Influence of Climate.

Climate influences religion in respect to ceremonies and usages. A legislator could have experienced no difficulty in inducing the Indians to bathe in the Ganges at certain appearances of the moon; it is a high gratification to them. Had any one proposed a like bath to the people who inhabit the banks of the Dwina, near Archangel, he would have been stoned. Forbid pork to an Arab, who after eating this species of animal food (the most miserable and disgusting in his own country) would be affected by leprosy, he will obey you with joy; prohibit it to a Westphalian, and he will be tempted to knock you down.

Abstinence from wine is a good precept of religion in Arabia, where orange, citron, and lemon waters are necessary to health. Mahomet would not have for bidden wine in Switzerland, especially before going to battle.

There are usages merely fanciful. Why did the priests of Egypt devise circumcision? It was not for the sake of health. Cambyses, who treated as they deserved both them and their bull Apis, the courtiers of Cambyses, and his soldiers, enjoyed perfectly good health without any such mutilation. Climate has no peculiar influence over this particular portion of the person of a priest. The offering in question was made to Isis, probably on the same principle as the firstlings of the fruits of the earth were everywhere offered. It was typical of an offering of the first fruits of life.

Religions have always turned upon two pivots,-forms or ceremonies, and faith; forms and ceremonies depend much on climate; faith not at all. A doctrine will be received with equal facility under the equator or near the pole. It will be afterwards equally rejected at Batavia and the Orcades, while it will be maintained, unguibus et rostro-with tooth and nail-at Salamanca. This depends not on sun and atmosphere, but solely upon opinion, that fickle empress of the world.

Certain libations of wine will be naturally enjoined

in a country abounding in vineyards; and it would never occur to the mind of any legislator to institute sacred mysteries, which could not be celebrated without wine, in such a country as Norway.

It will be expressly commanded to burn incense in the court of a temple where beasts are killed in honour of the divinity, and for the priests' supper. This slaughter-house, called a temple, would be a place of abominable infection, if it were not continually purified; and without the use of aromatics, the religion of the ancients would have introduced the plague. The interior of the temple was even festooned with flowers to sweeten the air.

The cow will not be sacrificed in the burning territory of the Indian peninsula, because it supplies the necessary article of milk, and is very rare in arid and barren districts, and because its flesh, being dry and tough, and yielding but little nourishment, would afford the Brahmins but miserable cheer. On the contrary, the cow will be considered sacred, in consequence of its rareness and utility.

The temple of Jupiter Ammon, where the heat is excessive, will be entered only with bare feet. To perform his devotions at Copenhagen, a man requires his feet to be warm and well covered.

It is not thus with doctrine. Polytheism has been believed in all climates; and it is equally easy for a Crim Tartar and an inhabitant of Mecca to acknowledge one only incommunicable God, neither begotten nor begetting. It is by doctrine, more than by rites, that a religion extends from one climate to another. The doctrine of the unity of God passed rapidly from Medina to Mount Caucasus. Climate, then, yields to opinion.

The Arabs said to the Turks: "We practised the ceremony of circumcision in Arabia without very well knowing why. It was an ancient usage of the priests of Egypt to offer to Oshiret, or Osiris, a small portion of what they considered most valuable. We had adopted this custom three thousand years before we became Mahometans. You will become circumcised

like us; you will bind yourselves to sleep with one of your wives every Friday, and to give two and a half per cent. of your income annually to the poor. We drink nothing but water and sherbet: all intoxicating liquors are forbidden us. In Arabia they are pernicious. You will embrace the same regimen, although you should be passionately fond of wine; and even although, on the banks of the Phases and Araxes, it should often be necessary for you. In short, if you wish to go to heaven, and to obtain good places there, you will take the road through Mecca."

i The inhabitants north of the Caucasus subject themselves to these laws, and adopt, in its fullest extent, a religion which was never framed for them..

In Egypt the emblematical worship of animals succeeded to the doctrines of Thaut. The gods of the Romans afterwards shared Egypt with the dogs, the cats, and the crocodiles. To the Roman religion succeeded Christianity; that was completely banished by Mahometanism, which will perhaps be superseded by some new religion.

In all these changes climate has effected nothing; government has done everything. We are here considering only second causes, without raising our unhallowed eyes to that Providence which directs them. The Christian religion, which received its birth in Syria, and grew up towards its fullness of stature in Alexandria, inhabits now those countries where Teutat and Irminsul, Freya and Odin, were formerly adored.

