserts of Sahara, of Arabia, and Persia, and of Belochistan. The great table-land of Thibet is in the same condition, and agriculture has to be effected altogether by artificial irrigation from mountain-streams. In some districts, however, dew is deposited so copiously as to supply the place of rain. Snow is frozen rain, and is the form in which the moisture descends when the temperature is lower than the freezing-point. This is the case in all latitudes at a certain elevation, the limit of which is called the snowline. It varies in altitude from twenty thousand feet in the tropics, (as in some parts of the Andes,) down to the actual sea-level in the Arctic regions, where rain is unknown, and snow is perpetual. Mount Erebus, in the South Polar land, rises twelve thousand feet directly from the sea, covered with perpetual snow from its base to its summit. And thus it happens that, even in the hottest climates, every possible temperature may be met with on mountain-slopes; from the torrid heat at the base to the insufferable cold, as we approach the summit. In the earlier part of this paper, we have noticed the operation of mighty laws producing great and perhaps convulsive changes in our globe; and we must now remark, in concluding, that all the agencies that we have seen concerned in the changes and revolutions described (so far at least as those of a physical nature are concerned) are still in operation. Forces acting from underneath the earth's crust are here producing volcanic eruptions with effusion of lava or melted granite; and there they are upheaving islands, parts of continents, and mountains, and correspondingly depressing other districts. Within comparatively recent periods many of our known coasts have been ultimately elevated and depressed below the sealevel; as in the well-known instance of that on which the temple of Serapis stands. Part of the coast of Iceland is now perceptibly sinking from year to year; part of the coast of Finland in like manner is rising; the old stakes of the fishermen now stand far away inland, from the highest high-water. Here the sea is encroaching on the land, and of its substance forming other strata, which will perhaps be again elevated to be dry land. There again the land is encroaching on the sea, retaining the marks of its late submarine condition. Large tracts of country are washed away by rains and torrents, to form with their inhabitants fossiliferous strata elsewhere; and again, in other places, huge hills are cast up by internal convulsion, as in the case of the volcanic hill Jorullo, in Mexico, which in 1759 rose in a few hours nineteen hundred feet above the plateau on which it stands. But the time of man's experience is comparatively short, so the changes under his immediate observation are not so world-wide. Yet in less favored lands than ours, where volcanic action is rife, and consequent alterations of level in sea and land are frequent, the world's stability is not so received a doctrine as with us. As in the days of Noah, they marry and are given in marriage, and the sea invades them and swallows up cities or districtsthe earth opens and engulfs large tracts of country—or torrents of lava and avalanches of ashes bury them, and the place that knew them knows them no more. And then compensating influences are at work. The mud carried down by mighty rivers, like the Ganges, forms islands of great extent, upon which the natives fix themselves, sow their rice, and flourish till they and their works are swept away to form the material for other islands. The tiny coral animal builds and builds from the ocean floor, till it reaches to high-water mark, and then it dies. low coral island or reef is thus formed, into which sea-weed floats and decays. Mud, sand, floating twigs, and leaves accumulate upon it; the rain beats, and a soil is formed, in which seeds of the cocoanut, palm, date, and many other trees, brought by the air, water, or birds, take root and grow, and very soon a new land is formed, clothed with the richest tropical vegetation to the water's edge, and a new home is made for nomadic man, who builds a house, a temple, a school, and a prison. A Such is the past and present of our earth, as ascertained by observation and induction; its future we know by faith, not by sight. We look for new heavens and a new earth, when the curse upon the earth for man's sin shall have been revoked. But before this, we hear the heavens passing away with a great noise, we see the elements melting again with fervent heat; but beyond all this apparent ruin, we see a city not lighted by sun or moon, not parched with heat or frozen with cold; for the light of it proceeds from a throne of jasper, and in its midst is a stream of life, on whose banks grows a tree whose fruit is for the healing of the nations. THE larger half of Mr. Bain's first volume is occupied by the exposition of Association. His exemplification and illustration of this fundamental phenomenon of mind, in its two varieties -adhesive association by contiguity in time or place, and suggestion by resemblance-are quite unexampled in richness, clearness, and comprehensiveness. The whole of the intellectual phenomena, as distinguished from the emotional, he considers as explicable by that law. But to render this possible, the law must be conceived in its utmost generality. Association is not between ideas of sensation alone. The following is the author's statement of the two laws of association, the law of Contiguity, and that of Similarity: "Action, sensations, and states of feeling, occurring together or in close succession, tend to grow together or cohere in such a way that when any one of them is afterwards presented to the mind, the others are apt to be brought up in idea." (The Senses and the Intellect, p. 348.) "Present actions, sensations, thoughts, or emotions, tend to revive their like among previous impressions." (P. 451.) One of the leading features in Mr. Bain's application of these laws to the analysis of phenomena, is the great use he makes of the