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fee, the infallible method, in this country, of establishing good understanding and hospitality. I inquired what had taken place at Constantinople. Our host raised his head, and without ceasing to attend to his coffee and his fire, began: My soul! Sultan Mahmoud, our lord, will have janissaries no longer then! What will become of us, if the pachas and grandees are able to eat us as they like? We must all fly; we must become Kurds. Our rayas are now all agog; but they must still pay carash, ispresh, and meeree; their taxes will be increased; nay (God protect us from it!) perhaps even Mussulmans will have to pay them. God knows if these changes are for the better! But the chief of the Muscovite dogs has taken advantage of this opportunity to revolt against the son of the slave (the Grand Seignor), because he would not make him a king, any more than his brother, Constantine the drunkard. The six other infidel kings have also revolted; they will pay tribute no longer, and they will force the true believers to chastise them. Sultan Mahmoud has become an infidel; he adopts the customs and the habits of infidels; they say that he is about to establish quarantines, as if there was no longer such a thing as predestination. It is that dog, that son of a dog, Mehemed Ali Pacha, who has suggested all this. God grant that his eyes may burst!' 'Inshallah! Inshallah!' exclaimed in chorus all who were present: after which they relapsed into their habitual abstraction."

MEMORIES. A French professor of the Art of Memory, asked his pupils "where was Joan of Arc born?" None could tell. "Well then," said the professor, "remember, she was born at Donremi, near Vaucouleurs. And how will you remember this? Remember Don, the Spanish title, as we say Dom or Don Quixote; and, as for Remi, remember the name of St. Remi, Archbishop of Rheims, who consecrated King Clovis. And now, for your lesson. Stephanie, my child, where was Joan of Arc born?" "Monsieur, she was born at Rheims, where she consecrated King Clovis."

"Poh, child; Julius, tell me who was the Archbishop of Rheims."

"Monsieur, he was Don Quixote."

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FIRST DEVELOPMENT OF A PERFECT BUT TERFLY, OR MOTH.-Sir, Although in Kirby and Spence's valuable work there is an interesting description of the first development of the butterfly, yet I take the liberty of sending you an account of an instance which fell under my own observation, as it contains some particulars which do not appear in their narration.

The moth (Phala'na pavonia, emperor) which I observed, was about five minutes getting out of its tomb; its wings were at first small, shrivelled, and flabby, its body very large and unwieldy; for the first five minutes after its exit it did nothing but stretch its legs, and lie first on one side and then on the other; it afterwards lay gently down on its back, with its wings lying negligently at each side; its pulse at this period was at 60, for, as it lay stretched out, the joints of the abdomen, if I

may use that term, for the pliable parts which are not so visible in a mature subject (like the joints of a lobster's body), were transparent, and I could therefore see the internal movements: after remaining a few minutes in this state, the pulsation became considerably slow. er, and at the same time the wings began to grow, the first process was the ejection of a yellow fluid from the body, which shot very rapidly into the nervure of the wings, and seemed to strengthen them. Their further development continued to proceed from the base: the action resembled the convulsions of a bit of parchment in the fire, and the wings, from the nervures being tense, were very like a leaf of Savoy cabbage. In about a quarter of an hour they had attained to their full size, but not strength: one side was perfected before the other was half done; the colours and pencilling grew more evident and brilliant, as the wings increased in size, which was the most beautiful part of the process. The moth at last turned itself heels over head, and then walked about a little, but was very dull, and the wings did not attain their maximum of strength till about five hours after, when a copious evacuation took place, and it immediately became quite lively.-Magazine of Natural History, No. 6.

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REVOLVING MASTS.-Lieutenant Shuldham, of the Royal Navy, has lately introduced to public notice an invention which, should it answer his expectations, will effect a complete alteration in the mode of managing ships. Perhaps the enemies of innovation may lift up their voices at once against a plan that threatens to extinguish the tars of Old England. He is going to do away ropes and rigging, braces and haulyards, and banish from use the unctous substance that gives them their shortest and most favoured naine. A ship will then be as clean and bright as a drawing room fireplace; our sailors may wear gloves and use perfumes, like fair ladies, and may realize the old woman's notion of having nothing to do but sit still and let the wind blow them along. The invention consists in making the whole mast of the vessel turn round on its end. It passes through the deck of the vessel as usual; but instead of being fixed in the keel, it there turns on its own end. The machinery for turning it consists, in the model we momentarily inspected, of a series of booms worked on deck. The mast is supported by wooden beams instead of rigging; the yards can be hoisted up and lowered down, and the sails reefed by similar machinery to that which turns round the mast. No masts are stepped one above another; the sails, in the model, actually work themselves; and are trimmed by the force of the wind in the best possible manner, either to exert their greatest effect in impelling the vessel, or, in case of sudden tempests, to shiver harmless in the wind. Lieutenant Shuldham's idea, we believe, is quite novel. The plan is not yet complete. We understand, however, that the Admiralty has so far given the plan its sanction, as to order a vessel to be fitted at Woolwich under the inventor's direction.Spectator.

