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that followed it. The admirers of Hooker and Addison will be equally disappointed. We are not rigorists in the ceremonials of authorship. There is more than one faith in literature. We recognize a self-adjusting power which enables it to meet the necessities, as well as to express the feelings, of contemporary intellect. What is good in one century is unprofitable in another. An ingenious person has observed, that many things may descend from the sky of truth without awaking or interesting men, just as from the natural sky. The rain or snow cause no agitation in the cottager or wayfaring man; but hailstones rattling against windows, thunder-peals crashing among black woods, or lightnings splitting church towers, these call people forth in alarm to gaze abroad. So with respect to images and the words that clothe and convey them. Wesley, in his visit to Scotland, complained of the indifference of the people, which Southey explains by saying, that they had been startled by the storm of Whitefield's oratory, but were as unmoved by the soft, persuasive rhetoric of his successor, as by one of their own mists. The same truth is told by Luther in his usual forcible way. He had been reprehended by a popish priest for vehemence in reproving the people, and replied, "Our Lord God must first send a sharp, pouring shower, with thunder and lightning, and afterwards cause it mildly to rain, as then it wets."

We are, then, friendly to wide toleration in style, and are by no means zealots for the studied elegance and intense chill of Hurd. We rather like to see occasional sinkings and apparent weaknesses; regarding them as hints of nobler feats soon to be accomplished - gatherings up of the nerves and muscles for a new and mightier spring. This was the brave neglect of Pope, and more especially of Dryden or Shakspeare. The practice in authorship corresponds with what is related of our landscape-painter, Wilson. When he had finished a picture in a tame, correct manner, he often stepped back to some distance, with his pencil fixed to the end of a long stick. After gazing earnestly on the work, he would suddenly dash forward and give the finishing touch to the delineation.

It is chiefly, as we have said, in the later works of Sterling, that what we look on as the corruption of style becomes apparent. It may, perhaps, be traced, in great measure, to his admiration of a living writer, in whom the antidote of genius has scarcely conquered the Teutonic poison. Those of our readers who remember the late Mr. Taylor of Norwich, and the remarks of one or two eminent persons on his writings, will easily understand our meaning. Southey tells him of "the tower-of-Babel char

acter of his English." And Mackintosh writes, "It is true that he does not speak the Armenian, or any language but the Taylorian. As the Hebrew is studied for one book, so is the Taylorian by me for another."

Every literary epoch seems to be distinguished by some peculiar and popular dialect; — whether the Euphuistic under Elizabeth, the epigrammatic under the third George. We need not mention Mr. Carlyle in our own, or add any testimony to its reception, beyond the remark of Arnold on The History of the French Revolution, that it was "a treasure rarely met with, and not likely to be met with again." These will be called reformations or heresies in style, according as critical orthodoxy or latitudinarianism may prevail. And, perhaps, even in the present volumes, those rich and daring combinations of imagery and sentiment will be the most popular which we are least willing to receive in exchange for the author's simpler and more classical man

ner.

We cannot better conclude this notice of one of the most deeply interesting works which modern times have produced than by extracting the editor's beautiful and, upon the whole, just estimate of the character and functions of his deceased friend:;

If there is any man who, having exerted himself laboriously and perseveringly to pry into the hidden recesses of our nature, to pierce through the unfathomable abyss of evil, and to catch a glimpse of the light and glory beyond and behind, can say he has never been shaken or troubled in the calm composure of his faith, let him cast a stone at Sterling;-I cannot. Nor should they, who never having engaged in culties besetting them.*** Sterling was one such inquiries, can form no estimate of the diffiof the men whose nature commanded him to stand in the van of human progress. He belonged to the body-guard of him who might be called by the name of the heroic Prussian, Marshal Forwards. If there was a post of danger, he would rush to it; if a forlorn hope was sent out, he would be amongst the first to join it. Such men we honor, although they fall, nay, we honor them the more because they fall. Of the mystery of their fall we cannot judge; but we may trust that he who, as far as we can discern, has earnestly loved Truth, and sincerely desired to serve the God of Truth, will be judged that the prayer for forgiveness, when it rises by the God of Mercy; and we may feel sure from the depths of a departing spirit, cannot be uttered in vain.- Fraser's Magazine.