muscular sensations, in explaining our impressions of, and judgments respecting, things physically external to us. The dis tinction between these sensations and those of touch, in the legitimate sense of the word, and the prominent part they take in the composition of our ideas of resistance or solidity, and extension, were first pointed out by Brown, and were the principal addition which he made to the analytical exposition of the mind. Mr. Bain carries out the idea to a still greater length, and his developments of it are highly instructive, though he sometimes, perhaps, insists too much upon it, to the prejudice of other elements equally or * Concluded from page 214. more influential. Thus, in his explanation of the acquired perception of distance and magnitude by sight, he lays almost exclusive stress on the sensations accompanying the muscular movements by which the eyes are adapted to different distances from us, or are made to pass along the lengths and breadths of visible objects. That this is one of the sources of the acquired perceptions of sight, can not be doubted; but that it is the principal one, no one will believe, who considers that all the impression of unequal distances from us that a picture can give, is produced not only without this particular indication, but in contradiction to it. The signs by which we mainly judge are the effects of perspective, both linear and aerial; in other words, the differences in the actual picture made on the retina, the imitation of which constitutes the illusion of the painter's art, and which we should have been glad to see illustrated by Mr. Bain, as he is so well able to do, instead of being merely acknowledged by a quotation in a note, (p. 380.) We regret that our limits forbid us to quote (p. 372-6) his explanation of the mode whereby, in his opinion, the feeling of resistance, a result of our muscular sensations, generates the notion, often supposed to be instinctive, of an ex ternal world. Respecting the law of Association by Contiguity, so much had been done, with such eminent ability, by former writers, that this part of Mr. Bain's exposition is chiefly original in the profuseness and minuteness of his illustrations. To bring up the theory of the law of Similarity to the same level, much more remained to do, that law having been rather unaccountably sacrificed to the other by some whom Mr. James Mill, in his "Analysis," of the Association psychologists; among even endeavored to resolve it into contiguity; an attempt which is perhaps the most inconclusive part of that generally acute and penetrating performance, association by resemblance being, as Mr. Bain observes, presupposed by, and indispensable to, the conception of association by contiguity. The two kinds of association are indeed so different, that the predominance of each gives rise to a different type of intellectual character; an eminent degree of the former constituting the inductive philosopher, the poet and artist, and the inventor and originator generally, while adhesive association gives memory, mechanical skill, facility of acquisition in science or business, and practical talent so far as unconnected with invention. To the long chapters on Contiguity and Similarity, Mr. Bain subjoins a third on what he terms Compound Association; "where several threads, or a plurality of links or bonds of connection, concur in reviving some previous thought or mental state," (p. 544,) which they consequently recall more vividly; a part of the subject too little illustrated by former writers, and which includes, among many others, the important heads of "the singling out of one among many trains," and what our author aptly terms "obstructive association." The subject is concluded by a chapter on "Constructive Association," analyzing the process by which the mind forms" combinations or aggregates different from any that have been presented to it in the course of experience," and showing this to depend on the same laws. We are unable to find room for the smallest specimen of these chapters, which are marked with our author's usual ability, and fill up what is partially a hiatus in most treatises on Association. tends on the ideas considered separately, and which these philosophers have passed without any attempt at explanation. It is a wholly insufficient account of Fear, for example, to resolve it into the calling up, by association, of the idea of the dreaded evil; since, were this all, the physical manifestations that would follow would be the same in kind, and mostly less in degree, than those which the evil would itself produce if actually experienced; whereas, in truth, they are generically distinct; the screams, groans, contortions, etc., which (for example) intense bodily suffering produces, being altogether different phenomena from the wellknown physical effects and manifestations of the passion of terror. It is conceivable that a scientific theory of Fear may one day be constructed, but it must evidently be the work of physiologists, not of metaphysicians. The proper office of the law of association in connection with it, is to account for the transfer of the passion to objects which do not naturally excite it. We all know how easily any object may be rendered dreadful by association, as exemplified by the tremendous effect of nurses' stories in generating artificial terrors. We must not, therefore, expect to find in the half-volume which Mr. Bain has dedicated to this subject, any attempt at a general analysis of the emotions. He has not even (except in one important case, to which we shall presently advert) entered, with the fullness which belongs to his plan, and which marks the execuMr. Bain's exposition of the Emotions tion of every other part of it, into the is not of so analytical a character as that important inquiry, how far some emotions of the intellectual phenomena. He con- are compounded out of others. He gives siders it necessary, in this department, to a general indication of his opinion on the allow a much greater range to the