To depend on a difference of temperature that is always liable to vary, and yet may not vary in the distance of a thousand miles a single degree of Fahrenheit's thermometer, would be absolute insanity; and none but a madman or an idiot would dip his thermometer in search of soundings, instead of heaving the lead. But the investigation is highly interesting to the physical history of our planet. Be it so-and we should say the thermometer cannot be too much exercised both at sea and on shore, even though its results. should never enable us to solve the question, Does the quantity of free caloric remain the same during thousands of years?' or to determine whether the barometric pressure of the atmosphere, the quantity of oxygen, the intensity of the magnetic powers, and a great number of other phenomena, have undergone any change since the time of Noah, of Xisuthris or of Menou. Philosophers have long amused themselves in settling the point whether ice or steam be the natural state of water, and in solving the problem of the increase or diminution of the heat of the earth: but a plain matter-of-fact man wishes for data, instead of wild hypotheses. A collection of facts continued with care for a thousand years might' be of use in these important questions, and every encouragement for amassing them has our most cordial approbation-all we contend· for is to make sure of our facts before we theorize. With this feeling we cannot possibly participate in the pleasure which M. de Humboldt seems to enjoy in contemplating a prospect so remote as that which follows.

Very distant posterity will one day decide whether, as Mr. Leslie has endeavoured to prove by ingenious hypotheses, two thousand four hundred years are sufficient to augment the mean temperature of the atmosphere a single degree. However slow this increment may be, we must admit, that an hypothesis, according to which organic life seems gradually to augment on the globe, occupies more agreeably our ima-: gination, than the old system of the cooling of our planet, and the ac-cumulation of the polar ice. Some parts of physics and geology are merely conjectural; and it might be said that science would lose much of its attraction if we endeavoured to confine this conjectural part within too narrow limits.'-vol. ii. p. 82.

The hygrometer is an instrument so very imperfect, and its results of so little importance at sea, that we consider it as wholly useless to navigation: the humidity of the air has little or no apparent effect on the winds; but it generally increases its transparency, and seems to bring objects nearer to the view. This phenomenon,' says M. de Humboldt, is well known to those who have made hygrometrical observations :'-true; and to every old woman it is known that, when the distant spire of the parish church is seen more clearly, and the hills seem to approach, there is rain brewing in

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the sky. The cyanometer, or instrument to measure the intensity of the blue sky, is still more useless, if possible, to navigators. This intensity, in fact, depends neither on the siccity nor humidity of the lower strata of air; while it may be rendered pale and even obliterated by a stream of vapour in the upper region of the atmosphere. On the summit of high mountains, elevated above the grosser portions of the atmosphere, it might be curious to compare experiments with those made with the same kind of instrument by Saussure on the Alps; but it is mere ostentation to talk of such experiments made at sea with a view of being useful to navigation. We prefer, as more simple and more correct, that natural diaphanometer,' which for ages has regulated the prognostics of marinersa great paleness of the setting sun, a wan colour, an extraordinary disfiguration of its disk ;'-though we should be cautious in admitting that these meteorological phenomena are the unequivocal signs of a tempest.' The marine barometer is far more important to the mariner than hygrometers or cyanometers. By this instrument a change of weather never fails to be indicated by the least rising or falling of the mercury in the tube; the descent, in tropical latitudes, of an eighth of an inch, when at a distance from the land, is the unequivocal indication of an approaching storm. Many a 'ship has been saved from destruction by the timely notice given by this instrument to prepare for a storm; and no ship, in our opinion, should be permitted to go to sea without one.

To the accuracy of the experiments made to determine the intensity of the magnetic forces, we cannot give the least confidence. The number of oscillations made by a needle delicately suspended and placed on so moveable a body as that of a small sloop, will depend rather on the quantity of the ship's motion, than on the quantity of magnetic force.

The observations on Cumana are minute and not without interest; but they need not detain us long. Every thing had a novel appearance, and nature wore a grander aspect than in Europe. A silk cotton tree (bombax heptaphyllum) had a trunk, in its fourth year, nearly two feet and a half in diameter! but it was an Indian who told them so. The governor of Cumana talked of azot, oxyd of iron, and hygrometer, 'words,' says M. de Humboldt, 'as agreeable to our ears as the name of his native country pronounced on a distant shore to those of a traveller.'

The cactus forms a strong feature in the vegetable productions of the intratropical parts of the new world. Armed with its formidable thorns, it opposes so impenetrable a barrier that plantations of it are employed as one of the best means of military defence. The places where these plants naturally spring up in groups are called tunales; and to add to their terrific character,

the cascabel, or Cumanian rattlesnake, the coral and other vipers, with poisonous fangs, frequent in vast abundance these arid haunts to deposit their eggs in the sand. There is little indeed that is inviting on the scorched plain of Cumaua.

The earth drenched with rain, and heated again by the rays of the sun, emits that musky odour which, under the torrid zone, is common to animals of very different classes, to the jaguer, the small species of tyger-cat, the thick-nosed tapir, the galinazo vulture, the crocodile, vipers and rattlesnakes. I have seen Indian children, of the tribe of the Chaymas, draw out from the earth and eat millepedes or scolopendras eighteen inches long, and seven lines broad. Whenever the soil is turned up we are struck with the mass of organic substances which, by turns, are developed, transformed, and decomposed. Nature in these climates appears more active, more fruitful, we might even say, more prodigal of life.'-vol. ii. p. 205.

The banks of the Manzanares, however, are well shaded by mimosas, erythrinas, ceibas, and other trees of gigantic growth. Both sexes of all ranks and ages bathe several times a day in this river, which, when flooded, is sometimes at 72° of Fahrenheit's thermometer when the temperature of the air is at 90°. All the ladies of the first families are taught to swim; and the first question at meeting is generally whether the water be cool? It is usual to assemble in groups in the river on moonlight nights, to sit in the water on chairs in light clothing, smoke segars, and converse about the weather, &c.