ZOOLOGICAL RECREATIONS.

upon the water and breathe the air; or as those more truly amphibious forms that breathe and have the command of both elements. There are the water-scorpion (Nepa) and water-beetle even amongst the Insect world—as, for instance, (Dytiscus)-species gifted with such varied instruments of locomotion that they are qualified for all the habitable elements; and such a creature, like Milton's fiend,

Through strait, rough, dense, or rare, With head, hands, wings, or feet, pursues its way, And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies."

Zoological Recreations. By W. J. BRO- | the firm surface of earth; or in those that float DERIP, Esq., F. R. S., &c. London, 1847. This volume presents to us, in a carefully revised form, some twenty papers originally published in the New Monthly Magazine, when under the care of their author's delightful friend and companion, Theodore Hook. Mr. Broderip, favorably known in the literature of his own profession, and very generally esteemed as an upright, intelligent, and humane magistrate, tells us that "these Essays were sketched as a relief from more severe studies and duties;" and that their re-appearance in a separate shape is due to Professor Owen, to whom the work is dedicated, and to other scientific friends "who urged their republication, under the impression that when brought together they might form a handbook which might cherish or even awaken a love for Natural History." Such is the language of his modest preface; we have no doubt that a great motive was to give pleasure to Mr. Hook - but we believe that we do not exaggerate in saying, that since the publication of Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne,' and of the 'Introduction to Entomology' by Kirby and Spence, no work in our language is better calculated to fulfil the avowed aim of its author than the Zoological Recreations.'

Earth, air, water, each have their appropriate inhabitants. The worm and the mole are constructed to bore the very substance of the dark and dense element; they are truly of the earth earthy. The swallow, insatiable in pursuit of the insect-food, wheeling on unwearied wing throughout the long summer's day- and the midges, whose ranks it thins as they weave their mazy dance in the evening sun-beam, are creatures of the air and light. "The shoals of fish that, with their fins and shining scales, glide under the green wave," are as strictly denizens of the water. The adaptation of form and structure in each of these beings to its particular element is perfect, the relation appreciable by the least practised observer. It needs but a little insight into the structure of the animal frame to discern the same adaptation of it to external circumstances in the species which have a more mixed dependence on the surrounding elements; in the mollusca, for example, that exist in a medium of water, but "in their pearly shells at ease, attend moist nutriment" at the bottom; or in those terrestrial creatures which, moving in the rarer atmosphere, are so far the slaves of gravitation as to be unable to raise themselves above

The relations which subsist between the modifications of the organic machinery and the media in and upon which it is destined to operate, are clearly traceable and readily comprehensible. In them, from the days of Socrates to those of Paley, the philosopher has found his most striking illustrations of a superintending Providence. But there are other, and as yet more obscure relations subsisting between animals and their habitats, the existence of which Zoology has but of late years made known, and the nature of which it will be the future business of that science to unfold. The turtle of Malabar (Chelonia Dussumieri), for example, is by no means the same species with that of the Isle of Ascension (Chelonia Mydas), although the sea in which they swim is warmed by equal floods of solar influence, and stored with equal abundance of the food of these esculent reptiles. It could not have been unreasonable to presuppose that the same species of Fishes would exist in parallel latitudes of the northern and southern hemispheres; and the accounts which we occasionally meet with of the kinds of produce in our remote colonies would seem to show this to be in some respects the case. In one of the South Australian (Adelaide) newspapers for October, 1845, we read, for example, of whitings 6d. per dozen; flounders 6d. per pair; mullet 30 for 1s.; cod 2d. per lb. But none of these fishes are even generically allied to their namesakes and representatives developed in the seas that wash our mild southern coasts; although the circumstances of light and heat, the constitution of the water, or the coast-line, offer no modifications explanatory of the essential differences which rigorous observation proves to exist in the fishes of the British and Australian seas.

Facts are remarkable, and at present inexplicable, have been brought to light in regard to the geographical distribution of Birds. It might

be supposed that the power of traversing space, | American monkeys, for example, have four more possessed by the majority of this class, would free them from the restrictions imposed upon less gifted natures in regard to range; but the hawks and eagles of Africa differ from those of America, and these again from the birds of prey in Australia. On the hypothesis that their first progenitors started from a common centre, it is conceivable that some may have winged their way across one or two wide oceans, whilst others tarried on the intermediate continent or nearer home; but had any such migratory instincts continued to operate, the peculiar localization of certain forms of the strong-winged "Raptores" must long since have been overpassed.

