down this delicious dell was like a little paradise. It was so cool, so verdant, so full of beauty and perfume, and the warbling melody of birds so harmoniously blended with the refreshing sound of falling waters, that one felt as if in fabled fairyland. Bright insects were flitting about through the trees, and among others I noticed one that has long been a favourite, the lovely and delicate lace-winged fly, and which recalled to memory a few lines addressed to one several years ago. Those of my kind and good-natured readers acquainted with the insect will, I hope, attribute my introducing them here to the right motive-a desire of awakening pleasurable thoughts and associations.

66 TO THE LACE-WINGED FLY.

Bright fly thou recallest the sweet days of my childhood,
When, wandering alone through the green sunny wildwood,
To pull the fresh cowslips all drooping in dew
And list to the ringdove so plaintively coo,
I there first beheld thee in happy repose-
Thy pillow the half-opened leaves of a rose.
How enraptured I stood! and, in silent surprise,
Viewed thy fair pearly wings and thy bright golden eyes!
And how with delight my young bosom did glow
When thou mountedst aloft to the cherry-tree's bough,
And then, in the wake of a clear sunny ray,
Rose far in the blue sky, and vanished away!

And still, when I visit the woodland's green bowers,
To quaff the rich breath of the gay summer flowers,
And hear the sweet birds in their happiness singing,
Till all the glad echoes with music are ringing,
I love to behold thee on rose-blossom sitting,
Or under the fragrant trees merrily flitting,
Thy beauty-the pleasure thou seem'st to inherit-
Impart a pure ray of delight to my spirit;
For who can be sad while a creature like thee,
With so fragile a form, yet so happy can be?
Does He who has clothed thee in vestments so fair,
And fed thee, and watched thee with tenderest care,
Not watch over all with unwearying eye,
And pour from a fountain that never runs dry
His kindness unbounded on great and on small,
And his power and his love that sustaineth them all?
Then welcome, bright fly! for a teacher thou art,
That can win, with thy gentle persuasion, my heart:
No anger, no threatenings, thou usest to awe me,
But with love's silken cord dost more easily draw me,
To willingly offer, at gratitude's shrine,

The spirit's pure praise to thy Maker and mine." 'Among other plants growing in this dell were Rubus saxatilis, Melica nutans, and uniflora Melampyrum sylvaticum and pratense, and abundance of Epilobium angustifolium, but not in flower. The Melampyrum sylvaticum had some of its flowers of a deep orange colour. Carex pulicaris and pallescens were in perfection on moist rocky banks, and I culled a specimen or two of the beautiful and apparently distinct Luzula multiflora. Bartramia Halleriana occurred among the rocks in dense tufts, with Weissia curvirostra, Hypnum pulchellum and stellatum, and, where water was trickling, Weissia acuta and Fissidens adiantoides. There had been here primroses, cowslips, woodroof, and wood-anemones; but they were all past flowering, and some of the leaves of the latter were covered with Ecidium leucospermum. Near the foot of the dell the barberry was flowering, and on its leaves plenty of Ecidium Berberides.

With a light heart and heavy vasculums I returned from Corrymulzie when the lark was leaving his station in the blue sky, and the brilliancy of day giving place to the softness of evening.'

Next day was devoted to an excursion to the summit of Ben-na-Bourd, the account of which we are likewise tempted to extract. 'The second sun of July was brightening with his early beams the waters of the Dee, when I left Castleton, with a guide, for the lofty mountain solitudes of Ben-na-Bourd. About a quarter of a mile from the village we crossed the Dee in a boat, ferried over by a picturesque-looking kilted boatman, who chained his little bark to a tree on the opposite bank. Passing the boatman's pretty cottage, we entered the fresh woods, where

"Song, fragrance, health, ambrosiate every breeze;" and after walking on for some time

"Beneath the umbrageous multitude of leaves,"

emerged upon the open heath, and came into Glen Candlic; up which a road for ponies has been formed by Mr Farquharson of Invercauld, the proprietor, and is continued all the way, gradually ascending, to the west shoulder of Ben-na-Bourd. In this wild and solitary glen plenty of deer were seen, and Epilobium angustifolium was not uncommon among the rocky banks of the stream. Soon after leaving Glen Candlic, we crossed a stream descending to Glen Quoich, on the banks of which Arabis petræa was both in flower and fruit. The ascent now became steeper, and gave ample occupation to our respiratory apparatus; the air was keener, and the sky getting somewhat overcast, threatened us with mist and rain. . . .

