Arabia. We must content ourselves by observing, that in his hands these subjects are admirably blended with the cognate efforts of Greece and of Rome, and that the influence exercised by Nature upon the genius of the different races is set forth with a clearness which delights as much as it surprises the reader. Nor does he stop there. We are shown how, after the stars of these countries had set for ever, and the last rays of their departed glory had vanished from the West, one form, illuminated by the first beams of returning day, appeared, and left its impress upon the ages that were to follow: these still reverence the memory of Dante Alfieri. The works of that great man abound with the most exquisite descriptions of natural scenery. He paints with a truth and accuracy of coloring which have never been surpassed, and presents, in the tenderness of his sentiment, a remarkable contrast to the severity of his bitter sarcasm, and concise and most cutting invective.

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The Lusiad of Camoëns surpasses all modern poems for the splendor and variety of its language, when it describes the surface of the ocean sleeping in calm, or lashed by tempests into fury. Camoëns had fought at the foot of Mount Atlas, in the Red Sea, and in the Persian Gulf. He had twice sailed round the Cape; and, for sixteen years, had watched every vicissitude of the atmosphere in the Chinese and Indian Oceans. In the third canto, he paints the condition of Europe from the frozen North to the Strait where the crowning toil of Hercules was accomplished. From Prussia and the Muscovites, and the races que o Rheno frio lava," he hastens to the glorious fields of Hallas, “que creastes os peitos eloquentes, e os zuizos de alta phantasia." In the 10th canto, his view enlarges; Tethys leads Gamba to a lofty mountain, to reveal to him the mysteries of the universe, and the course of the planets. All the world passes under his gaze; the land of the Holy Cross and the coasts discovered by Magellan, by deeds but not by faith, a son of Lusitania. As may be supposed, Shakspeare is not passed over in this glorious catalogue. We cannot, however, conceal our surprise and indignation to find, in such a writer as Humboldt, Thomson mentioned in the same page with Milton. After dwelling on the stately and measured style of Buffon, which, elevated as it is, he says, does not convey the idea that the writer had ever visited the regions he describes, he criticises the passionate and irresistible eloquence that has consecrated the scenes of Clarens and Meillerage; and dwells on the soft and lovely coloring of Bernardin de St. Pierre, in his master-work of Paul et Virginie. Then, after a passing tribute to Chateaubriand, and his old instructor, George Forster, he points out the difference between ancient and modern writers, and explains why the former are so vigorous and genial, and the latter so pedantic and insipid. The best description, say the Arabians, is that which changes the ear into the eye. "In the present age, an unhappy tendency to unmean

While yet on the enchanted ground of Italy, our author pauses to quote the sonnet of Petrarch, which describes the impression made on the poet's mind by the Valley of Vaucluse after Laura's death; - the smaller poems of Bojardo, and the later writings of Vittoria Colonna. Among prose writers, Cardinal Bembo is one of his favorites, particularly his Historia Venetia, where he has described with enthusiasm the climate and vegetation of America. The cardinal wrote when the image of a new world filled the minds of men, and roused them to the most heroic efforts. The tropical world, covered with its gorgeous exuberance of vegetation, with its Cordilleras, exhibiting as on a graduated scale every variety of organized existence, with all the attributes of a northern climate in Mexico, Grenada, and New Quito, was suddenly flung open to the view of astonished Europeans. Imagination, without the aid of which no really great work ever was achieved by man, was thus roused into action, and is seen to lend to the descriptions of Columbus and Vespucci a charm peculiar and indescribable. In giving an accounting poetical prose, to the nothingness of sentiof Brazil, the latter displays an intimate acquaintance with ancient and modern poetry; the former, as he tells of the soft atmosphere, and of the Orinoco pouring its gathered multitude of waters towards the Eastern Paradise, shows how deep within him lay the religious principle. No doubt, with increasing age, and struggles against religious persecution, this feeling degenerated into gloom and fanatical hallucination; but the simplicity of the language of the great discoverer, flowing from the purest and most genuine love of nature, and dictated by an extraordinary power of observation, stamps all that he has written with a character of immortality.

mental effusion, has seized upon many meritorious travellers and writers of natural history." This remark is followed by some admirable observations on the character of descriptive style, and a splendid panegyric on Goethe concludes the first chapter of the work.

