J. "As man is the most artfully complicated of all creatures, so great a variety of genetic character occurs in no other. Blind imperious instinct is wanting to his delicate frame; but in him the varying currents of thoughts and desires flow into each other, in a manner peculiar to himself. Thus man, from his very nature, will clash but little in his pursuits with man; his dispositions, sensations, and propensities, being so infinitely diversified, and as it were individualized. What is a matter of indifference to one man, to another is an object of desire: and then each has a world of enjoyment in himself, each a creation of his own. 2. "Nature has bestowed on this diverging species an ample space, the extensive fertile Earth, over which the most different climates and modes of life have room to spread. Here she has raised mountains, there she has placed deserts or rivers, which keep men separate: on the hunter she has bestowed the extensive forest, on the fisherman the ample sea, on the shepherd the spacious plain. It is not her fault, that birds, deceived by the fowler's art, fly into his net, where they fight over their food, peck out each other's eyes, and contaminate the air they breathe: for she has placed the bird in the air, and not in the net of the fowler. See those wild species, how tamely they live together! no one envies another; each procures and enjoys what he wants in peace. It is repugnant to the truth of history, to set up the malicious discordant disposition of men crowded together, of rival artists, opposing poEiticians, envious authors, for the general character of the species: the rankling wounds of these malignant thorns are unknown to the greater part of mankind; to those, who breathe the free air, not the pestilential atmosphere of towns. He who maintains laws are necessary, because otherwise men would live lawlessly, takes for granted, what it is incumbent on him to prove. If men were not thronged together in close prisons, they would need no ventilators to purify the air: were not their minds inflamed by artificial madness, they would not require the restraining hand of correlative art. 3. "Nature, too, has shortened, as far as she could, the time that men must remain together. Man requires a long time to educate: but then he is still weak: he is a child, quickly provoked, and as easily forgetting his anger; often displeased, but incapable of bearing malice. As soon as he arrives at years of maturity, a new instinct awakes in him, and he quits the house of his father. Nature acts in this instinct: she drives him out, to construct his own nest. "And with whom does he construct it? With a creature as dissimilarly similar to himself, and whose passions are as unlikely to come into collision with his, as is consistent with the end of their forming an union together. The nature of the woman is different from that of the man: she differs in her feelings, she differs in her actions." Having enlarged upon this topic, he concludes, that peace, not war, is the natural state of mankind, when at liberty; the latter being the offspring of necessity, not the legitimate child of enjoy ment. He destroys, with great force of argument, the hypothesis, which considered the earth as the ruins of a former habitation, and the human species a remnant of its former inhabitants. This he does by proving that the first apparent ravages and revolutions it has undergone presuppose no ancient history of man, but belong to the creative series, by which our earth was rendered ha bitable. The ingenuity with which this doctrine is supported, demands particular attention. "The ancient granite, the kernel of our Globe, exhibits, as far as we have any knowledge of it, no trace of organic beings destroyed: we neither find any such included in it, nor do it's component parts prerequire them. It's highest pinnacles probably rose above the waters of the creation, for they discover no marks of the action of a sea: but on these bare heights no human being could find nourishment, or even breathe. The air, that surrounded these masses, was not yet separated from water and fire: loaded with the various substances, which deposited themselves in various combinations, and at various periods, on the basis of the Earth, and gradually gave the World' it's form, it was equally as incapable of supporting the respiration of the most exquisite creature upon the Globe, as of imparting to it the breath of life. Thus the first living creatures must have originated in water: and this was endued from it's formation with a primitive creating power, which could yet act no where else, and accordingly first organized itself in an infinite multitude of shellfish, the only animals that could live in this teeming sea. As the formation of the earth proceeded, their destruction largely ensued, and their scattered parts became the bases of finer organizations. In proportion as the primitive rock was freed from water, and enriched by its deposits, or the elementary particles and organized beings mingled with it; the ve getable creation succeeded to that of the waters, and on every naked region what could vegetate vegetated. But no land ani mal could yet live in this hothouse of the vegetable kingdom. On heights, on which the plants of Lapland now grow, we find petrified productions of the torrid zone; a clear proof that their at mosphere had once the heat of the equatorial regions. Yet this atmosphere must already have been rendered in a considerable degree more pure, since so many substances had been precipitated from it, and since the life of a tender plant requires light: but as no animal, that lives on the face of the earth, not to say no human skeleton, has ever been found along with these impressions of vegetables, it is highly probable, that no such animal then existed, because no nourishment was yet ready for it, and