curly-pated undersized man is to me far preferable to a taller with hair ever so long. Now, on his awaking after being asleep in the lap of his faithless fair one, he found himself hairless, he was at the same time heartless and spiritless; for where there is no courage and confidence, there is also no power. I hope now that the world will have understood me: for I have spoke plain enough. But I am not used to say the same thing twice over, and he that does not understand me the first time, is like to go without any farther help from me. However, if any one have yet the smallest doubt, he may write direct to me, John Peter Craft, through the editor of these sheets, who knows my address; and, God willing, he shall quickly receive the necessary solution. But if any person finds that I have not sufficiently proved my position, or thinks my arguments weak, and chuses to refute me; let him come on; he shall be received according to his rank and quality. But all ye of feeble and pusillanimous spirits; oh ye poor exhausted, exficcated, and exanimated creatures! come to me, that I may heartily bow myself over you, and breathe into you a portion of my energy, which is truly exuberant and invincible. REMARKABLE INSTANCE OF HONESTY. IN the little town of Oranienbaum lives a woman, bordering on ninety, by name Christophorevna, a native of Holstein. A little cottage is her sole possession, and the visits of a few ship-masters coming over from Cronstadt to go to Petersburg by land, when the wind does not serve for sailing up, her only livelihood. Several Dutch skippers having one evening supped at her house, on their departure she found a sealed bag of money under the table. Her surprise at this unexpected discovery was naturally very great; some one of the company just gone must certainly have forgotten it: but they were sailed over to Cronstadt, and perhaps at sea, the wind being fair, and therefore no hope of the guests returning. The good woman put up the bag in her cupboard to keep it till called for. However, nobody called for it. Full seven years did she carefully keep this deposit, often tempted by opportunities, still oftener pressed by want, to employ this gift of chance. Her honesty, however, overcame every allurement of opportunity and every command of want. Seven years had elapsed when some shipmasters again stopped at her house, to take what refreshment they could find. Three of them were Englishmen, the fourth a Dutchman. Conversing of various matters, one of the former asked the Dutchman whether he had ever before been at Oranienbaum. "Yes, sure I have," returned he, "I know the cursed place but too well: my being here once cost me seven hundred hundred rubles." "How so?" "Why, in one of these wretched hovels here I once got rather tipsy and left behind me a bag of rubles." "Was the bag sealed?" asked old Christophorevna, who was sitting in one corner of the room, and had been rouzed to attention by what she had heard. "Yes, yes, it was sealed, and with this very seal here at my watch-chain." The woman looked at the seal and knew it directly. "Well then,” said she, by that you may be able to recover what you lost.” “ Recover it, mother! no; I am rather too old to expect that. The world is not quite so honest as that comes to. Besides, consider it is now seven years since. I wish I had not mentioned it; it always makes me melancholy. Let us have no more of it. Give me an other tumbler of punch, mother." While the four gentlemen were engaged in drowning the re membrance of the doleful accident in punch, the good woman had slipt out, and was now waddling in with her bag. "See here, perhaps you may be convinced that honesty is not so rare as you imagined," said she, putting the bag upon the table. The guests were dumb with astonishment; and, on recollecting themselves, the reader may represent to himself their several expressions of commendation and gratitude. The four captains were all rather stricken in years, and had navigated the seas from Japan to Newfoundland, and from the Cape of Good Hope to Archangel; had had dealings with black and brown faces, with woolly-haired and powdered heads-therefore that their amaze ment was so great, is certainly no panegyric on our times, Never were such strong emotions excited in any human mind, as in that of the Dutchman. From the firmest persuasion of his loss to the completest certainty of its recovery, the transition was too sudden and too great not to set every fibre of his phlegmatic body in vibration. One look at the honest woman to whom he was indebted for this transport of joy, brought him to himself. A sudden impulse of magnanimity overpowered him, to which all other sensations reverently gave way. He seized the bag, tore open the seal, took-one ruble out, and laid it on the table, with a civil thanksgiving for the trouble his