The phenomena of the distribution of the great terrestrial wingless Birds are still more perplexing. Almost every large tract of dry land under a warm or tropical sun supports its peculiar struthious bird. Thus Africa has the true twotoed ostrich, the type of the family; South America has a three-toed ostrich; the rich islands of the Indian Archipelago have their cassowary: Australia has its emeu: — but these four sorts of great birds, alike incapable of flight, and alike with unwebbed feet, differ from each other not merely specifically, but, according to the current value of zoological distinctions, in their wider characters. They are entered, accordingly, in the catalogues under different nomina generica: Struthio, Rhea, Casuarius, Dromai

us.

The question of the cause or condition of this insulated and widely-parted location of such non-migratory birds is one that naturally suggests itself to the inquiring mind, and the enigma becomes more puzzling and more provocative of attempts at solution, when the progress of zoology further discloses the fact, that small islands have, or had recently, their peculiar wingless terrestrial birds, generically distinct from each other, as well as from the larger species of the continents. Thus New Zealand has now its Apteryx, just as, two centuries ago, Rodriguez had its Solitaire, and Mauritius its Dodo.*

The geographical distribution of Quadrupeds seems equally mysterious. The elephant of Africa is specifically distinct from that of Asia; the rhinoceros of the Asiatic continent is onehorned; all the known rhinoceroses of Africa are two-horned. The giraffe and hippopotamus are at present peculiar to Africa. Not any of the indigenous quadrupeds in South America are of the same species with those of the old world—very few are of the same genus. The

* Bones of this till lately deemed fabulous bird were exhibited by Sir William Jardine, Mr. Strickland, and Professor Milne Edwards, at the late meeting of naturalists at Oxford, where the unique relics of the famous Dodo were duly descanted upon.

grinding teeth than those of the corresponding warm latitudes of Africa and Asia: they have the nostrils wider apart, and the tail prehensile in most, to compensate for their incomplete or absent thumbs. The sloths, the armadilloes, and the true ant-eaters are beasts strictly peculiar to South America. Great was the surprise of European naturalists when the discovery of the New World first brought these forms of mammalian life under their notice. Centuries have since elapsed, but the most assiduous researches have failed to make known a species of Bradypus, Dasypus, or true Myrmecophaga, in any other part of the globe. Again, the vast island or continent of Australia has an indigenous quadruped population as peculiar as that of South America, aud still more remarkable on account of the general prevalence of the marsupial economy. (It is, we need hardly say, the endowment of the mother with a natural pouch, or tegumentary nest, for the conveyance of her young, which has suggested this name.) With the exception of the native naked biped and his dog, - probably a contemporary importation, — not any mammalian species has been discovered in Australia which agrees with a known species or even genus in the rest of the world. New Guinea has its tree-kangaroos, Amboyna and the neighbouring Indian isles their phalangers, and the Americas have their opossums; but the genera Dendrolagus, Cuscus, and Didelphys, to which these extra-Australian marsupials respectively belong, are represented by no species in Australia, which, from the number and variety of other pouched genera, may be called the metropolis of marsupials. Here the true kangaroos (Macropus), the carnivorous opossums (Dasyurus), the wombats (Phascolomys), with a host of other genera, and with the still more extraordinary and anomalous duck-mole (Ornithorhynchus), are features of animal life as distinct from those in the rest of the world, as are the sloths, the ant-caters, and the armadilloes of South America, or the giraffe, the hippopotamus, and the orycteropus of Africa. Let any one reflect on the limited powers of locomotion assigned to the last-cited huge fossorial insectivore, to the heavy burrowing wombat, to the climbing sloth, or the diving duck-mole, which shuffles awkwardly along dry land like a reptile, and is restricted in the aquatic part of its amphibious existence to tranquil pools of fresh water, and let him associate these impediments to migration with the facts of the present geographical distribution of the species so fettered; or let him ponder upon the allocation of the few struthious birds which now exist in connexion with their want of wings and of webbed feet:—

and say whether Zoology has not presented a problem which, when rightly solved, will effect as great a revolution in men's ideas of the time and the mode of the dispersion of animal life over the earth's surface, as the Copernican system did in those regarding the relations of our planet to the sun.

