reptiles. The Museum contains perhaps the firest collection of these in the world. The earlier Tertiary introduces us to the strange mammals of the Paris Basin, the same system, in its second stage, to the Dinotherium of Darmstadt and the Megatherium of Buenos Ayres. A still later period brings before us the great elephantine family, once so widely distributed over the globe we arrive at a monstrous skeleton, entire from head to heel: 'tis that of the gigantic mastodon of North America, a creature that may have been contemporary with the earlier hunter tribes of the New World; and just beside it, last in the long series, we find the human skeleton of Guadaloupe. Mysterious frame-work of bone locked up in the solid marble, unwonted prisoner of the rock! an irresistible voice shall yet call thee from out the stony matrix. The other organisms, thy partners in the show, are incarcerated in the lime forever,thou but for a term. How strangely has the destiny of the race to which thou belongest re-stamped with new meanings the old phenomena of creation! I marked, as I passed along, the prints of numerous rain-drops indented in a slab of sandstone. And the entire record, from the earliest to the latest times, is a record of death. When that rain-shower descended, myriads of ages ago, at the close of the Palæozoic period, the cloud, just where it fronted the sun, must have exhibited its bow of many colors; and then, as now, nature, made vital in the inferior animals, would have clung to life with the instinct of self-preservation, and shrunk with dismay and terror from the approach of death. But the prismatic bow strided across the gloom, in blind obedience to a mere optical law, bearing inscribed on its gorgeous arch no occult meaning; and death, whether by violence or decay, formed in the general economy but a clearing process, through which the fundamental law of increase found space to operate. But when thou wert living

prisoner of the marble, haply as an Indian wife and mother, ages ere the keel of Columbus had disturbed the waves of the Atlantic, the high standing of thy species had imparted new meanings to death and the rainbow. The prismatic arch had become the bow of the covenant, and death a great sign of the unbending justice and purity of the Creator, and of the aberration and fall of the living soul, formed in the Creator's own image, reasoning, responsible man.

Of those portions of the Museum which illustrate the history of the human mind in that of the arts, I was most impressed by the Egyptian section. The utensils which it exhibits that associate with the old domesticities of the Egyptians-the little household implements which had ministered to the lesser comforts of the subjects of the Pharaohs- seem really more curious, at any rate, more strange in their familiarity, — than those exquisite productions of genius, the Laocoons, and Apollo Belvideres, and Venus de Medicis, and Phidian Jupiters, and Elgin marbles, which the Greek and Roman sections exhibit. We have served ourselves heir to what the genius of the ancient nations has produced, -to their architecture, their sculpture, their literature; our conceptions piece on to theirs with so visible a dependency, that we can scarce imagine what they would have been without them. We have been running new metal into our castings, artistic and intellectual; but it is the ancients who, in most cases, have furnished the moulds. And so, though the human mind walks in an often-returning circle of thought and invention, and we might very possibly have struck out for ourselves not a few of the Grecian ideas, even had they all perished during the middle ages,—just as Shakspeare struck out for himself not a little of the classical thinking and imagery, we are at least in doubt regarding the extent to which this would have taken place. We know not

whether our chance reproduction of Grecian idea wou d have been such a one as the reproduction of Egyptian statuary exhibited in the aboriginal Mexican sculptures, or the reproduction of Runic tracery palpable in the Polynesian carvings, -or whether our inventions might not have expatiated, without obvious reproduction at all, in types indigenously Gothic. As heirs of the intellectual wealth of the ancients, and inheritors of the treasures which their efforts accumulated, we know not what sort of fortunes we would have carved out for ourselves, had we been left to our own unassisted exertions. But we surely did not fall heir to the domestic inventions of the Egyptians. Their cooks did not teach ours how to truss fowls; nor did their bakers show ours how to ferment their dough or mould their loaves; nor could we have learned from them a hundred other household arts, of which we find both the existence and the mode of existence indicated by the antiquities of this section; and yet, the same faculty of invention which they possessed, tied down in our as in their case by the wants of a common nature to expatiate in the same narrow circle of necessity, has reproduced them all. Invention in this case has been but restoration; and we find that, in the broad sense of the Preacher, it has given us nothing new. What most impressed me, however, were the Egyptians themselves,—the men of three thousand years ago, still existing entire in their framework of bone, muscle, and sinew. It struck me as a very wonderful truth, in the way in which truths great in themselves, but commonplaced by their familiarity, do sometimes strike, that the living souls should still exist which had once animated these withered and desiccated bodies; and that in their separate state they had an interest in the bodies still. This much, amid all their darkness, even the old Egyptians knew; and this we-save where the vitalities of revela

tion influence seem to be fast unlearning. It does appear strange, that men ingenious enough to philosophize on the phenomena of the parental relation, on the mysterious connection of parent and child, its palpable adaptation to the feelings of the human heart, and its vast influence on the destinies of the species, should yet find in the doctrine of the resurrection but a mere target against which to shoot their puny materialisms. It does not seem unworthy of the All Wise, by whom the human heart was moulded and the parental relation designed, that the immature "boy" of the present state of existence should be "father to the man " in the next; and that, as spirit shall be identical with spirit, — the responsible agent with the panel at the bar,- so body shall be derived from body, and the old oneness of the individual be thus rendered complete,

"Bound each to each by natural piety."

CHAPTER XIX.

Harrow-on-1 -the-Hill. - Descent through the Formations from the Tertiary to the Coal Measures. - Journey of a Hundred and Twenty Miles Northwards identical, geologically, with a journey of a Mile and a Quarter Downwards. - English very unlike Scottish Landscape in its Geologic Framework. Birmingham Fair. - Credulity of the Rural English; striking Contrast which they furnish, in this Respect, to their Countrymen of the Knowing Type. - The English Grades of Intellectual Character of Immense Range; more in Extremes than those of the Scotch.. Front Rank of British Intellect in which there stands no Scotchman ; probable Cause. - A Class of English, on the other Hand, greatly lower than the Scotch; naturally less Curious; acquire, in Consequence, less of the Developing Pabulum. — The main Cause of the Difference to be found, however, in the very dissimilar Religious Character of the two Countries. The Scot naturally less independent than the Englishman ; strengthened, however, where his Character most needs Strengta, by nis Religion. -- The Independence of the Englishman subjected at the present Time to two distinct Adverse Influences, the Modern Poor Law and the Tenant-at-will System. - Walsall. - Liverpool. Sort of Lodging-houses in which one is sure to meet many Dissenters.

On the fifth morning I quitted London on my way north, without having once seen the sun shine on the city or its environs. But the weather at length cleared up; and as the train passed Harrow-on-the-Hill, the picturesque buildings on the acclivity, as they looked out in the sunshine, nest-like, from amid their woods just touched with yellow, made a picture not unworthy of those classic recollections with which the place is so peculiarly associated.

The railway, though its sides are getting fast covered over with grass and debris, still furnishes a tolerably adequate section of the geology of this part of England. We pass, at an