infinitesimals of Dr. I listened to all this patiently, because "Why," said I, "do you maintain this painful reserve with your friends? Why do you suffer alone, when so many desire nothing more earnestly than to give you sympathy?" She took from her desk a scrap of paper closely written over and handed it to me. I transcribe it, in the hope that it may save at least one from becoming the victim of the poison of poisons, morphine, or opium, in any form. "My life is but a hidden fire, that burns and eats into itself continually. Suffering has surrounded me like a wreath of flame, and like a wretched viper, my spirit stings itself to death. This morning I awoke bathed in tears. I sought for the cause. It was a dream-a vision of my sunny childhood, when in my father's grounds, I lay upon soft grassy banks, and I was happy as a young poet who sitteth in the sun of spring to see the violets grow.' Clear, crystal wavelets of delight passed over me as I lay amongst the flowers and listened to the drony hum' of the bees, and watched the bright flight of the birds. I was wrapped in slumber that seemed like infancy. I felt the soft velvet of the grass. I was fanned by the perfume of the blessed flowers, and cluster after cluster became distinct to me, and the humming-birds came like visible fairies, to take the honey from the heart of the blossoms, and the cool pond came before me, and the virgin lilies clustered there, and bowed their delicate heads, and the fountain sent up its cooling spray, and the trees spread out upon the air the green blessing of their leaves, and the strawberries lay rich and ripe below me, and through the open windows of the conservatory came the perfume of the orange blossoms, and all the sweet flowers, and the air rested down upon me an overwhelming heaven. But even in my slumber the vision vanished, and I awoke in an agony of tears. All my nerves thrilled with the most intense pain. I thought that the marrow of my bones was perforated with hot irons. A weight, that felt hot and heavy, seemed to lay on my forehead and press into my eyes. I opened my eyes resolutely, and then I could not close them, and a sight was presented in terrible distinctness, the thought of which almost suffocates me. I saw a coffin before me, borne on the shoulders of four men, clad in deep mourning. They stopped opposite me, and put down their sad burden. Slowly the coffin lifted itself upright, and stood like a man before me. The lid unclosed, and I saw-O God, can I write it! I saw the ghastly features of the idol of my heart. The sunken eyes, the bony cheeks, the shriveled and fallen lip, all burned themselves into my very heart. The likeness was preserved in the midst of decay. The foul fetor filled my room, and again the coffin closed, and became lifted upon the shoulders of the men-a dirge, more awful than the silence, burst upon my ear, and a train of mourners came before me. I recognized myself as the first of the train. I was attired in my bridal dress, and wreaths of flowers encircled my arms and my head. But, within the gorgeous robes, I stood a living corpse. The same ghastly decay, and the same dreadful likeness to myself, was visible in me, that appeared in the coffin. Then came a long train of friends clad in weeds, but looking healthy and happy, as if it had been a gala day. Last of all came my dead mother in her shroud, smiling and beautiful as when, in childhood, I pillowed my head upon her loving heart. I saw no more; the cup of my agony was drained to the dregs. I became insensible-how long I lay in the peace of death, I know not; but I awoke again to live my life-to count the weary minutes of the interminable, long, long day-to doze an hour of painful and unnatural slumber, and then to wake and watch, through a night of fever, and pain, and restless anguish, that no words can tell. Oh! if any one of my friends could know the utter impossibility of describing my state, they would never ask me to attempt it. Why I have not thrown my self into the next life, I cannot tell, unless it be from that paralysis of will which leaves me too destitute of steady purpose to do anything. I have only ability to endure-to suffer." It may be asked, why the healing art was powerless in this case? I answer, no attempt was made to bring Mrs. Waters' system under any remedial treatment. I could never succeed in rousing her will to resist taking morphine. She did not believe that it was possible for her to live a day without the drug. I felt sure that she might have been saved if she could have loved a living and substantial entity. But her heart was in the land of dreams and shadows, with her dead lover. She took no real interest in any living person or thing. My service to her was that of a sympathetic friend; and 1 sometimes stood in the way, between her and those miscellaneous mixtures of medicinal substances which were most mischievous, although nothing that she could have gleaned from the highways and byways of folly and fatuity, could have been more mischievous than the deadly drug, morphine. But every additional poison, was of course an additional evil. I was not surprised when I saw her slowly and surely sinking to the grave. I had expected it from the first-and yet I felt always that she might be saved. The last time I saw her she said, “I am enduring life and waiting for death." TO EMILY. STILL dearest, Emily, art thou to me; They come with graceful forms, glad looks, sweet lips, But soon they pass, and thy fair pensive brow, In shape and magic like the midnight moon; Thy deep, dark, earnest and devoted eyes, From whence thy soul beams outward like a star, New York, February, 1846. HUGH BRIDGESSON A SEQUEL TO "VESTIGES OF THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE reading public were surprised not long ago by an author who carried them, with an easy assurance and little help of thought, into the very mystery and genesis of creation. With a singular confidence he stepped in between us and our opinions, obscuring philosophies and orthodoxies accepted from all antiquity. He would have had us believe that an altogether novel discovery of Providence was to dawn upon us. What this was, the reading public are not uninformed of; but since anything so remarkable cannot be too often spoken, if true, or too freely exposed, if false, we venture upon another notice of the same, for the sake