of the peculiar existing species of South America, were rejected with the flippant remark that "all those species might dance within the carcass of the megatherium." It might be objected with equal force of the glyptodon, that the present diminutive species of armadillo might all send representatives to disport within its huge panoply, where they would no doubt display more agility there than could be expected from the sloths within the carcass of the megatherium; yet the glyptodon was not less a gigantic armadillo than the megatherium a gigantic sloth. The fact first glimpsed at by Cuvier seems, in a word, to have been abundantly confirmed: viz., that the huge extinct quadrupeds of South America are not allied to those which exhibit similar proportions in Africa or Asia, but have their nearest affinities to the diminutive species which are now peculiar to South America.

The like correspondence is traced between the recent and the extinct mammals of Australia. Beasts manifesting, in unmistakable characters stamped upon their fossil remains, the same essential affinities to the kangaroo and wombat, which the megatherium and the glyptodon respectively present to the sloth and armadillo, existed in New Holland contemporaneously with those edentate giants in South America. Quadrupeds as large as rhinoceroses, and in the proportions of some of their bones approaching the elephant, but representing on a gigantic scale the peculiar features of the existing herbivorous marsupials, subsisted upon the vegetable

Zoology, by the application of that branch of the science called Paleontology, has already carried us a long way back. With regard to the continents composing what geographers call the Old World, it has shown, by its power of determining the natural affinities of extinct species from their fossil remains, that mammalian forms, now limited to particular regions of that great natural tract of dry land, were of yore more generally disposed over it; that hyænas, elephants, and rhinoceroses, were as common in Europe as they now are in Asia, if not more abundant; and that giraffes and hippopotamuses once co-existed in Africa, Asia, and Europe. The species, indeed, were different; but the same generic forms were at one time widely dispersed over the whole of this Old World, of which they may be regarded as peculiarly characteristic. When, thanks to the exertions of Sir Woodbine Parish and Mr. Darwin, the extensive tertiary deposits of South America began in their turn to supply analogous evidences of the ancient mammalia of that continent—and when the limestone caverns of Brazil had been ransacked by Lund with a success second only to that which rewarded the previous explorations of Buckland in the same dark recesses of Eng-productions of Australia at the same remote lish geology—the results proved so far similar that it could be as truly said of the primeval beasts of America as of those of Europe, that verily there were giants in those days. But the giants appear to have been of totally different orders. No fragment of elephant, rhinoceros, giraffe, or hippopotamus has been discovered in South America; but it is inferred from abundant remains of enormous sloths, armadilloes, and ant-eaters, and of huge species having near affinities to the llamas (e. g., Mucrauchenia), to the cavies (e. g., Toxodon), or to other mammalian families, that such types were at that tertiary epoch, as now, peculiar to this region. Of the dimensions of some of those extinct representatives of the quadrupeds which may be said to wear the South American livery, an idea may be formed from the fact that certain bones of the megatherium measure exactly double the size of the same bones in the elephant. Forty years ago, difference of size was deemed a matter of such importance in the comparison of species, that Baron Cuvier's just conclusions from his exact demonstrations of the concordance of structure between the megatherium and some

period — judging from the geological character of the strata and the petrified conditions of the fossils at which the mammoth, the rhinoceros, and hippopotamus owned the soil of England — a period anterior to its separation from continental Europe. But more-the vast size of the ancient herbivorous marsupials, and their numbers, as indicated by the abundance of remains discovered in a comparatively brief period, required a system of check; and this was provided for by the co-existence with them of a carnivore bearing to them the same proportional size and force which the ancient lion of England (Felis Spelaa) bore to its colossal prey. But the relics of this Australian carnivore prove it to have been more nearly allied to the small existing carnivorous marsupials of Australia (the dasyures, for example) than to any of the jaguars, lions, tigers, hyænas, or bears of other continents. It was a huge marsupial destructive.