'On reaching the margin of a considerable field of snow, a little below the summit, I came upon large patches of Polytrichum septentrionale, and, to my great joy, bearing plenty of capsules! There was a drizzling rain, and the cold was so severe, that my fingers were almost benumbed; but the sight of this rarity was enough to diffuse a thrill of warmth through every nerve, and for a few minutes the effects of the elements were entirely forgotten. I was also gratified with fine specimens of Dicranum Starkii, and picked up besides, while my guide laid out dinner on a snowy table, Dicranum falcatum, Trichostomum microcarpum, Conostomum boreale, Polytrichum hercynicum, and Jungermannia scalaris. My guide and I were soon on the summit, which is nearly four thousand feet above the level of the sea, and about eight miles north from Castleton. Here the mountain breeze was certainly revelling in all its freshness, but rather too "arrowy;" the sky was too murky for allowing the eye to enjoy any extent of prospect, and the ground was too sterile to produce much of interest to the botanist. The contrast between this hard, cold, bare region of clouds, and the soft, warm luxuriance of the vale we had left in the morning, was striking. We had exchanged, in a few hours, the genial glow and beauty of summer for the surliness of winter-the mildness of a temperate, for the rigour of an arctic climate-the cheerful hum of society, for the awful depth of nature's most sacred solitude.

'We descended by the Corry (from correi in Gaelic, which means a kettle), a large hollow in the side of the In most cases these corries have a lake in them, or a mountain, surrounded by a circular range of precipices. Where the rocks bog, where a lake has formerly been. are micaceous, the ravines, the steep water-courses, and shelves of the corry-rocks, are rich in alpine plants, as is the case among the Clova and Breadalbane mountains; but here, the rocks, being of hard, dry granite, are almost destitute of verdure, and, from their vastness and sterility, present a spectacle of singular sublimity and grandeur. At the base of these wild and wintry cliffs vegetation began again to invite attention, and Thalictrum alpinum showed its small fragile flowers. Gnaphalium supinum was abundant, but in general not very far advanced; and in one sheltered spot, small specimens of Trollius Europaus were ornamented with their swelling globular flowers of golden hue. most interesting acquisition on our descent was Azalea procumbens in flower. This humble but pretty shrub usually grows on mountain-summits, and flowering early, is rarely seen in that state by botanical tourists, whose peregrinations are generally made towards the end of July, or in August. Its bright rosy corolla is a perfect gem; and to all who admire the beautiful, its contemplation must afford no small share of delight. The only other plant of interest noticed in our descent was Betula nana; some clumps of which were spreading over the heaths, but almost destitute of catkins.

The

'Crossing Cairn-a-Drochel, we descended to Deeside, were ferried over the river long after twilight had departed, and reached Castleton, tolerably fatigued, late in the evening.'

From these extracts, it will be observed that the various obstacles which impeded the author in his early career have neither prevented him from acquiring &

tasteful and pleasing style of composition, nor stood in the way of pious and poetical communings with nature. Other little works followed The Botanical Rambles;' one of which, now before us, entitled 'Twenty Lessons on Mosses,' is a curiosity worth noticing.* Instead of being illustrated by coloured engravings, the work is embellished with real specimens of mosses, dried and gummed on its pages in the manner of a Hortus Siccus. This mode of illustration is not new, but it must be allowed to be more effective than that of giving imitations with the press or the pencil. In the present instance, the delicate and varied tints of the mosses are preserved in a remarkable manner, and insure the recognition of the plants in their growing state. By means of this ingenious and interesting little book, any one, without the assistance of a teacher, may acquire a thorough elementary acquaintanceship with the leading tribes of mosses. We may venture to prognosticate that it will be the precursor of many larger and more valuable works on a similar plan, which Mr Gardiner will be tempted to give to the world.

