MUNICH.

FROM Vienna we passed to MUNICH, the capital of Bavaria, which, for its inconsiderable size, has evinced a steady zeal in the promotion and establishment of literary and scientific institutions nowhere else surpassed. The Bavarians are much indebted for this to the liberality and public spirit of their worthy monarch, who, descending from his throne to mingle familiarly with his people, has taken a personal and individual interest in giving an elevated intellectual rank to his capital.

Here resides that most distinguished surgeon, WALTHER, who for many years was co-editor with the illustrious Baron Graeffe, of Berlin, in the publication of a Medical Journal, the most extensively known of any throughout Germany. Walther enjoys a distinguished reputation at home, and an extended fame upon the Continent.

FRANKFORT ON THE MEIN.

THE last place we shall here notice in Germany is Frankfort on the Mein, a flourishing and interesting capital.

This was the residence of the great SEMMERING. Eager to pay my respects to so celebrated an anatomist and surgeon, I hastened, on my arrival, to search out hist residence, and found the family in gloom and mourning. He had died a short time before. I saw his son, who is a respectable representative of his illustrious father. He treated me with marked attention; and when I inquired, as I naturally did, for his father's celebrated museum, he referred me to his sister, who seemed to take à much deeper interest in her honoured parent's fame than the son himself. She accompanied me to the museum, and presented me a handsomely bound volume containing a catalogue of his invaluable preparations, which are remarkable for their exquisite beauty and perfection in the most minute details.

She handed down for me, and exhibited successively, the most interesting specimens in the collection, and I was delighted to see she took great pride in stating to me that they were made by her own beloved father's hands. I confess that in my absence abroad no incident has occurred, in all my rambles, that made a more delicate and touching impression upon my feelings than this. In no instance have I seen filial affection more strikingly and pleasingly shown, or more appropriately bestowed, than it was as exhibited in this interview. For a daughter to be the anatomical biographer of so

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honoured and illustrious a father, though it might be considered by some of the sex to be unfeminine, appeared to me a triumphant illustration of devotional attachment. She informed me that the collection was for sale, and the price demanded for it was 10,000 thalers, or about $8000 of our money.

It may be said of the lamented Sommering, that he was one of the brightest lights in anatomical and physiological science, and that his name and his writings will be transmitted to the latest posterity, as among the highest authorities, for the accuracy and fidelity of his statements and the soundness of his deductions.

In travelling through Belgium, Holland, and Germany, particularly the latter extensive country, I was struck with the general health and robustness of the population, attributable mainly to their frugal and regular habits of life, and to the general absence of all luxurious indulgences. The limited means of obtaining a livelihood compel every individual almost to a rigid economy and industry. And in Prussia the healthy moral and physical condition of the people is still better secured by the solid intellectual culture extended by the admirable system of school education and athletic exercises, to almost every individual, it may be said, of that dominion.

Nor do the titled classes generally, I think, consume so large a portion of the fruits of human labour as in some other countries. Neither is their time passed in the usual voluptuous idleness of courts, but devoted to intellectual improvement and practical attention to the wants of the people, with whose welfare they seem directly to sympathize.

It ought in justice to be stated also in honour of our Anglo-Saxon kindred, that there is more rigid cultiva

tion of the higher order, and more useful branches of mental pursuits to be met with in the courts of northern Europe, than elsewhere upon the Continent.

There is one habit common to the countries of northern Europe, which, however loathsome and annoying to some, and however severely reprobated by others, is, it may be said, almost universal. I mean the use of tobacco; which, though apparently everywhere most freely indulged in by all classes, and even by both sexes, was not, as it appeared to me, attended with those injurious results which the denunciations it has received in our own country would have led me to anticipate.

If this "good creature" and "precious weed," as it was called when first brought into vogue by Sir Walter Raleigh, were so extremely deleterious as some would have us believe, it appears to me inconceivable how we should find the most vigorous constitutions and welldeveloped forms among those very people where it is so profusely employed, chiefly in the form of smoking.

My impression with regard to the humid climate and locality of Holland, and it accords with observation there, is, that its use is more or less prophylactic or preventive of the endemial fevers of low and marshy countries. The moderate use of this weed, we are inclined to think, may, under many circumstances, be not only harmless, if not also preventive and remedial.

In France its consumption is certainly on the increase, and in England we should judge that it is getting more and more into vogue. It is not our intention to dilate upon this disputed question; but our experience leads us to the conclusion that much more censure has been cast upon our American Virginia plant than it merits. In one very fatal and distressing form of disease, to wit, Laryngeal Phthisis, and Bronchitis among pub

lic speakers, the fact is very clearly established, that the moderate habit of smoking, by the drain it accomplishes and its anodyne qualities, has been eminently useful, at least as a preventive of that peculiar malady so frequent in the northern part of the United States, especially among the clergy.