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No. 726.-24 April, 1858.-Enlarged Series, No. 4.

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POETRY.-The Storms and Stars of March, 273. Living, 273. De Profundis, 273. Looking East, 291. Story of a King, 291. At Belton, 320. Alone, 320. Sower and Seed, 320. A Woman's Question, 320.

SHORT ARTICLES.-Destruction of Personal Property on the Death of a Gipsey, 265. Sir Walter Scott at Cambridge, 265. Suez Canal, 268. To Knock Under, 272. Deadening Glass Windows, 272. Resuscitation of Drowned Flies, 290. Anecdote of Flamstead, 290. Buff, 297. First Women Actors and First Scenes, 299. Nursery Hymn, 299. Hour Glass in Pulpits, 301. Dean Sherlock's Redeemed Slaves, 304. A Sorrow's Crown of Sorrow, 308. Seraphims and Cherubims, 311. De Amore Jesus, 311. Red and Black, 315. Twitchill, 316. Conversation, 316.

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should it turn out to be only a truce," seems a great good to Europe.

Lord Byron comes up again, like a defaced Idol. Some of the writers represent him as an industrious, plodding writer, with little of the

THE pamphlet of the Emperor Napoleon is reprinted entire in this number. The first reception in England was not very favorable: the debating society in Leicester Square being looked upon with contempt. This was rather a Cockney view of the case. Leicester Square inspiration of poetry. and its dingy residents, however unfashionable

A bookseller writes to us that he has a cus

in London, are important matters for the des-tomer who has bought every number of the potic governments of Europe. Here are con- Living Age from the beginning, and has the gregated patriotic and desperate Germans, Ital-whole 56 volumes, handsomely bound, who has ians, Frenchmen. The substance of the discontinued his subscription because the edges pamphlet is the Emperor's earnest desire for peace with England—and that appears to have made at last the impression which it ought. While the French press is so restrained it is difficult to judge of the national feeling,-and the English for a time suspected the Emperor himself of endeavoring to irritate the army and the people of France against them. It is likely that alarm and anger deranged for a time the steady mind of Napoleon-and that he soon returned to a truer sense of his relations and condition. To retrace mistaken steps about England, may be easier than to undo the violent measures of government in France. We should be sorry for the overturn of Napoleon, -for the Empire seems to be Peace. Every month of increasing trade with England, even

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NEW BOOKS.

THE LIFE OF GEORGE STEPHENSON, Railway Engineer. By Samuel Smiles. Reprinted from the fourth London Edition, by Ticknor & Fields, Boston.

This life of a self-educated, self-made man, has been repeatedly reviewed with high praise, in the pages of The Living Age.

LIFE THOUGHTS, gathered from the Extemporaneous discourses of Henry Ward Beecher. By one of his Congregation. Phillips, Sampson & Company, Boston.

Many of these beautiful thoughts, in few words, we should like to build into the waste places (we mean the bottoms of half-filled pages) of this magazine.

ST. MATTHEW. The Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, according to St. Matthew. The Received Version in paragraph form. With an Introduction by Thomas Hartwell Horne; a very full Index; and two

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From the Quarterly Review. pain, infancy would be maimed, or perish, before experience could inform it of its dangers. Lord Kaimes advised parents to cut the fingers of their children "cunningly" with a knife, that the little innocents might associate suffering with the glittering blade before they could do themselves a worse injury; but if no smart accompanied the wound, they would cut up their own fingers with the same glee that they cut a stick, and burn them in the candle with the same delight that they burn a piece of the fire. Without pain, we could not proportion our actions to the strength of our durance. In the impetuosity of youth we frame, or our exertions to its powers of enshould strike blows that would crush our hands, and break our arms; we should take leaps that would dislocate our limbs; longer taught by fatigue that the muscles needed repose, we should continue our sports and our walking tours till we had worn out the living tissue with the same unconsciousness that we now wear out our coats and our shoes. The very nutriment which is the support of life would frequently prove our death. Mirabeau said of a man who was as idle as he was corpulent, that his only use was to show how far the skin would stretch without bursting. Without pain, this limit would be constantly exceeded, and epicures, experiencing no uneasy sensations, would continue their festivities until they met with the fate of the frog in the fable, who was ambitious of emulating the size of the ox. Sir Charles Bell mentions the case of a patient who had lost the sense of heat in his right hand, and who, unconscious that the cover of a pan which had fallen into the fire was burning hot, took it out and deliberately returned it to its proper place to the destruction of the skin of the palm and fingers. This of itself would be an accident of incessant occurrence if the monitor were wanting which makes us drop such materials more hastily than we pick them up. Pain is the grand preserver of existence, the sleepless sentinel that watches over our safety, and makes us both start away from the injury that is present, and guard against it carefully in the time to come.

