which has brought in its stream a mixture of evil. The very first generation even in New England had its proportion both of roysterers and Romanists. Georgia was avowedly colonized, in no small part, with vagabonds and criminals. The maternal ancestor of many a proud Virginian was bought at her full value with a barrel of tobacco. Yet even with a mixture of such elements in the stream of immigration, our country was not ruined, but has been constantly advancing, not only in respect to the wealth, civilization and civil privileges of its population, but also in knowledge, morality and religion, a larger proportion of the present generation being intelligent members of evangelical churches than of any generation that has preceded this.

It is true, that many of these novices are very awkward in their first attempt to enact the part of freemen. They have many lessons to learn in the hitherto forbidden science of selfgovernment. But they can be indoctrinated. Even the wildest Irish and the most plodding Germans, when they have found themselves in cottages of their own, and on plots of ground unblasted by a landlord's charter, and unrobbed by a tither's visit, have often been rapidly transformed into the image of freemen, and have developed a sagacity and an ambition to rise in the scale of humanity, of which they had previously been quite unconscious. And their children will be native Americans. In numberless instances, they will be independent and intelligent owners of American soil, the worthy and patriotic fellow-countrymen of our own children, the enlightened friends of freedom, the shields of our republic.

Our occasion for fear in respect to our foreign population appears still less, when we consider the desirable character of a great proportion of the immigrants of the present period. Europe, by its vehement convulsions and reactionary barbarities, is sending to our country its sinews and its soul. Her most sagacious minds perceive most clearly, where are the old reverend abuses, or ironlinked fetters, that enthrall her starving millions; her noblest hearts throb with warmest longings to break the galling chains; and her firmest nerves dare first to strike a blow for freedom. And when treachery and reaction defeat the great resolve, these are the men to throng our welcoming shores, pouring the best lifeblood of Europe into the veins of our republic. If those old empires were annually to equip an army of three hundred thousand men, and land them on our shores, to be annually conquered, and sent back to our western frontier, and employed in hewing down forests, and constructing railroads, should we not exult in the rising power of our country? They are doing better for us than that. They are not only sending us armies of their subjects, but they are first teaching those subjects, in the most effectual manner, to love our country, and to abhor the remorse

less governments and despotic institutions they have left behind. Will men like Waldeck and Smith O'Brien ever aid in crowning an American emperor? Will men like Achilli and Pilatte and James Shore advocate a state religion? Will men like Klapka and Garibaldi draw the sword here in behalf of popery? Who in the next generation will be animated by a more fervent patriotism, as Americans, than the children of these Hungarians, to whom we are giving a refuge from the butcher-like ferocity that drove them from their native land? Thus the most efficient instruments in hastening our country to its destined preeminence are those despotic rulers of European countries and their agents. Their tyrants and traitors, their evicting landlords, their military tribunals, their ecclesiastical proscriptions, their Bonapartes and Gorgeys and Philpotts, are steadily transferring the best staple of a nation from their shores to ours, and aiding our yet stripling land to suck the breast of kings. Let them continue to send us the victims of misgovernment and oppression, their Emmets and their Kossuths, with the tens of thousands of unnamed hearts that reflect the same image. We have homes to give them, homes that shall be their own, without rent, or tithe, or poor rates; and they in return, will give us the power, all the sooner, to dictate a policy to all the governments of the civilized world.

ART. V.-HUGH MILLER.

First Impressions of England and the People. By HUGH MILLER, author of the "Old Red Sandstone." London: John Johnstone, 26 Pater Noster Row; and 15 Prince's street, Edinburgh. 1847.

WE presume it is not necessary formally to introduce Hugh Miller to our readers. The author of the "Old Red Sandstone" placed himself by that production, which was his first, among the most successful geologists and the best writers of the age. We well remember with what mingled emotions of admiration and delight we first read that work. Not that it was any thing remarkable for one, who had spent the prime of life digging in a stone quarry, to have met with many strange things, or to have collected even a museum of curiosities; but that such a man, without an education, and cut off from intercourse with those who could assist him, should have grasped at once the leading principles of geological science which had been so long in obtaining a foothold even in the scientific world; that, alone and unacquainted with the successful researches of the devotees of that

science, he should have prosecuted his investigations through twenty years of patient, or should we not rather say, of enraptured thought, spending months upon a single fossil and returning time and again to the same specimen, till at length after long delay the truth revealed itself to him; that, thus accumulating facts and observations, he should have worked out for himself the general principles of the Inductive Philosophy, and should have established in its true position one of the grand systems of creation which had been almost rejected, "The Old Red Sandstone" -was to us a remarkable phenomenon, though we know not whether it is more remarkable than are the classic purity and the poetic beauty of style with which these discoveries are narrated. We have little other knowledge of Mr. Miller, than what we glean from his writings. We are informed that he is now a prominent member of the Free Church of Scotland, and Editor of "The Witness" newspaper, which is devoted to its support. Thirty years ago he was "a slim, loose-jointed boy," who "one morning in February, a little before sun-rise," left his home to make his first acquaintance with a life of labor and restraint-to work at what Burns has instanced in his "Twa Dogs," as one of the most disagreeable of all employments, to work in a quarry. But he was no common boy. "I had been a wanderer," he tells us, "among rocks and woods, a reader of curious books when I could get them, a gleaner of traditionary stories, fond of the pretty intangibilities of romance and of dreaming when broad awake." But a trivial event soon happened, which converted the intangibilities of these day-dreams into realities more wonderful than any thing the fancy could conjure up, and for the marvels of traditionary stories, substituted the real history of transactions, authenticated by evidence more sure than human testimony itself. "In the course of my first day's employment, I picked up," he says, "a nodular mass of blue limestone, and laid it open by a stroke of the hamWonderful to relate, it contained inside a beautifully finished piece of sculpture-one of the volutes apparently of an Ionic capital; and not the far-famed walnut of the fairy tale, had I broken the shell and found the little dog lying within, could have surprised me more. Was there another such curiosity in the whole world? I broke open a few other nodules of the same appearance, for they lay pretty thickly on the shore, and found that there might be. In one of these there were what seemed to be scales of fishes, and the impressions of a few minute bivalves, prettily striated; in the centre of another there was actually a piece of decayed wood. Of all nature's riddles these seemed to me to be at once the most interesting and the most difficult to expound. I treasured them carefully up." The boy was no longer a dreamer. He saw in that nodule of blue limestone, what made him thereafter "an explorer of caves and ravines, a loiterer

