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great secret to govern the human race; and, whether it be in a prison, a Ragged School, a madhouse, or the world at large, he that would force men's hearts to a surrender, must do so by manifesting that they would be safe if committed to his keeping.

The narrative of the present volume terminates with the year 1825, and closes the account of her benevolent activity down to this date by mentioning the commencement of her service for the benefit of the Coast Guard. A simple incident, simply told, paints the lifelong watchfulness:

In Mrs. Fry's illness at Brighton,' say her biographers, she was liable to distressing attacks of faintness during the night and early in the morning, when it was frequently necessary to take her to an open window for the refreshment of the air. Whether through the quiet grey dawn of the summer's morning, or by the fitful gleams of the tempestuous sky, one living object always presented itself to her view on these occasions; the solitary blockade-man pacing the shingly beach.' -p. 472.

That she should have been exposed to various illnesses, the result of her toil and persevering anxiety, can surprise no one who reads her memoir. Mrs. Fry's time was occupied,' we are told, to an extent of which none but those who lived with her can form any idea. The letters she received from all parts of the country were numerous. These letters required long and careful answers.' Had she lived in the days of the penny-post, her life would have been an astonishment to her! 'Poor people, thinking her purse as boundless as her good will, wrote innumerable petitions praying for assistance; others sought for counsel, or desired employment, which they imagined she could obtain for them.' We know it well; the wealth of Croesus and the patronage of two Prime Ministers rolled into one, would not suffice to pay even 1 per cent. of the demands on any one who has acquired the name of an active philanthropist. Incessant anxieties and cares, watchings and journeyings, made up in fact the sum of her devoted existence; and her health could not but pay the penalty.

She was subjected to some trial (pp. 404, 407, 408) by the preference her daughter manifested to a member of the Church of England over one of the Society of Friends. In no one instance does her Catholic spirit shine more brightly: but her Journal shows that she keenly felt the displeasure of the brotherhood, with whom it is a rule of discipline to disunite from membership those who marry persons not members of the Society. It is very strictly enforced; and to promote such connexions is looked upon as an act of delinquency on the part of parents and guardians!' (p. 405,) This fact alone would be sufficient reason

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for the form of biography adopted by the editors. It would have been difficult for members of the Church of England, however delicately and affectionately alive to the merits of their deceased parent, to have composed a narrative satisfactory, in all its bearings, to the sensitive apprehensions of the Society of Friends. She has been made her own historian; and the result is a record which, exhibiting all the workings and triumphs of an ardent faith, and abounding in lessons of patient experience, is sure to be studied and prized by all who have any share in the spirit of Mrs. Fry.

The rest of the work will not, we hope, be long deferred. Trials of a heavy kind, we know, awaited her-increased embarrassments of fortune, and the loss of her excellent son William, the joy and prop of his mother, tested and matured the spirit that could solemnly declare to her daughter in her last illness:-'I can say one thing; since my heart was touched at the age of seventeen, I believe I never have awakened from sleep, in sickness or in health, by day or by night, without my first waking thought being how best I might serve my Lord.' (p. vii.)

ART. V. Zoological Recreations. By W. J. Broderip, Esq., F.R.S., &c. Post 8vo. London, 1847.

HIS volume presents to us, in a carefully revised form, some twenty papers originally published in the New Monthly Magazine, when under the care of their author's delightful friend and companion, Theodore Hook. Mr. Broderip, favourably known in the literature of his own profession,* and very generally esteemed as an upright, intelligent, and humane magistrate, tells us that these Essays were sketched as a relief from more severe studies and duties;' and that their re-appearance in a separate shape is due to Professor Owen, to whom the work is dedicated, and to other scientific friends who urged their republication, under the impression that when brought together they might form a hand-book which might cherish or even awaken a love for Natural History.' Such is the language of his modest preface: we have no doubt that a great motive was to give pleasure to Mr. Hook-but we believe that we do not exaggerate in saying, that since the publication of Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne,' and of the Introduction to Entomology by Kirby and Spence, no work in our language is better calculated

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* Callis on the Statute of Sewers, 4th Edit. 1824.-Broderip and Bingham's Reports, &c.

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to fulfil the avowed aim of its author than the Zoological Recreations.'

The low condition of elementary zoological instruction in this country greatly enhances the value of any lucubration calculated to diffuse a taste for the pursuit. Mr. Broderip, however, is by no means to be numbered among the mere light volunteers of Zoology. He has taken an important share in the dissemination of sound systematic principles by his learned and lucid series of articles in the Penny Cyclopædia; and he has contributed no inconsiderable quota of original discovery and research, especially on his favourite field of conchology, in numerous memoirs published in the Zoological Journal, in the Appendixes to voyages discovery, and in the Transactions of the London Zoological Society, of which he has from the first been an active supporter.*