Our story of William Gardiner's uneventful but not useless life, as far as it has gone, may now be said to be told. Stepping beyond the ordinary usage of maintaining silence respecting persons of genius and modest merit till they are in their grave, we have taken some pains to collect these few particulars of a self-taught man of science, who still, we are happy to say, lives amongst us, battling, it may be, with difficulties, but nevertheless inspired with a genuine Scotch spirit of self-reliance, and drawing no small measure of happiness from his perseveringly-conducted botanical researches. If our notice shall be the means of extending a knowledge of his name into quarters where it has not hitherto happened to penetrate, and, above all, if it serve to stimulate youth to undertake the great task of self-culture, the great duty of self-dependence, it will not have been written in vain.

KOHL'S TRAVELS IN DENMARK. MR KOHL, whose travels through different countries are well known, has just added another work to the already long list-Travels in Denmark'-a country of which little is distinctly known in England.

Generally speaking, Denmark is not a picturesque country. The peninsular portion, comprising twothirds of the whole, is little better than an immense sand-bank, two hundred miles long, bound together and kept in shape, as it were, by a backbone of limestone hills running along its length from north to south. The high ground keeps throughout close to the eastern shore, where the country is highly pleasing in parts, with the clear, blue, beautiful Baltic heaving deep inshore down the narrow inlets, and slumbering in lakes as transparent as Windermere, though of the salt sea brine, under the lea of the hills, which are forested with beech down to the water's edge. Kohl speaks with rapture of the beauty of the beechwoods hereabouts, which, he says, are the finest in Europe, though they are hardly equal to some along the Weser. Some of these tideless lakes are of great extent: one of them cuts right across the peninsula, making an island of Northern Jutland: many of them are tolerably deep close in-shore; and some of the small towns upon them are, in consequence, considerable shipping ports. The other side, along the North Sea, facing England, seems to be a waste of peat bogs, clay, and drift sand, where the sea breaks in a perpetual surf upon a line of shoals, without a single port which can be entered by a ship of size. The dry ground bears nothing itself but buckwheat and rabbits, and is a terra incognita to all but the natives, and a few German pedlers, who barter rabbitskins and goose-quills for the luxuries of life—namely, snuff and red-herrings. Starting from Hamburg, the

great emporium of the north, now rising, like a phoenix, in renovated beauty from its ashes, our traveller finds his way at first into the marsh district of Holstein, and is presently lost in admiration of its beef and butter. Here it is that are reared those great herds of cattle which are beginning to be brought so largely into England. Scarcely three years have elapsed since the late government first legalised their importation, and now every flood-tide bears with it up the Thames or Humber a black, smoking vessel, loaded from stem to stern with motionless captives, wedged together as if by a hydraulic press, and all staring steadfastly forward out of their melancholy eyes, in mute expectation of being within twenty-four hours converted into beef for the English stomachs. Here, too, the Holstein butter is made, which, under the name of Dutch butter, is imported among us to the extent, Kohl says, of a hundred thousand casks; but this is an exaggeration. The production, however, is great, and increasing; and as more and more capital is being brought into it every year, it may fairly be expected to rival the Dutch and Irish butter in the English market. The dairy-farms are very large, with seven or eight hundred cows a-piece in some of the greatest, so that a smaller proportional profit will remunerate the producers-this, too, in a land where there are very few taxes, and the pastures among the richest in the world.