hostess had had. If the astonishment of the other three was great before, it was now effaced by a greater. They stood looking at one another for a minute, as silent as the grave. "Dammee," at last, exclaimed one of the Englishmen, striking his fist upon the table; "that bag there, my lad, you shall not carry off so. Devil fetch me, but the old woman shall have it!" His two countrymen, who had been mute till now, added their hearty concurrence to his proposal. The Dutchman turned pale, but endeavoured to console himself by the reiterated protestations of Christophorevan that she required nothing at all, that she thought she had done no more than her duty, and insisted that the Dutchman should even take back his rubles. However the Britons could not so easily be brought to strike sail. The conversation grew warm; the oaths followed rapidly on each other, and the fists of the Englishmen were doubling spontaneously, and attitudes forming for putting an end to the dispute via facti: during all which the Dutchman was striving to get the corpus delicti into his custody. After long debate, conducted with various degrees of heat, perceiving no possibility of success against the sturdy arguments likely to be advanced, the skipper agreed to part with fifty rubles. The Englishmen insisted on a hundred. This proposal seemed to the Dutchman so unreasonable, that he declared he would sooner encounter the whole weight of their fists than comply with it. "Avast, my lads!" cried the captain who had made the first attack upon the Dutchman's generosity. "I have somewhat to say. The bag does not belong to us. That is true; but a Briton will never stand by and not see justice done: and by heaven the woman here has acted nobly, and ought to be rewarded. Give me hold of the bag. I will count out the hundred rubles." No sooner said than done. The Dutchman, thunderstruck at this summary way of proceeding, had not time to recover himself before the hundred rubles were fairly counted upon the table. This brought on a truce. Where humanity, gratitude, gene rosity, and English fists had made the attack in vain, there conquered-national pride. The Dutchman insisted upon it, that the Britons should let him treat them; and in perfect stoical resigna tion parted with a hundred of his beloved, long-lamented, and lately-recovered rubles. THE ANIMAL KINGDOM IN RELATION TO THE HISTORY OF MAN. [From Herder's Outlines of a Philosophy of a History of Man, lately published.] BEASTS are the elder brethren of man. Before he was, they were. Every country the alien man found at his arrival already occupied, at least in some of the elements: otherwise on what but vegetables could the stranger have fed? Thus every history of man, which considers him without this relation, must be partial and defective. The world, it is true, was given to man: but not to him alone, not to him first: animals in every element, render his monarchy questionable. One species he must tame: with another he must long contend. Some escape his dominion: others wage with him eternal war. In short, every species extends its possession of the earth in proportion to its capacity, cunning, strength, or courage. It is not here the question, whether man have reason, and beasts have none. If they have not, they have some other advantages; for assuredly nature has left none of her offspring unprotected. Were a creature neglected by her, from whom could it obtain succour? since the whole creation is at war, and the most oppo 2 site site powers are found so close to each other. Here godlike man is annoyed by snakes, there by vermin: here a shark devours him, there a tiger. Each strives with each, as each is pressed upon; each must provide for his own subsistence, and defend his own life. Why acts nature thus? and why does she thus crowd her creatures one upon another? Because she would produce the greatest number and variety of living beings in the least space, so that one crushes another, and an equilibrium of powers can alone produce peace in the creation. Every species cares for itself, as if it were the only one in existence: but by its side stands another, which confines it within due bounds: and in this adjustment of opposing species creative nature found the only mean of maintaining the whole. She weighed the powers, she numbered the limbs, she determined the instincts of the species toward each other; and left the earth to produce what it was capable of producing. I concern myself not, therefore, whether whole species of animals have perished from the face of the earth. Has the mammoth disappeared? so have giants. When these existed, the relations between the several creatures were different: as things at present are, we perceive an evident equilibrium, not only over the whole earth, but in particular regions and countries. Agriculture may restrict beasts