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It is due to the high estimation of Natural History in the continental universities, that since the commencement of the present century, and more especially since the conclusion of the war, few sciences have made more rapid and extensive progress than Zoology. Its general aspect has been changed, its scope expanded, its relations multiplied. It has yielded unexpected aids to other sciences, and it begins to throw light on questions of the deepest and most general interest. The discovery of the specific characters of a new shell, insect, bird, or fish, ceases to have the importance, even in the eyes of the adept, which was assigned to it in the days of the respectable author of the Naturalist's Miscellany. A Shaw's Zoology can hardly be said any longer to exist. The Zoology of Cuvier and his numerous disciples has higher aims and aspirations. Duly appreciating the discriminator of specific distinctions, and acknow ledging the necessity of accurate definitions of so-called species as the groundwork of the science, the philosophical student of the animal kingdom keeps a steady eye on the generalizations that are to be raised upon these materials. Zoology has to him as wide a signification as Botany has to the investigator of plants. It comprises not merely the systematic catalogue of the known species and varieties, but a knowledge of their structure, and of their natural affinities as interpreted by the totality of their structure, of the relations of their organization to living properties

It is with pain that we see the funds of this institution, which is an honour and ornament to the metropolis, suffering from causes which have produced a general regard to the individual economies, and from the reflux in the tide of fashion which once set so strongly in its favour. Of the intrinsic claims of the Zoological Society to public support, the present condition of its gardens and menagerie, its museum and library, will bear ample testimony. At no period since its establishment has a greater number and variety of rare and interesting animals been exhibited, or exhibited with more attention to their comfort and the display of their native habits.

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and habits,-of the laws that govern the development of that organization, of the type to which its variations may be referred, of the mutations which the different parts of the body undergo in passing from phase to phase in the life of the individual, and of the metamorphoses of the same or homologous parts traced from species to species. Zoology-so comprehended and applied-unfolds the harmonious principle of similitude which reigns amidst the infinite seeming diversity of its objects, and demonstrates the unity of the Designer, as plainly as the exact adaptation of each living unit to its place and sphere in creation bespeaks His power and goodness.

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Earth, air, water have each their appropriate inhabitants. The worm and the mole are constructed to bore the very substance of the dark and dense element; they are truly of the earth, earthy. The swallow, insatiable in pursuit of insect-food, wheeling on unwearied wing throughout the long summer's day-and the midges, whose ranks it thins as they weave their mazy dance in the evening sun-beam, are creatures of the air and light. The shoals of fish that, with their fins and shining scales, glide under the green wave,' are as strictly denizens of the water. The adaptation of form and structure in each of these beings to its particular element is perfect, and the relation appreciable by the least practised observer. It needs but a little insight into the structure of the animal frame to discern the same adaptation of it to external circumstances in the species which have a more mixed dependence on the surrounding elements; in the mollusca, for example, that exist in a medium of water, but in their pearly shells at ease, attend moist nutriment' at the bottom; or in those terrestrial creatures which, moving in the rarer atmosphere, are so far the slaves of gravitation as to be unable to raise themselves above the firm surface of earth; or in those that float upon the water and breathe the air; or as those more truly amphibious forms that breathe and have the command of both elements. There are even amongst the Insect world-as, for instance, the water-scorpion (Nepa) and waterbeetle (Dytiscus)-species gifted with such varied instruments of locomotion that they are qualified for all the habitable elements; and such a creature, like Milton's fiend,

-Through strait, rough, dense, or rare,
With head, hands, wings, or feet, pursues its way,
And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies.'

The relations which subsist between the modifications of the organic machinery and the media in and upon which it is destined to operate, are clearly traceable and readily comprehensible. In them, from the days of Socrates to those of Paley, the philoso

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pher has found his most striking illustrations of a superintending Providence. But there are other, and as yet more obscure relations subsisting between animals and their habitats, the existence of which Zoology has but of late years made known, and the nature of which it will be the future business of that science to unfold. The turtle of Malabar (Chelonia Dussumieri), for example, is by no means the same species with that of the Isle of Ascension (Chelonia Mydas), although the sea in which they swim is warmed by equal floods of solar influence, and stored with equal abundance of the food of these esculent reptiles. It could not have been unreasonable to presuppose that the same species of Fishes would exist in parallel latitudes of the northern and the southern hemispheres; and the accounts which we occasionally meet with of the kinds of produce in our remote colonies would seem to show this to be in some respects the case. In one of the South Australian (Adelaide) newspapers for October, 1845, we read, for example, of whitings 6d. per dozen; flounders 6d. per pair; mullet 30 for 1s,; cod 2d. per lb. But none of these fishes are even generically allied to their namesakes and representatives developed in the seas that wash our mild southern coasts; although the circumstances of light and heat, the constitution of the water, or the coast-line, offer no modifications explanatory of the essential differences which rigorous observation proves to exist in the fishes of the British and Australian seas.

Facts as remarkable, and at present inexplicable, have been brought to light in regard to the geographical distribution of Birds. It might be supposed that the power of traversing space, possessed by the majority of this class, would free them from the restrictions imposed upon less gifted natures in regard to range; but the hawks and eagles of Africa differ from those of America, and these again from the birds of prey in Australia. On the hypothesis that their first progenitors started from a common centre, it is conceivable that some may have winged their way across one or two wide oceans, whilst others tarried on the intermediate continent or nearer home; but had any such migratory instincts continued to operate, the peculiar localisation of certain forms of the strong-winged 'Raptores must long since have been overpassed.

The phenomena of the distribution of the great terrestrial wingless Birds are still more perplexing. Almost every large tract of dry land under a warm or tropical sun supports its peculiar struthious bird. Thus Africa has the true two-toed ostrich, the type of the family; South America has a threetoed ostrich; the rich islands of the Indian Archipelago have their cassowary; Australia has its emeu :—but these four sorts

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