In dealing with subjects such as these, it is important carefully to bear in mind the difference between early anticipation and actual knowledge. As science advances, the former is often confounded with the latter. Imagination is stimulated and fortified by premature combinations. Much was put forward among the Greeks and Indians, much in the middle ages,

Hicetas of Syracuse, Heraclides, Ponticus, and Eephantus, taught the rotation of the earth; but only Aristarchus of Samos, and Seleucus the Babylonian, a century and a half after Alexander, knew as well that motion of the earth was rotatory, as that the earth itself moved round the centre of the planetary system. If, in the middle ages, the Ptolemaic system prevailed, together with every other absurdity, and the belief was entertained that the earth was stationary, still a German cardinal, Nicholas de Cusa, had the courage and independence of thought to To inquire whether there was any original ascribe to our planet both a rotatory and a pro-knowledge of physical nature communicated to gressive motion.

There is in the dialect of some of the tribes that | emancipation from local influence and of intel

are now in a savage state, much that resembles fragments that have been shattered in the shipwreck of former civilization, but Europeans have carried their knowledge to the extremity of the universe. In the almost uninterrupted inheritance of their sciences, and in its refined nomenclature, we may trace, as materials for history of the human race, memorials of the various ways in which discoveries have been poured in upon it: how from Eastern Asia came the knowledge of the magnet; chemical preparations from Phoenicia and from Egypt; from Arabia the first notions of astronomy; and from India the use of a more refined and concise method of notation. We think that our author is mistaken in supposing that, in the Homeric age, Italy was an unknown land. Strabo particularly states the reverse.

lectual freedom, which, after the Macedonian conquest, shot up into an abundant harvest.

The opening of the Egyptian harbors under Psammeticus is a most important epoch. Before that time strangers were excluded from Egypt as carefully as they now are from Japan. The Phoenicians, in the order of time, succeed to the inhabitants of Egypt. They were the chief means of communication between the populations round the Indian Ocean and the western part of Europe. They used the Babylonian weights and measures, and, after the Persian conquest, coined money, which, singular as it appears, the Egyptians were without. But their great contribution to human knowledge was a written alphabet. It is not only as an instrument of trade, -as a bond of union among civilized people along the coasts of the Mediterranean, and even to the north-western shores of Africa, that this discovery is to be considered; it was the means of conveying the noblest triumphs achieved by the Greeks in the intellectual and moral world, and thus of bequeathing to the most remote posterity a precious and imperishable inheritance.

It is a singular instance of the apparently inadequate means by which the most important revolutions are sometimes brought about, that an article comparatively so insignificant as amber

Among the people dwelling round the shores of the Mediterranean the Egyptians are first mentioned. In the valley of the Nile, which has played so great a part in the history of mankind, Lepsius informs us that ascertained shields of kings, go back to the fourth Manethonic dynasty. This dynasty begins 3400 years before the Christian era, and 2300 years before the emigration of the Heraclide to Peloponnesus. The last dynasty of the old kings, which ended with the invasion of the Hyksos, 1200 years before Homer, was the twelfth Manethonic dy-should have made a highway from the coasts of nasty, to which belong Ameranha III., the builder of the original labyrinth, and the maker of the lake of Maris. After the expulsion of the Hyksos, the new kingdom began with the eighteenth dynasty, 1600 years before Christ. The great Ramses, called by Herodotus Sesostris, was the second ruler of the nineteenth dynasty. His exploits, Tacitus tells us, inscribed on the edifices of Thebes, were interpreted to Germanicus by the priests of Egypt. Diodorus says expressly that the great Ramses brought back captives from Babylon. It is certain that the Egyptians were acquainted, not with the Nile only, but with the Arabian Gulf. The inscriptions on the Kosser road, which connects the valley of the Nile with the western coast of the Red Sea, reached to the sixth dynasty. The canal of Suez was begun under Sesostris to facilitate the access to the Arabian copper mines, which were worked under Cheops, one of the fourth dynasty of Egyptian kings. Under Psammeticus, the father of Neku II., during whose reign the circumnavigation of Africa is said to have taken place, and after the civil wars were ended, Grecian mercenaries were established at Naucratis, and this settlement was the cause of a permanent commercial intercourse with Greece. Thus the seeds were sown of

the Baltic to those of the Mediterranean and Adriatic Seas. As the Phocæan colonists of Marseilles brought tin from England through Gaul to the banks of the Rhone, so was amber transmitted from tribe to tribe through Germany and the Celtic hordes on the slopes of the Alps to the Po, and through Pannonia to the Borysthenes and Pontus. Starting from Carthage, and, probably, from Tartessus and Gades, the Phoenicians explored the north-west coast of Africa far beyond Cape Bojador. Among the Tyrian cities was Cerne, the principal station of their ships, and the great mart of their produce. As the Canary islands and the Azores are the resting-places of the western passage to America, so are Iceland, the Orcades, and the Faroe islands, the resting-places for the northern. These are the two paths by which the European races first became acquainted with North and Central America.