mer.

along sea shores, a climber among rocks." He was not long in discovering that what "appeared to be scales of fishes" were veritable scales, and not well executed forgeries; recognizing in this single case one of the fundamental facts of geological science, and at once seizing upon the true interpretation of those phenomena of nature."I fain wish I could communicate to the reader the feeling with which I contemplated my first-found specimen of the winged fish. It opened with a single blow of the hammer; and there, on a ground of light colored limestone, lay the effigy of a creature fashioned apparently out of jet, with a body covered with plates, two powerful looking arms articulated at the shoulders, a head as entirely lost in the trunk as that of the ray or the sun-fish, and a long angular tail." The observant boy who "carefully treasured up" the nodules of blue limestone, here presents himself as the well instructed geologist and successful investigator. It is now ten years since that apparently trivial circumstance occurred, but they have been years filled, we may be sure, with varied observation and much reflection-with doubts and resolutions of doubts-with errors and corrections of errors-with hopes of discoveries, with disappointments and with triumphswith conjectures now proving to be baseless and now passing into knowledge-with all the diversified states of mind which belong to the observer and the man of science. Within this period, Mr. Miller had wrought out for himself many of the recognized conclusions of geological science: but here is a discovery which is to lead him on step by step, till he shall have disinterred a whole kingdom of animal remains from their rocky tombs; thus revealing a series in the rank of created beings before unknown and marking out another great epoch in the history of our globe. Previous to these investigations it was a pretty general opinion. among geologists that the Old Red Sandstone was a mere local deposit, its upper beds having the fossils of the Coal Measures, and the lower graduating apparently into the Silurian system. Mr. Miller demonstrated, on the contrary, that it abounded in fossils and that these were of a peculiar and distinctive kind. None of the acknowledged systems had any like them. They were indeed, strange enough, according to Mr. Miller's description:"Creatures whose very type is lost-fantastic and uncouth, and which puzzle the naturalists to assign them even their class-boatlike animals, furnished with oars and a rudder-fish plated over, like the tortoise, above and below, with a strong armor of bone, and furnished with but one solitary rudder-like fin; other fish less equivocal in their form, but with the membranes of their fins covered with scales-creatures bristling over with thorns-others glistening in an enamelled coat, as if beautifully japanned-and all of them testifying of a remote antiquity whose 'fashions have passed away.""

Thus after ten years' search, the fossils had been found; but it was to take another ten years' search to assign them their proper place in the scale of creation. "I was acquainted with the Old Red Sandstone of Ross and Cromasty nearly ten years, ere I had ascertained that it is richly fossiliferous; I was acquainted with it for nearly ten years more ere I could assign to its fossils their exact place in the scale." Let us pass over the interval and note only the moment of discovery. "I was spending a day early in the winter of 1839, among the nearly vertical strata that lean against the Northern Sutor. I had passed over the section twenty times before, and had carefully examined the limestone and the clay, but in vain. On this occasion, however, I was more fortunate. I struck off a fragment. It contained a vegetable impression of the same character with those of the ichthyolite bed; and after an hour's diligent search, I had turned from out the heart of the stratum, plates and scales enough to fill a shelf in a museum-the helmet-like snout of an Osteolepis, the thorn-like spine of a Cheiracanthus, and a Coccosteus, well nigh entire. I had at length, after a search of nearly ten years, found the true place of the ichthyolite bed. The reader may smile, but I hope the smile will be a good natured one; a simple pleasure may not be the less sincere on account of its simplicity; and 'little things are great to little men.'" This day's work completed his great discovery. He has now demonstrated it by the sure process of the Inductive Philosophy.

"The Old Red Sandstone" was published not long after this event, and rarely, taking into view all the circumstances of the case, has a more remarkable book come from the press. For, besides the important contributions which it made to the science of geology, it was written in a style which placed the author at once among the most accomplished writers of the age. He proved himself to be in prose, what Burns had been in poetry. We are not extravagant in saying that there is no geologist living who in the descriptions of the phenomena of the science has united such accuracy of statement with so much poetic beauty of expression. What Dr. Buckland said was not a mere compliment, that "he had never been so much astonished in his life, by the powers of any man, as he had been by the geological descriptions of Mr. Miller. That wonderful man described these objects with a felicity which made him ashamed of the comparative meagreness and poverty of his own descriptions in the Bridgewater Treatise which had cost him hours and days of labor." For our own part we do not hesitate to place Mr. Miller in the front rank of English prose writers. Without mannerism, without those extravagances which give a factitious reputation to so many writers of the day, his style has a classic purity and elegance, which remind one of Goldsmith and Irving, while there is an ease and a naturalness in the