The city of Cumana, with its Indian suburbs, does not contain 20,000 inhabitants; we are only surprized that such a number should be found to inhabit it, on account of the frequency and fatal effects of earthquakes. In 1766 it was entirely destroyed: the whole of the houses were overturned in a few minutes, and the shocks were hourly repeated during fourteen months.' In 1797 more than four-fifths of this devoted city were entirely overthrown. Our limits forbid us to follow M. de Humboldt through his long dissertation on earthquakes, in which we have the pith and marrow of all that has been observed and conjectured on the subject from Seneca down to Dr. Young in the New Cyclopedia.' It is convenient enough to have a suite of facts and opinions thus clustered together, and we should not object to it in another form, but surely it is misplaced in a personal narrative of travels.' We must also pass over his account of the salt-works on the peninsula of Araya, the pearl-fishery which once existed on the coast of Cumana, and the wonderful stone, piedra de los ojos, which, placed in the eye, is asserted by the natives to expel any extraneous substance that may accidentally have been introduced; and which M. de Humboldt soon discovered to be nothing more

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than a thin porous operculum of some small univalve shell. The geological remarks and observations are interesting and important; but we shall have other opportunities for noticing them in the succeeding volumes. His reflexions on the difference between ancient and modern colonies are judicious and just; he has pointed out, we think, the principal causes which, in the latter, have operated in dispelling national remembrances, without filling their place by others relative to the country newly inhabited. This want of recollections of glory to inspire noble sentiments, and the indifference of the Spanish colonies towards the mother-country have long been met by a corresponding indifference on the part of the mother-country, which is now feeling the effect of its unjust and impolitic conduct; and unless the people of the Spanish colonies are made of materials different from the rest of the species, we may venture to predict that their final emancipation is an event not very distant.

It would be great injustice, and a violation of truth, not to allow to M. de Humboldt an extraordinary share of talent; his literary acquirements appear indeed to be more various than generally fall to the lot of man. To intellectual powers of the highest order, he adds an ardent and enthusiastic mind, full of energy and activity in the pursuit of knowledge. In the true spirit of enterprize and research, we doubt if he has any superior; and it seems to be equally exerted on all occasions: the ardour of pursuit, the mental energy, and the bodily activity are as much in earnest in rummaging the shelves of a library, as in clambering up the sides of a volcanic mountain. He is well read in all the modern discoveries of astronomical, geological, and physiological science; but his book affords no evidence that he is well grounded in mathematics, in chemistry and mineralogy, or in the principles and details of the several departments of natural history, with the exception perhaps of botany, in which he had an able assistant in M. Bonpland. Our doubts arise, in some degree, from the constant attempt at generalization, a species of philosophy the more likely to become fashionable from its lying at so little depth beneath the surface: "it is an easy way to rouse the reader's attention by exhibiting objects in large masses, and it gratifies the general reader by giving him striking results, while it spares him the trouble of thinking. are not, however, arrived at that period in physical science, more especially in that branch of it which relates to geology, to systematize with safety; we are but yet in the rudiments: and the best service which naturalists of the present day can render to science is to follow the injunction of Bacon, to collect facts with judgment, and describe them with exactness; it belongs to a remoter period to group them into systems: every new fact in science advances, while

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while new theories frequently retard, the progress of the human mind. Such is M. de Humboldt's immoderate fondness for theory and system that, to establish a favourite point, he thinks nothing of ransacking all the libraries of Europe, from Venice to Berlin. His imagination appears to be always on the wing; for a single word or a name suggests a hundred different ideas, and transports him to as many different places-from the Peak of Teyde to the summit of Chimboraco-from the burning sands of Africa to the fields of ice that surround the poles: in the mean while, the subject under immediate discussion is lost sight of, and taken up again, or abandoned, as it may happen. We are by no means sure, however, that this exuberance of foreign matter may not rather be the result of a systematic reference to the indices of books, than of previous knowledge arranged in the memory. This must at least be the case in quoting periodical journals, Transactions of learned societies, the Journal de Physique, and other works of the same kind, which are more for reference than reading. We shall not say of him as Felix did of St. Paul; but we may observe, that too much reading, or too frequent reference, betrays him sometimes into inconsistencies.

M. de Humboldt however has one good quality for a traveller; he is no egotist; he never offends by thrusting forward his own exploits, his own adventures, and his own hair-breadth escapes:' -all the parade which he displays is employed in adorning science, in whose cause he is always eloquent; perhaps he may too frequently throw his cloak of wisdom over subjects that ages ago had descended to the vulgar, and thoughtlessly expend his powers on familiar objects that are generally understood. In a word, we are persuaded that he aims at too much for any one man to accomplish; or, to make use of a nautical phrase, (as we have been dealing in naval matters,) he spreads too much canvass, and stows too little ballast.

ART. IV. The Fair Isabel of Cotchele. A Cornish Romance: in six Cantos. By the Author of Local Attachment, and Translator of Theocritus. Foolscap octavo. pp. 371. Cawthorn. THE valuable manuscript of the poem before us was inclosed, it seems, in a bureau of Mr. Walter Scott, which was for some time inaccessible.' (p. 371.) The key, however, was at length luckily found, or a blacksmith procured; and the Cornish Romance emerged from the obscurity of its seclusion.

Novelists, who undertake to describe manners and characters, have often assumed the agreeable fiction of a prosopopoeia. Thus we have The History of a Black Coat,' The History of a Goldheaded