There are some nations whose religion is not the result either of climate or of government. What cause detached the north of Germany, Denmark, three parts of Switzerland, Holland, England, Scotland, and IreIand, from the Romish communion ?-Poverty. Indulgences, and deliverance from purgatory for the souls of those whose bodies were at that time in possession of very little money, were sold too dear, The prelates and monks absorbed the whole revenue of a province. People adopted a cheaper religion. In short, after numerous civil wars, it was concluded that the pope's religion was a good one for nobles, and

the reformed for citizens. Time will show whether the religion of the Greeks or of the Turks will prevail on the coasts of the Euxine and Ægean seas.

COHERENCE-COHESION-ADHESION:

THE power by which the parts of bodies are kept together. It is a phenomenon the most common, but the least understood. Newton derides the hooked atoms, by means of which it has been attempted to explain coherence; for it still remained to be known why they are hooked, and why they cohere. He treats with no greater respect those who have explained cohesion by rest.. 66 It is," says 66 he, an occult quality." He has recourse to an attraction. But is not this attraction, which may indeed exist, but is by no means capable of demonstration, itself an occult quality? The grand attraction of the heavenly bodies is demonstrated and calculated. That of adhering bodies is incalculable. But how can we admit a force that is immeasurable to be of the same nature as one that can be measured?

Nevertheless, it is demonstrated that the force of attraction acts upon all the planets and all heavy bodies, in proportion to their solidity; but it acts, therefore, on all the particles of matter; it is therefore very probable that, while it exists in every part in reference to the whole, it exists also in every part in reference to cohesion: coherence, therefore, may be the effect of attraction.

This opinion appears admissible till a better can be found, and that better is not easily to be met with. *

*This wholly physical question, for difficulty, may be compared to the partly metaphysical one of the principle of the connexion between mind and body. Both should at once be deemed beyond the province of human knowledge, and consequently of practical philosophy. As materials for imagination, musing, and German mysticism, they may occupy a share of attention; but, in every other point of view, it would be as rational to occupy our mortal span of leisure with cups and balls. Sir Isaac New ton has discovered certain laws which regulate mation, and the mutual dependency of bodies, the principal of which he calls attraction. Other persons dislike this word; and certainly

COMMERCE.

SINCE the fall of Carthage, no people had been powerful in commerce and arms at the same time, until Venice set the example. The Portuguese having passed the Cape of Good Hope, were, for some time

a rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet:" but what is the use of finding fault with the name, when the substitution of another makes no alteration in the thing? Newton's merit lies in the discovery of the law, not in the name which be bestows on the source of it. With respect to coherence or cohesion, it is probably a breach of the great principle called attraction; but we shall never know anything beyond the laws by which it is, in particular instances, governed. Thus, our knowledge of chemical affinities may every day improve; but to know that A is more disposed to unite with B than with C, is not to know why it is thus disposed, and still less to discover the general principle of cohesion. Possibly, nothing is more essential, in sound education, than to lay down with precision the real boundaries of human science. Why it is not more precisely done where it ought most to be done, is no riddle; but certainly nothing would prevent a greater waste of intellect. There are writers, to be sure, who place men who dream before those who detect and discover-Plato and Herder, before the father of experimental philosophy and all his offspring. The former, it seems, are the men of positive knowledge, the latter merely detectors of their errors; it being conveniently taken for granted, that all which is not absolutely overthrown is purely true; that is to say, if the experimentalist cannot prove a negative, the dreams are correct. People must swallow a great deal of opium to admit this, even from the first of all scholastic logicians. The nil admirari of this sect is extraordinary it can see nothing grand in the vast development of facts and consequences which spring from the school of experiment; a school in which all men may be made scholars; which finds employment for every grade of intellect, and produces an aggregate from universal mind. All this is minor, subordinate, and negative, the great positive being represented by the resplendent personages who extract everything from the storehouse of their own imagination, in the concoction of which they sit brooding, like so many monks of Mount Tabor, who elicited the holy spirit from an intense contemplation of their own navels. There is probably some asperity in this note; but the small fry of the class alluded to are becoming unbearable; and a brief protest cannot be out of place in a publication which anglicises the manly labours of a Voltaire in the great cause of general intellectual improvement and social amelioration,—a vulgar final cause, which is utterly beneath them.-T.