Far different from the flexible genius of the Phoenician race, the character of the Etruscans was stern, and, if such a phrase may be permitted, concentrated. But they carried on over the northern Alps no inconsiderable trade with Northern Italy, where a holy road was guarded by all the tribes through which it ran to the amber-producing countries. More than any

Alexander had surrounded himself with the most learned and scientific of his countrymen. Among others was Callisthenes, the relation and friend of Aristotle, who fell a victim to Alexander's unjust suspicion. He led the thoughts of his companions from the vegetation of plants and the habits of animals, from the shape of the earth and the swelling of rivers, to an object nobler and more interesting by far-to him who, in the splendid language of Aristotle, is the aim and centre of creation-to man. Callisthenes sent from Babylon astronomical observations for 1903 years, according to Porphyry, before Alexander. The oldest Chaldean observations mentioned in the Almagest, only reached to a period of 721 years before the Christian era. True, Alexander never reached the chief seat of Indian learning. Seleucus Nicator was the first who pressed towards the Ganges from Babylon; and, by the repeated embassies of Megasthenes to Pataliputra, formed a political connexion with Sandracottus (Tschandragriptus).—There were, however, learned Brahmins in the Punjaub in the days of Alexander; whether the Indian method of notation was known to them is not ascertained. Great, indeed, would have been the benefit to science if Calanus, in the days of Alexander, before he ascended the funeral pile at Susa, or Barjom, in the days of Augustus, before he ascended the funeral pile at Athens, had communicated this method to the West.

exercised by the Arabians—a foreign element in European refinement on the progress of physical science. This Semitic race had, in some measure, escaped the barbarism which for two centuries spread itself over Europe, when, after thousands of years passed in almost absolute seclusion from the rest of mankind, they suddenly burst from the central parts of Arabia, and spread themselves like a torrent from the Pillars of Hercules to the Indus; and from the Euphrates to the Guadalquiver, and the southern parts of Central Africa. In the middle of the ninth century, Arabia carried on a commercial intercourse with the northern parts of Europe and Madagascar, with India, China, and Eastern Africa. She communicated to the inhabitants of these regions her language, coins, and Indian method of calculation; and laid among them the foundations of a mighty and a durable empire. Her people were not barbarous then. They had learned much, ere Alexandria yielded to the force of their arms, from a long intercourse with civilized nations, and were ready to receive as well as to communicate knowledge wherever they went. The Syrians, themselves instructed by the Nestorian Christians, led the invaders to a study of Greek literature. From the same source the Arabians acquired that acquaintance with the healing art for which they were long famed; and bringing with them habits of thought well suited to such inquiries, they became, by degrees, skilled above other races in physical science. The Arabian was the first of men to examine the organic tissue. He compared the structure of the plant and of the animal form with their functions, and investigated the laws which distribute them over the surface of the globe, according to the differences of temperature and elevation. In chemistry, likewise, he made large advances, though he mixed with it the dreams of alchemy as he worked out his system of astrology from the knowledge which he acquired of the stars. Whether the Arabians were or were not indebt

After the destruction of the Macedonian empire, which extended over a part of these countries, the seeds which had been scattered by the hand of the most magnanimous of rulers began to develop themselves with great rapidity. But Egypt, the kingdom of the Lagidæ, had the advantage, not of political unity alone, but of a geographical position, which pointed it out as the mart of nations, and especially as the seat of maratime adventure. Half a century after the death of Alexander, and before the first Punic war had shaken the plebeian aristocracy of Carthage, Alexandria was the first trading city ined for these and other scientific acquirements to the world. But if the commerce of Egypt long sustained itself, the philosophy which grew up under its shadow never rose to a giant stature. The tendency of the Alexandrian school was encyclopædiacal throughout. There was no mind of sufficient power to wield the immense stores that were accumulated; and, as is always the case, an abundance of literary and scientific mediocrity proved fatal to the efforts of inventive genius.

Having dwelt upon these matters, and suffering himself to be led, by the course of the Chinese expedition, to speak of the Roman empire, Humboldt goes on to examine the influence

the people of the far East it is hard to say. But this much is certain in regard to them, that, from whatever source they drew their knowledge, they were largely instrumental in diffusing it over the world. And it should not be forgotten that astronomy is not only the most sublime, but also the most necessary of all the sciences to the supply of wants of which every human being, from the philosopher to the savage, is conscious. By this we guide ourselves over sea and land, - unerringly if our calculations be accurate, with more or less divergence from the right course in proportion to our ignorance. By the light which this gives the unlettered husbandman prosecutes