Again Banks and Solander, throughout Cook's first voyage found no similar tract of land so destitute of mammalian life as the isles of New Zealand: not a trace of the kangaroos and opossums of neighbouring Australia could

here be detected. The Aborigines, though at that stage of civilization when a knowledge of the beasts of chase is most useful and therefore usually the most exact, could give no information respecting any wild or native quadruped. They had a small half-domesticated dog; but the largest warm-blooded, indigenous, terrestrial animals hunted or entrapped by them were birds, about the size of our pheasant, but wingless, nocturnal and fossorial; they called them "Kivi." This condition of New Zealand has been aptly compared by Mr. Lyell with that of Europe during the era of the Wealden formation, in which deposits no traces of animals more highly organized than birds have yet been found.

of Surgeons? What adds to the strangeness of this recent discovery and most striking restoration of lost animals, is the fact, that, the number of already ascertained species of struthious or short-winged birds incapable of flight, which once inhabited New Zealand, is nearly three times that of the same order of birds at present known to exist in the rest of the world. Here, therefore, is one of the problems which Zoology offers to the inquiring mind; to explain a generalization based upon a series of carefully ascertained facts, the conformity, namely, of the geographical distribution of certain groups of the higher organized forms of animal life, at a period antecedent to history, prior apparently to man's existence, with the actual distribution of the same peculiar groups as determined by observation of the living species.

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The learned author of the Researches into the Physical History of Mankind'— in his attempt to reconcile the facts of the geographical distribution of existing animals with certain passages in the Mosaic history, as usually interpret

Thus as large hoofed quadrupeds (the elephant, giraffe, rhinoceros, hippopotamus) form the most striking feature of the zoology of the Old World, as long-clawed edentate quadrupeds do in the case of the New World, or at least of its southern division, and as marsupial quadrupeds prevail in the Australasian world, so wingless birds might be said to form the leading characteristic of the actual zoology of New Zea-ed-conjectures that the peculiar extra-Asiatie land. And hence the question became extremely interesting as to what forms of animal life, if any, the deposits contemporaneous with the newer tertiary formations in Australia, South America, and Europe might reveal. The answer which the explorations of the Rev. Messrs. Williams, Cotton, and Colenso, Colonel Wakefield, and Mr. Earle have enabled Professor Owen to return, is complete. New Zealand was populated at the pleistocene period, by forms of animal life no higher in the scale than wingless birds and birds most nearly allied to the Kivi (Apteryx), forming the remnant and representative of the family, and now fast disappearing through the exterminating spread of the colonists. But the ancient wingless birds of New Zealand were as gigantic in proportion to the Kivi as the diprotodon of Australia was to the Kangaroo. When different species of elephants, rhinoceroses, and hippopotamuses existed in Europe, while as many species of gigantic sloths and armadilloes peopled the forests of South America, and when the diprotodons, nototheria, huge wombats, and dasyures represented the marsupial order as gigantically in Australia- at the same remote period the dinornis and palapteryx formed a wingless but feathered biped population of the New Zealand isles, comprehending many species, some four feet, some seven feet, some nine feet, some eleven feet in height. Linnæus apostrophized the ostrich as avium maxima! How shrunk are its proportions when viewed by the side of the Dinornis giganteus which towers above the skeleton of the giant O'Byrne in the museum of the College

genera and species might have been called into existence subsequently to the Deluge. The silence of Scripture as to such recent partial creations, Dr. Pritchard holds to be of little consequence. "It was of no importonce," he says, "for men to be informed at what time New Holland began to contain kangaroos, or the woods of Paraguay ant-eaters and armadilloes." (vol. I., p. 83, ed. 1826.) We now learn, however, that amongst the inscrutable designs of a good Providence, ordaining the times and seasons for the introduction of new truths into the treasury of human knowledge, it was also intended that men should know that long antecedent to historical cataclysms there prevailed the same laws as to the geographical distribution of animals, which subsequently governed that mysterious circumstance in their history. The tim id, the narrow-minded, and the essentially faithless shrink from the acceptance of such sums of knowledge. Loath to comprehend that Philology itself is a science still in progress-rashly assuming that the old and common interpretation of a Hebrew Text can alone be just — they are apt to accuse of boldness bordering on impiety those to whom it has been given to open and read another page of Nature. It would seem from the language in which the progress of physical science has been sometimes apostrophized, as if its cultivators were luxuriators in intellectual pleasures, self-willed seekers after forbidden knowledge. Whereas they are for the most part the creatures of circumstances beyond their control: they are in positions, sometimes not of their own choice, in which the evi

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