Nothing can surpass the luxuriance of the Holstein meadows, every inch of which has been created by the sea. The great rivers flowing from Northern Germany, the Elbe, the Weser, and the Ems, bring down a huge mass of rich mud, which, in a tideless sea like the Baltic or Mediterranean, would speedily form a delta; but the furious tides, currents, and winds of the North Sea, keep it in suspension till it is finally deposited at a distance, and forms an alluvial belt along the coast. The soil thus progressively created is so rich, as to quadruple the value of the adjoining land, and every possible contrivance is adopted to accelerate its formation. Jetties, constructed of strong beams, driven from twenty to thirty feet deep into the mud, are carried out to low-water mark, each of these of course creating a backwater, in which there is no motion, and all the earthy matter in suspension is able to settle. After a time, a layer of soil rises to the surface, and divers saline plants creep over it, which grow and fatten upon the slime. Plants of a higher order succeed, and contribute, by their decaying remains, to increase and raise the ground; and this process goes on for years, till at last a fine grass springs up in spots, and the cattle are forthwith driven down at ebb-tide to graze. As the tides are apt to be brought violently forward without warning over grass, and all by the westerly winds, it is only the oxen which are risked in these exposed situations, as they fly at once upon the approach of danger to the higher ground, and there make the best fight for their lives that they can, while the sheep, like the stupid, blundering things they are, stand quietly still to be drowned. If the herbage, such as it is, promises well, a subscription is raised, the government engineers are called in, and a dike is carried out at great cost and labour round the outlying portions, which thus, after descending in the shape of mud from the romantic crags and valleys of Bohemia, ends in becoming a constituent part of the kingdom of Denmark.

The country thus created is very curious. From Hamburg to Ripen it extends round the coasts nearly one hundred and fifty miles in length, but of inconsiderable breadth. The whole is a dead flat, without a shrub on it as big as a gooseberry bush, but a veritable paradise to a grazing farmer, being one uninterrupted stretch of fat alluvium, alternately corn and meadow, every inch of which is in the highest degree productive, and is made to produce accordingly. To the right and left, as far as the eye can reach, is a sea of grass, covered far and near with grazing herds-the backs of the cows and oxen in parts just peering above the abundant herbage. Dikes in straight lines to keep

out the sea, and canals in straight lines for drainage, cutting each other at right angles, run endlessly along the horizon. On the tops of these dikes the roads are carried; for a very few days of rain is sufficient to convert the marsh below into a deep tenacious slime, impassible for wheel-carriages. The cost of keeping them up is immense, in some parts as much as a hundred pounds per mile; but it is cheerfully borne, as the sea would else flood the whole country; and the soil is rich enough to pay for all.

In his second volume, we find our author transported into another peculiar region-the island group along the western coast, about which he tells us more than enough. After wading through his manifold details about seal-hunting and duck-catching, dikes and sandhills, tides, currents, and north-west gales, a chapter on each, our only wonder is, how people can be found to live by choice in such a dreadful country. Most of these islands, which have no dikes to keep out the sea, are flooded at every spring-tide; and he tells a marvellous story of a ship having sailed right across the flooded land, at one unusually high tide, without knowing it. The houses are perched on mounds from fifteen to twenty feet high, but the tides sometimes rise even higher, turning the scanty stock of rain-water in the tanks into brine, and sweeping everything off but the haystacks, which, to guard against such an emergency, are secured by strong cables, passing over their tops, and brought down on either side to the heaviest stones that can be got, by way of anchors. Then we have a good deal of curious matter (chap. ii. vol. 4) upon a subject of peculiar interest to the student of our early history-namely, the origin and location of the northern tribes who settled among us in the Saxon times. A district of some twenty miles square, on the eastern side, is still called Angelu, and inhabited by Angles, a separate people in face and speech from any of the Danes. The alternation of hill and dale, with green thorn-hedges, the comfortable people and farm-houses of this little district, are all peculiarly English-like, and reminded him, he says, at every step of the county of Kent. The Frisian people, on the other hand, upon the west coast, claim for themselves exclusively the honour of having planted the Anglo-Saxons, and appeal to the identity of their language, which comes nearer to English than any other. Kohl gives us a distich current among them, in which every word is identical, Good bread, and good cheese, is good English, and good Friese' (or Frisian). Walking in one of the villages, he abruptly asks a child whom he met, Where did Hengist and Horsa sail from?' To which the answer immediately was, 'From Tondern on the Eyder.' It is certainly curious thus to see traditions familiar even to little children on the opposite side of the North Sea, which have so completely passed away from among ourselves.