An Essay on the Beneficent Distribution of the Sense of Pain. By G. A. Rowell, Honorary Member of the Ashmolean Society, and Assistant Underkeeper of the Ashmolean Museum. Oxford, 1857. SIR HUMPHREY DAVY when a boy, with the defiant constancy of youth which had as yet suffered nothing, held the opinion that pain was no evil. He was refuted by a crab who bit his toe when he was bathing, and made him roar loud enough to be heard half a mile off. If he had maintained instead, that pain was a good, his doctrine would have been unimpeachable. Unless the whole constitution of the world were altered our very existence depends upon our sensibility to suffering. An anecdote, which is quoted by Dr. Carpenter in his "Principles of Human Physiology," from the "Journal of a Naturalist," shows the fatal effects of a temporary suspension of this law of our nature. A drover went to sleep on a winter's evening upon the platform of a lime-kiln, with one leg resting upon the stones which had been piled up to burn through the night. That which was gentle warmth when he lay down became a consuming fire before he rose up. His foot was burnt off above the ancle, and when, roused in the morning by the man who superintended the lime-kiln, he put his stump, unconscious of his misfortune, to the ground, the extremity crumbled into fragments. Whether he had been lulled into torpor by the carbonic acid driven off from the limestone, or whatever else may have been the cause of his insensibility, he felt no pain, and through his very exemption from this lot of humanity expired a fortnight afterwards in Bristol hospital. Without the warning voice of pain, life would be a series of similar disasters. The crab, to the lasting detriment of chemistry, might have eaten off the future Sir Humphrey's foot while he was swimming without his entertaining the slightest suspicion of the ravages which were going on. Had he survived the injuries from the crab, he would yet have been cut off in the morning of his famous career, if, when experimenting on the gases, the terrible oppression at his chest had not warned him to cease inhaling the carburetted hydrogen, nor, after a long struggle for life, would he have recovered to say to his alarmed assistant, "I do not think I shall die." Without physical

The same Infinite Wisdom which has contrived pain for our protection has also distributed it in the manner which causes it to

fulfil its defensive purposes with the least | blood, of which the consequence is the speedy suffering to its subjects. The chapters which destruction of the part, mortification, and Sir Charles Bell devoted to this question in death. When Sir Charles Bell called the his work on the "Hand" are alone, from attention of his audience to this fact, in a their originality, and the striking evidence lecture delivered before the College of Surthey afford of design, worth all the rest of geons, he bid them observe how often, as the Bridgewater Treatises. The skin is the they listened to him, they had moved upon advanced guard through which every injury their seats that they might shift the weight to the other parts must make its way. The of their bodies, and relieve the portions skin, therefore, required to be the seat of a which were beginning to be cramped. "Were peculiar sensibility both for its own security you constrained," he said, "to retain one poand to impel us to flinch from the violence sition during the whole hour you would rise which would hurt the flesh beneath. Form- stiff and lame." Even in the unconsciousing our notions of pain from what we feel at ness of slumber the contrivance continues to the surface, we imbibe the idea that the act, and, were it otherwise, sleep, instead of deeper the wound the more severe would be being "nature's sweet restorer," would de the suffering, but this, says Sir Charles Bell, range the circulation and cripple our frames. is delusive, and contrary to the fact. The Not only have different parts of the system surgeon, he adds, who makes use of the sensibilities which differ in degree, but sensiknife, informs the patient that the worst is bilities which differ altogether in kind, so that over when the skin is passed, and if, in the while both shall be acutely alive to their approgress of the operation, it is found neces-propriate stimulus, one or either may be dead sary to extend the outer incision, the return to the application which rouses and tortures to the skin proves far more trying than the the other. "A man who had his finger torn original cut, from the contrast which it pre-off," writes Sir Charles Bell, in his “Animal sents to the comparative insensibility of the Mechanics," "so as to hang by the tendon interior. The muscle is protected not by its only, came to a pupil of Dr. Hunter. I shall own tenderness, which is by no means acute, now see, said the surgeon, whether this man but by the tenderness of its superficial cover- has any sensibility in his tendon. He laid a ing, "which affords," says Sir Charles, "a cord along the finger, and, blindfolding the more effectual defence than if our bodies patient, cut across the tendon. Tell me, he were clothed with the hide of a rhinoceros." asked, what I have cut across? Why, you To have endowed the delicate internal tex- have cut across the cord, to be sure, was the tures with an exquisite susceptibility to the answer." The tendon was as insensible as gash from a knife, or a blow from a stick, the string itself. Further experiments have would have been superfluous torture. The shown that the tendons of the muscles, the end is effectually attained by spreading over ligaments which hold together the joints, the them a thin layer of highly sensitive skin, cartilages which act as a pad to the extremiwhich is too intolerant of cuts or bruises to ties of the bones where they work upon one allow any harm to approach it, which it is in another, feel neither cuts nor burns. But our power to avert. In addition to the pro- there is a very different result if they are tection which is thus provided against occa- submitted to stretching, laceration, and consional dangers, the skin, by its sensibility, is cussion. Then they raise the warning voice essential to our existence under the hourly of pain, and obtuse to what might seem a conditions of life. It is the skin which acts more agonising species of injury, they are as a thermometer to tell us whether the tem- intolerant of the less. The reason is obvious. perature is suited to our organization, and The skin is the fence to the inner membranes warns us alike to shun pernicious extremes from the first class of evils, but if the skin is of heat and cold. It is the skin again which to have the play and power of adaptation prompts the instinctive restlessness that pre which is essential to its functions, its suppleserves the entire frame from decay. A para- ness would be too great to be a check upon lytic patient must be supported upon soft the movements which affect the cartilages, pillows, and his position frequently changed the ligaments, and the tendons. These conby the nurse, or the uninterrupted pressure sequently are made impatient of concussion, upon the same surface stops the flow of the of tearing, and of stretching, that we might