of our author's new defence of it in his sequel that has just appeared. The first view we had of this great discovery in the book entitled " Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation," raised a very sudden admiration in some minds. It came attended with a number of solid facts out of treatises of natural history, tempered with a mixture of such doubtful matter as may be found in all books of science, for the exercise of weak understandings. The discovery itself was no less an one than that the inferior species in nature are continually generating and bringing forth the superior; that bodies of apes begat bodies of an inferior sort of men, and these, again, bodies of the better sort; that, in very deed, the species of all animals go on perfecting theselves by a law of their being: animalcules, originated in dust, changing gradually into worms and insects; insects into fishes; fishes into reptiles; reptiles into quadrupeds, and so on through all the stages, ending in man. Men are to become angels, angels demigods, and so on to infinitude. It is instantly apparent that we have here a something not new at all, but only newly revived; the same being an invention of Lamark and others out of hints, it may be, from the ancients. But there is no need of recurring to antiquity for the origin of a metaphysical theory, more than for that of a disease. Given the * causes of the malady, it will come to light. But we are to beware of charging atheism upon the author of a book written to disavow it; for that is seemingly the main purpose of this " Sequel to the Vestiges." The book is a mere heap of refutations, bearing obscurely upon two charges of atheism and ignorance. The author insists that he intended nothing but to set forth a new, not to abolish every, mode of creation; which we may easily admit, and pass on to a consideration of "the new mode," as a thing honestly meant. To come directly upon the matter: This author would have us believe that, as soon as earth was of a temperature suitable for life, germs of rudimentary species were produced in the moist ground, or in the ocean, by a natural process like the generation of intestinal worms, or of animalcules in our paste, supposing these to be a spontaneous product. In favor of this view, he offers Mr. Cross's experiments as a very sound proof. This experimenter found a new species of acarus in a solution of silica which had been galvanized, as every one has heard. Electricity favors the growth of plants, and accelerates all the functions of life; but that a current of it ever made so complex a thing as an acarus, or the germ of one, out of any rude assemblage of elements, no scientific person believes. The thing is contrary to possibility, if any possibility of nature is known to us. Meanwhile, we are well assured that earth, air and sea, are full of spores and seeds, and animalcular germs. It is only necessary to turn up a deep spadeful of soil to find seeds springing, that may have lain there a thousand years. Set a glass of distilled water in a warm place, and, after a day or so, it will be full of animalcules, not generated there. There was nothing in the water but hydrogen and oxygen; but in the animalcules, there must be a variety of other elements (nitrogen and phosphorus; iron, perhaps; carbon, especially). Nothing is to be gathered from the ex Explanations: A Sequel to "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation." By the author of that work. New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1846. periment but a reasonable belief that the atmosphere, like the earth and sea, is full of germs. If Mr. Cross's experiments were made in any place haunted by acari of the species found in his troughs, there is no difficulty in accounting for their appearance. Indeed, men of science never gave full credence to his experiments, and their authority is quite vanished from the minds of all but the credulous. Let us consider a moment the condition of a planet cooled from fusion, (as ours most evidently is,) at the moment of its arrival at a temperature suitable for life; a temperature between the freezing and the boiling point of water. The shores of its seas would be composed entirely of sands and silts, the detritus of plutonic rocks, devoid even of a trace of vegetable matter, and therefore not able to sustain the germ of an animal, should one be present in them. But if it be possible for the germs of animalcules to subsist, as plants do, upon ammonia, carbonic acid and the earths, the impossibility equally remains of the absolute genesis of a plant or animalcule in any possible mud of such an ocean. By the laws of the equal mixture of gases, the congregation of atoms in air, to form a germ, would be perfectly prevented. By the affinity of water for substances dissolved in it, and, in general, by the chemical affinities of all the elementary bodies, an insuperable bar is put to the production of germs. There is not the least known tendency in dead atoms, at any temperature, to combination in the figures of organic tissues. The most experienced chemists, familiar with the elements at all temperatures, have never observed any. thing like organization or genesis. Heat, electricity, chemical affinity and crystallogenic force, are the sole powers of dead matter. They are all polar, operating in lines, planes and solid angles; they may be able to shape the body of a planet, but are quite unequal to the origination of a planet or animal. In the mud of no primeval ocean, conceivable by human science, could any germs have been generated by the coalition of dead atoms. The impossibility is distinct, clear, insuperable; more and more clear and insuperable, as we are more and more conversant with the powers that compose matter. A drunken, irresponsible fancy may create chimeras and generate animalcules in the mud of a convenient ocean; the scientific chemist, in full possession of his wits, is unable to do so. The first germs must have been creations, and not results of laws, in any other sense than as the order of the Creator is always a law." The miracle may be in our ignorance, and not in the fact. Is the first appearance more wonderful or unaccountable than the after continuance ? Admit that there are primordial laws of laws, regulating the series of creation, as obscure to our understandings as the laws of the Eternal