All the popular tales of dwarfs, giants, and 'good people,' gnomes, nixes, and water-spirits, which are current in Germany and Ireland, and wherever good literature is dear, meet here with full acceptance, together with many a local legend of the true Scandinavian species, in which everything that is not minute is gigantic. Such is that strange fancy of the Danish sailors about the phantom ship, called 'Mannig Fual,' which is so huge, that the captain rides round its deck on a goblin steed to give his orders, and the life of a man is consumed in the time necessary to mount to and furl its sails. The islands of which we have spoken are formed of the ballast thrown overboard when it ran aground, and the chalk cliffs of Dover, according to the legend, owe their whiteness to the paint on its cabin windows, which was rubbed against them once upon a time when the vessel was somewhat squeezed in passing through the Straits. Great Britain forming the western boundary of the North Sea, and stretching the whole way right opposite to Denmark, is a frequent theme in these popular superstitions. Thus the Straits of Dover are attributed to the quarrel of a Danish king with an

English queen, who, in revenge, caused a channel to be cut through the isthmus which then united England to the continent, and thus precipitated the sea upon the Jutland coast. A very restless important personage, a kind of Puck on a larger scale, is constantly in the mouths of the people, under the name of 'Peter of Scotland,' supposed to haunt the highest summits of the Grampians, and from thence to breathe across the sea north-west winds, and their accompaniments of famine and disease. Most of these ideas are referable to natural causes. Where acre after acre of the land has been swallowed up by the sea, till the present coast-line is full fifteen miles east of the shore from what it was two hundred years ago, it is not wonderful that the people should fancy that they still see the houses and farm-yards of the sunken continent through the clear water, and hear the church-bells ringing with unearthly sweetness from below. The belief in a malignant water-spirit, who rides upon and propels the inundations, has the same origin. No one dares walk at night by a certain bay in Jutland, from the vision of a bleeding arm, which is supposed to be witnessed there, commemorating the fate of a shipwrecked mariner, who, after winning his way to shore, was murdered by the wreckers for the sake of his gold. The murderers were yet quarrelling over the division of their plunder, when the sand was slowly stirred, and the vision of the murdered man arose among them to reclaim his own. They tore from the body the head and right hand, but still the bleeding arm moved with them, and stood where they stood, till the murder was found out.' No doubt this ghostly superstition has had but too real an origin among the many catastrophes which happen every year on this wreck-strewn coast.

Kohl lingers so long among the wild people and scenery of the western coast, that he is obliged to make short work of the more civilised districts extending to Copenhagen. From the neat and cleanly' Kiel, as he truly calls the capital of Holstein, he pushes on at once to the passage of the Little Belt, now traversed in two places by steamboats. But Kohl being romantically inclined, prefers to cross it in an open boat by moonlight, and gives us, in consequence, whole pages of Byron at second-hand. The Little Belt, the narrowest and least-used of the three great inlets to the Baltic, is impassable for shipping, through a sand-bank running right across it in the middle from shore to shore. In the early winter months, from November to January, it presents a curious scene when the great herds of porpoises moving in from the North Sea are intercepted in this natural cul de sac, and there, unable to escape, with the land on two sides, the sand-bank in front, and the hunters in rear, are slaughtered by hundreds for the sake of their blubber and skins. Besides a lengthened description of this sea-hunt, which he never saw, and some remarks on the duties levied at the Sound, he tells us nothing more of these great inland straits, the arteries of Denmark; but to make amends, there is a great deal about Odin and Thor, and still more about German patriotism and philosophy, remarks on art and architecture, landscape gardening and general education, which have nothing more to do with Denmark than any other corner of the globe. His discursiveness becomes by this time a decided nuisance, and we are not sorry when he takes up his quarters finally at Copenhagen, and there dilates through a volume and a half, to his heart's content, upon everything and everybody.

The Danes are very proud of Copenhagen; and no wonder, for it is the only town they have. It is likewise the only island capital in the world, past or present, of any consequence; for Venice is morally and materially connected with the continent, and some peculiarities of manners and appearance are the consequence. Living as we do in the focus of a network of railways, which knit us inseparably to two hemispheres, we can hardly realise the situation of Copenhagen; sometimes, in the winter time, cut off by the drift-ice for a fortnight together from all communication with the continent,