not leap from heights, run with a violence, | ment the atmospheric currents which are inor twist our joints with a force inconsistent cessantly passing to and fro over its irritable with the strength of the human fabric. The pain of a sprained ankle shows how sufficient is the punishment to put a check upon any excesses of the kind. Exchange the sensibilities, confer upon the membranes which are interposed between the joints, or which tie them together, the same feelings both in kind and degree which belong to the skin, and the common movements of the body, or even the weight of one foot upon another, would have been attended, says Sir Charles Bell, with as much suffering as we experience when we walk upon an inflamed limb.

Paley applauds the contrivance by which everything we eat and drink is made to glide on its road to the gullet, over the entrance to the wind-pipe without falling into it. A little moveable lid, the epiglottis, which is lifted up when we breathe, is pressed down upon the chink of the air-passage by the weight of the food and the action of the muscles in swallowing it. Neither solids nor liquids, in short, can pass without shutting down the trap-door as they proceed. But this is only a part of the safe-guard. The slit at the top of the wind-pipe, which never closes entirely while we breathe, is endued with an acute sensibility to the slightest particle of matter. The least thing which touches the margin of the aperture causes its sides to come firmly together, and the intruding body is stopped at the inlet. It is stopped, but, unless removed, must drop at the next inspiration into the lungs. To effect its expulsion the sensibility of the rim at the top of the wind-pipe actually puts into vehement action a whole class of muscles placed lower than its bottom, and which compressing the chest over which they are distributed, drives out the air with a force that sweeps the offending substance before it. The convulsive coughing which arises when we are choked is the energetic effort of nature for our relief when any thing chances to have evaded the protective epiglottis. Yet this property, to which we are constantly owing our lives, is confined to a single spot in the throat. It does not, as Sir Charles Bell affirms, belong to the rest of the windpipe, but is limited to the orifice, where alone it is needed. Admirable too, is it to observe, that while thus sensitive to the most insignificant atom, it bears without resent

lips. "It rejects," says Paley, "the touch of a crumb of bread, or a drop of water, with a spasm which convulses the whole frame; yet, left to itself and its proper office, the intromission of air alone, nothing can be so quiet. It does not even make itself felt; a man does not know that he has a trachea. This capacity of perceiving with such acuteness, this impatience of offence, yet perfect rest and ease when let alone, are properties, one would have thought, not likely to reside in the same subject. It is to the junction, however, of these almost inconsistent qualities, in this, as well as in some other delicate parts of the body, that we owe our safety and our comfort-our safety to their sensibility, our comfort to their repose."

Another of the examples adduced by Bell is that of the heart. The famous Dr. Harvey examined at the request of Charles I., a nobleman of the Montgomery family who, in consequence of an abscess, had a fistulous opening into the chest, through which the heart could be seen and handled. The great physiologist was astonished to find it insensible. "I then brought him," he says, "to the king that he might behold and touch so extraordinary a thing, and that he might perceive, as I did, that unless when we touched the outer skin, or when he saw our fingers in the cavity this young nobleman knew not that we touched the heart." Yet it is to the heart that we refer our joys, our sorrows, and our affections; we speak of a good-hearted and a bad-hearted, a hard-hearted and a kindhearted, a true-hearted and a heartless man. Shielded from physical violence by an outwork of bones, it is not invested with sensations which could have contributed nothing to its preservation, but while it can be grasped with the fingers and give no intimation of the fact to its possessor it unmistakeably responds to the varied emotions of the mind, and by the general consent of mankind is pronounced the seat of our pleasures, griefs, sympathies, hatreds, and love. Persons have frequently dropped down dead from the vehemence with which it contracts or expands upon the sudden announcement of good or bad news-its muscular walls being strained too far in the upward or downward direction to enable them to returnand one of the purposes which this property

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