Justice itself; and that, to the eye of Deity, there is no miracle, but all orderly and predeterminate; what harm could follow such a speculation? But there is a difficulty at the first step towards any system of the world, which no human intellect has been able to remove; and that is, the difficulty of finding a beginning for matter itself. Out of nothing, i. e. out of no thing, matter was made; for if it was made of any thing, it was made of itself, which is absurd. It is equally impossible to say that "there was a time," when there were no atoms of matter; the very notion of time and space, requiring a previous" existence," (i. e. outstanding,) of all the phenomena of space and change. We are obliged, therefore, if we insist on a "beginning," to find it in a mere "ignorance of what went before." There is no "beginning of time;" the notion is ridiculous. We are compelled-all men have hitherto been compelled to quit all speculations on the " beginning of matter," as an event not comprehensible by intellect. It is one of those amazing phantasies that the reason, the superior soul, suggests to intellect as a kind of sport, as if to convince it of its own weakness. Once, then, for all. God said, in the beginning, "Let light and matter be," and they were. We divine that this is true; and thus we lay the foundation of a universe; creating it in imagination, and suspecting that our mode of "creatting" it may be remotely typical of the more original mode. Having now a world "enunciated," whispered in the abysses of the Ancient Night, another wonder follows:- It remains! Its being is founded on the Rock * Dana's Mineralogy, Faraday's Researches, &c., &c. of Ages; its existence in the Ancient of Days. It is made to our hands; the play of its powers is begun for us. We have only now to study and observe them for a few millennia, and presently there comes a new cause of wonder, the appearance of life, in species. These leap into existence as their place is made for them. The inferior gather nutriment from earth, air and water; these are plants. They, in turn, become food for a more complex order, the animals. All the kinds perish rapidly, and are continued: living and dying, sustained and sustaining. The system of their life is a system of death; they conquer the fate that lies in matter, and are conquered by it-preserving only a form. Like water through the wave, that stands always on the brink of a fall, the material flows through the form of the species. Like pulses of sound, the propagated forms die out and are repeated ceaselessly in the flow of time; and as all the pulses make one sound, all the individuals make but one species. Another part of the hypothesis of a gradual advancement of species, is that of Stirpes or Races, dwelt upon by the author in his sequel. This may be easily imagined by conceiving several conditions of the earth's surface in the five continents. In New Holland, in America, Europe, Asia and Africa, the production of germs began at epochs removed by long periods apart. In Asia, on the Indian Caucasus, germs were produced much sooner than in other continents, this region having been the first that rose above the sea, or that attained a temperature suitable for life. Here, then, life began, and arrived soonest at perfection. The typical forms began here, and ripened through their changes into the perfect In Africa an inferior stirps, or generation, ended in the Negro; in New Holland and other parts races still inferior came to light, those countries coming later out of the sea, and producing stirpes of an inferior kind. man. The whole number of stirpes may be five, represented by the five races of men, unless we see fit to imagine any other number, or make the whole accidental. Five groups of animals exist upon the five continents. Each of these is a series ascending from the animalcule to the monkey, and ending in man; though it is admitted that the series is surprisingly broken and irregular, many of the links having perished. The five species of men are the crowns of these five king doms. Such is one form of the progressive hypothesis. A variety of consequences, all singular enough, flow from this protean hypothesis. That there is in every nature a nisus, as it is termed, "an upward striving." Fishes long to be frogs; frogs would fain be snakes; snakes aspire to become birds. This aspiration is Platonical and profound, lying in no particular fish or snake, but in the whole life of the race. It is a secret striving of the Anima Mundi; particular souls partake of it only in a certain ineffable manner. Observe that this "nisus" is the thing intended by Göthe in his Song of Souls; hinted at by Plato in his doctrine of metempsychosis, and held clearly by the ancient Hindoos, in their theology, as the law of all existence. All existence, said they, is painful. All, therefore, strive after higher degrees, for the higher degrees are the least painful. This hypothesis of a nisus, much dwelt upon by some naturalists, seems to be nothing more than a mystical expression for the "Law of Progress," or of progressive creation. The property of growth, observed in an individual, is transferred by it to a whole species. All the individuals of a species advance simultaneously, with an imperceptible slowness, toward a higher (i. e. more complex) species. The nisus is a transmitted tendency, cumulative by infinitesimal degrees. The wonderful moderation of its movement may be guessed from a comparison of the human and other animals entombed four thousand years ago in the Egyptian catacombs. Not the least difference is discoverable between the anatomy and stature of these remains and those of recent time. The efforts of the nisus are either miraculously ceased, since Noah's day, or its effects are incalculably small. There is reason even to suspect a reversed progress, that the human race have degenerated in some particulars. When any complete organism attains maturity, it produces a germ, by an effort of its whole body. Then follows an extinction, or, at least, a general relaxation, of its vital energies. Some plants die in the effort to produce seeds. All are sensibly weakened by the process, and the same is true of every species of animals. It stands to reason that the resultant of a number of forces cannot be more than equal to the sum of all those forces. If a germ is generated in a plant |