instinct-point; but his illustrations of it are ive portion of our nature; and has exhibited what may be termed the natural history of the emotions, rather than attempted to construct their philosophy. It is certain that the attempts of the Association psychologists to resolve the emotions by association have been, on the whole, the least successful part of their efforts. One fatal imperfection is obvious at first sight: the only part of the phenomenon which their theory explains, is the suggestion of an idea or ideas, either pleasurable or painful—that is, the merely intellectual part of the emotion; while there is evidently in all our emotions an animal part, over and above any which naturally at scattered, and mostly incidental. He has, however, written the natural history of the emotions with great felicity, in a manner at once scientific and popular; insomuch that this part of his work presents attractions even to the unscientific reader. Mr. Bain's classification of the emotions is different from, and more comprehensive than, any other which we have met with. He begins with "the feelings connected with the free vent of emotion in general, and with the opposite case of restrained or obstructed outburst;" the feelings, in short, of liberty or restraint in the utterance of emotion, which he regards as themselves emotions, our emotions ciation from these four, with the aid of certain combinations of circumstances. Though, as already remarked, he does. not discuss this question in the express and systematic manner which his general scheme would appear to require, he has said many things which throw a valuable light on it, together with some which we consider questionable. But we still desiderate an analytical philosophy of the emotional, like that which he has furnish and entitled, on account of their superior generality, to be placed at the head of the catalogue. He next proceeds to one of the simplest as well as most universal of Wonder. The third on his list is Terror. The fourth is "the extensive group of feelings implied under the title of the Tender Affections." The consideration of these feelings is by most writers blended with that of Sympathy; which is carefully distinguished from them by our author, and treated separately, noted of the intellectual part of our constituas an emotion, but as the capacity of taking on the emotions, or mental states generally, of others. A character may possess tenderness without being at all sympathetic, as is the case with many selfish sentimentalists; and the converse, though not equally common, is equally in human nature. From these he passes to a group which he designates by the title, Emotions of Self; including Self-esteem, or Self-complacency, in its various forms of Conceit, Pride, Vanity, etc., which he regards as cases of the emotions of tenderness directed towards self, and has largely illustrated this view of them. The sixth class is the emotions connected with Power. The seventh is the Irascible Emotions. The eighth is a group not hitherto brought forward into sufficient prominence, the emotions connected with Action. "Besides the pleasures and pains of Exercise, and the gratification of succeeding in an end, with the opposite mortification of missing what is labored for, there is in the attitude of pursuit, a peculiar state of mind, so far agreeable in itself, that factitious occupations are instituted to bring it into play. When I use the term plot-interest, the character of the situation alluded to will be suggested with tolerable distinctness." This grouping together of the emotions of hunting, of games, of intrigue of all sorts, and of novel-reading, with those of an active career in life, seems to us equally original and philosophical. The ninth class consists of the emotions caused by the operations of the Intellect. The tenth is the group of feelings connected with the Beautiful. Eleventh, and last, comes the Moral Sense. tion. Much of the material is ready to his hand, and only requires coordination under the universal law of mind which he has so well expounded. For example, the most complicated of all his eleven classes, the aesthetic group of emotions, has been analyzed to within a single step of the ultimate principle, by thinkers who did not see, and would not have accepted, the one step which remained. Mr. Ruskin would probably be much astonished were he to find himself held up as one of the principal apostles of the Association Philosophy in Art. Yet, in one of the most remarkable of his writings, the second volume of Modern Painters, he aims at establishing, by a large induction and a searching analysis, that all things are beautiful (or sublime) which powerfully recall, and none but those which recall, one or more of a certain series of elevating or delightful thoughts. It is true that in this coïncidence Mr. Ruskin does not recognize causation, but regards it as a preëstablished harmony, ordained by the Creator, between our feelings of the Beautiful and certain grand or lovely ideas. Others, however, will be inclined to see in this phenomenon, not an arbitrary dispensation of Providence, which might have been other than it is, but a case of the mental chemistry so often spoken of; and will think it more in accordance with sound methods of philosophizing to believe, that the great ideas, so well recognized by Mr. Ruskin, when they have sunk sufficiently deep into our nervous sensibility, actually generate, by composition with one another and with other elements, the aesthetic feelings which so nicely correspond to them. Of these, the four first are regarded by The last of our author's eleven classes, Mr. Bain as original elements of our that of Moral Emotion, is the only one nature, having their root in the constitu- on which, in relation to the problem of its tion of the nervous system, and not ex- composition, he puts forth his whole plicable psychologically. The remaining strength. The question whether the seven he considers as generated by asso-moral feelings are intuitive or acquired |