because the matter, out of which it was to be formed, was not yet prepared. Thus we proceed, till in very superficial strata of sand or clay the skeletons of the elephant and rhinoceros first appear: for those bones, that occur in deeper strata, which some have fancied to be human, are altogether equivocal, and more accurate examiners of nature nature have declared them to be the remains of aquatic animals. Thus nature began on the earth with the creatures of the warmest climates, and as it appears, with the most bulky; as in the sea she first produced the mailed shell-fish and large cornua ammonis: at least it is certain, that among the numerous skeletons of elephants, which have been washed together at a late period, and in some places preserved even with their skins, snakes, marine animals, and the like, have been found, but no human bodies. And even had human bodies been discovered, they would have been unquestionably of a very modern date, compared with the ancient mountains, in which none of these remains of living creatures exist. So says the most ancient book of the Earth; thus it is written on it's leaves of marble, lime, sand, slate, and clay: and what says it for a new formation of the Globe, which a race of men, whose remains we are, had survived? All it says tends rather to prove, through the animating warmth of the creative spirit, to a peculiar and original whole, by a series of prepatory revolutions, till at last the crown of it's creation, the exquisite and tender creature man, was enabled to appear. Those systems, therefore, which talk of various changes of the poles and climates, of reiterated destructions of an inhabited and cultivated soil, of the driving of men from region to region, or of their graves under rocks and seas, and depict nothing but horror and destruction in all ancient history, are contradictory to the fabric of the Earth, or at least unsupported by it, notwithstanding all the revolutions it has unquestionably undergone. The fissures and veins in ancient stones, or the broken walls of our Earth, say nothing of a habitable World before the present: nay, had fate melted together the ancient mass, assuredly no living remnant of the primitive World could have survived." "The earth, therefore, as well as the history of its inhabitants, remains a simple problem to be solved by considering it as peculiarly formed for its animate creation." The work possesses so much real merit, that we sincerely regret there should occur many instances of fancy that belong more to the region of romance than to the province of natural history. The following simile, with other examples of a poetical turn, might have been spared:- "As when mountain torrents, swelled to a flood in some lofty valley, at length burst down its feeble dam and inundate the plains below, wave breaks on wave, stream follows stream, till all becomes one wide sea, which slowly subsiding, leaves every where traces of devastation, obliterated in time by flourishing pastures animated with fertility; so followed the celebrated irruptions of of the northern nations into the provinces of the Roman empire, and such were their effects." The translator has exccuted his task with clearness and energy; and had the philosophy of history no other claim to attention than the valuable mass of erudition which it contains, it would be worthy the perusal of all men of science. THE The characteristic Merits of the Chinese Language, illustrated by an Investigation of its singular Mechanism and peculiar Properties; containing Analytical Strictures on Dr. Hager's Explanation of the Elementary Characters of the Chinese. By Antonio Montucci, L. L. D. &c. Cadell and Davies, 1801. Determined to adhere to that excellent maxim, "Audi alteram partem," we must decline giving any decision upon the topics in dispute between Dr. Montucci and Dr. Hager. The remarks in the Critical Review, and the Monthly Magazine, we have not read; but we think that Dr. Montucci has given sufficient proofs of his talents to complete, in a satisfactory manner, his proposed treatise for the illustration of the characteristic merits of the Chinese language; and we trust that the undertaking will experience that liberal patronage to which it is entitled from the philological and commercial part of the community. ORIGINAL POETRY. LINES, WRITTEN BY THE ELDER CAPT. MORRIS, On visiting the House of THE LATE GENERAL KNOX;* In Grafton-Street, Fitzroy-Square. OH! KNOX, while sorrow o'er the land is spread, For thee, untimely number'd with the dead, Dear to thy sov'reign, to thy country dear, While all who knew thee, name thee with a tear, Accept my feeble praise; 'tis all I can, Who only from the mansion judge the man: There genuine elegance of taste I find, A true criterion of the master's mind; The simple and the beautiful unite To captivate the heart, and charm the sight; Thy bright example hath conviction wrought, I feel the truth of what I long have thought; And none but men of worth are men of taste. * The General was drowned on his passage to his government of Jamaica, the vessel on board of which he embarked foundered in a storm. 3 SONNET. VA SONNET. AST and amazing is the Poet's art, And animates the shadows of the mind: Pas: place and time's impenetrable zone, THE W SONNET. HE wither'd leaves, which round us rustling fall Resistless---scatter'd by the driving wind, Impart an awful lesson to the mind, That this must be the certain fate of all The days, when youth first bursting into life By zephyrs wooed; exults when smiling fortune TRANSLATION FROM BION. WHILE sleep's soft dews were o'er me spread, Fair Venus came, and with her led, With downcast eyes, demurely coy, Her Cupid, ever cheating boy. Dear Herdsman! did she cry with glee, Then loos'ning from his hand, she flew, I, silly man, thus soon beguil'd, So, shortly, all my ditties gay, PUBLIC |