to narrower limits: but it cannot easily exterminate them. At least it has not accomplished this in any extensive region; and it has fostered a greater number of tame animals, in lieu of the wild ones it has diminished. Thus in the present constitution of our earth no species of animals has been lost: though I question not but others may have existed, when its constitution was different; and if at any future period art or nature should completely change it, a different relation between living creatures would take place. Man, in short, entered an inhabited world. All the elements, rivers and morasses, earth and air, were filled or filling, with living creatures: and he had to make room for his dominion by his godlike qualities, skill, and power. How he effected this constitutes the history of his cultivation, the most interesting part of the history of man, which embraces even the rudest nations. I must here observe once for all, that man acquired chiefly from beasts themselves that information, which enabled him gradually to obtain his dominion over them. These were the living sparks of the divine understanding, the rays of which, as they related to food, habits of life, clothing, address, arts, or instincts, he condensed within himself, from a greater or smaller circle. The more, the clearer, he did this, the more artful the beasts around him were; the more he familiarized himself with them, and the more securely he dwelt with them in friendship or hostility, the more did he gain in point of improvement; so that the history of his cultivation is in a great measure zoological and geographical. Secondly: as the varieties of soil and climate, of stones and plants, on our earth, are so great; how much greater are the va rieties rieties of its properly living inhabitants! Let us not, however, confine these to the earth: for the air, the water, nay, the internal parts of plants and animals, all swarm with life. Innumerable multitudes, for whom, as well as for man, the world was created! Moving surface of the earth, on which all, as wide and as deep as the sun-beams extend, is enjoyment, life, and action! I mean not here to enter into the general proposition, that every animal has its element, its climate, its proper place of abode; that some species are little diffused, others more, and a few almost as widely as man himself; for on this point we have a profound work, compiled with scientific industry, Zimmerman's Geogra phical History of Man, and universally-disseminated Quadru peds.* What I shall here point out will be a few particular remarks, which we shall find confirmed by the history of man. 1. Those species, that inhabit nearly all parts of the globe, are differently formed in almost every climate. In Lapland the dog is small and ugly; in Siberia he is better shaped, but still has pricked ears, and no considerable magnitude: in those countries, says Buffon, where we meet with the handsomest races of men, we observe the handsomest and largest dogs: within the arctic and antarctic circles the dog loses his voice, and in the wild state he resembles the jackal. In Madagascar the ox has a hump on his back weighing fifty pounds, which gradually disappears in distant countries; and this animal varies greatly in colour, size, strength, and courage, in almost every region of the earth. An European sheep acquires at the Cape of Good Hope a tail nineteen pounds in weight: in Iceland he puts out as many as five horns: in the county of Oxford, in England, he grows to the size of an ass: and in Turkey his skin is variegated like a tiger's. Thus do all ani mals vary; and shall not man, who is also in the structure of his nerves and muscles an animal, change with the climate? Ac cording to the analogy of nature, it would be a miracle, did he remain unchanged. 2. All the tame animals we have were formerly wild; and of most the wild races, from which they are descended, are still to be found, particularly in the Asiatic mountains: the very place which was probably the native country of man, at least in our hemisphere, and the source of his cultivation. The greater the distance from this region, particularly where the intercourse with it is difficult, the fewer the species of tame animals, till at length the swine, the dog, and the cat, are the sole animal wealth of New Guinea, New Zealand, and the islands of the Pacific ocean. 3. America has chiefly animals peculiar to it, perfectly adapted to its climate, and such as must naturally be produced from its immense heights, and long inundated vallies. It had few large animals, and still fewer tame or tameable ones: but then it had pro *Geographische Geschihte des Menschen und der allgemein-verbreiteten vierfüssigen Thiere: Leipsic, 1778-83; in three volumes: with an elegant and accurate zoological map of the world. VOL. 2, No. 9. A A portionably |