Nature and arT.-"The natural school of acting" is much talked of and admired: is the excellence implied accurately understood? When Partridge sees Garrick in Hamlet, on the appearance of the spirit, he despises his acting, objecting that he himself should have "looked in the very same manner, and done just as he did," had he beheld a ghost. This is considered as a cavil containing the highest commendation, and proving the exact truth of Garrick's representation. But is it so? are we to deny nature its modifications? are its forms and modes of manifestation, in the extreme agitations of the soul, identical and unvarying in character from the prince to the clown? It is on the affirmative assumption that Partridge's remark is accounted praise; but we question the fact involved as granted. Habit, as is tritely said, makes a second nature; and consequently the different conditions of men must in some degree alter their impressions and the manifestation of them. Surprise and terror would never produce on a philosophic prince, the gross physical expressions they would call forth from an ignorant clown. The apparition would in the prince agitate various thoughts of the mind, to which the clown must be a stranger. To pass from the illustrations of fiction to examples of reality: John Hunter, after severe study, on raising his eyes from his book saw a spectre seated in the chair opposite to him. How did nature comport itself on this occasion? did Hunter stare as Partridge would have done? did his eyes start from their sockets? did his hair stand on end, and his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth? No-simply because the nature of Hunter was not the nature of a Partridge or a booby, but the nature of a philosopher; and accordingly he applied his fingers to his pulse, found it galloping at a hundred and thirty, rose, rung the bell, sent for a surgeon, and bled away the apparition of his heated brain.-Spectator.

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MEMORABILIA OF MR. COLERIDGE.-Being asked which he thought the greater man, Milton or Shakspeare, he replied that he could hardly venture to pronounce an opinion:-that Shakspeare appeared to him to have the strength, the stature of his rival, with infinitely more agility; but that he could not bring himself after all to look upon Shakspeare as any thing more than a beardless stripling, and that if he had ever arrived at man's estate, he would not have been a man, but a monster of intellect.

Being told that Mrs. Woolstonecroft exerted a very great ascendancy over the mind of her husband, he said, "It was always the case: people of imagination naturally took the lead of people of mere understanding and acquirement.' This was scarcely doing justice to the author of Caleb Williams.

He spoke of Mackintosh as deficient in original resources: he was neither the great merchant nor manufacturer of intellectual riches; but the ready warehouseman, who had a large assortment of goods, not properly his own, and who knew where to lay his hand on whatever he wanted. An argument which he had sus ained for three hours together with another

erudite person on some grand question of phílosophy, being boasted of in Coleridge's hearing as a mighty achievement, the latter bluntly answered "Had there been a man of genius among you, he would have settled the point in five minutes."

Having been introduced to a well known wit and professed jester, and his own silence being complained of, he said he should no more think of speaking where Mr. - was present, than of interrupting an actor on the stage.

Mr. Coleridge preferred Salvator Rosa to Claude, therein erring. He however spoke eloquently and feelingly of pictures, where the subject matter was poetical, and where more was meant than met the eye." Thus he described the allegorical picture by Giotto in the cemetery at Pisa, the Triumph of Death, where the rich, the young, and the prosperous, are shrinking in horror and dismay from the grim monster; and the wretched, the cripple, and the beggar, are invoking his friendly aid, both in words and tones worthy of the subject. Mr. Coleridge's was the only conversation we ever heard in which the ideas seemed set to music-it had the materials of philosophy and the sound of music; or if the thoughts were sometimes poor and worthless, the accompaniment was always fine.

He stated of Henderson, the actor, or some person of whom a very indifferent jest was repeated, that it was the strongest proof of his ability, and of the good things he must have said to make his bad ones pass current.

He characterized the Prometheus Bound of Eschylus, as being less a drama than an Ođe to Justice.

He said that formerly men concealed their vices; but now, in the change of manners and the laxity of theories, they boasted of those they had not.

He sometimes told a story well, though but rarely. He used to speak with some drollery and unction of his meeting in his tour in Germany with a Lutheran clergyman, who expressed a great curiosity about the fate of Dr. Dodd in a Latin gibberish which he could not at first understand. "Doctorem Tott, Doctorem Tott! Infelix homo, collo suspensus!"—he called out in an agony of suspense, fitting the action to the word, and the idea of the reverend divine just then occurred to Mr. Coleridge's imagination. The Germans have a strange superstition that Dr. Dodd is still wandering in disguise in the Hartz forest in Germany; and his Prison Thoughts are a favourite book with the initiated.-Atlas.

OXFORD AND LOCKE.-By Lord Grenville. 8vo. London, 1829. Murray.-The object of this pamphlet is to vindicate Oxford from a charge long made against it, and incidentally revived by Dugald Stewart. This charge is the expulsion of the famous author of the Essay on the Human Understanding." Lord Grenville, as an Oxonian, and Chancellor of the great University, boldly takes up the cause, and refers to sufficient documents to prove that the University had nothing whatever to do with the actual ejection of its brightest honour and ornament from its walls: but that it was in

every sense the work of a force put upon the University, the result of an act of tyranny exercised by Charles the Second, in his zeal for conciliating the Papists, guided by a profligate and infidel minister, Sunderland, and having for his immediate tool a base and time serving dignitary, Dr. Fell, head of Christ church.

Locke had been private secretary to Lord Shaftesbury, and, in the general flight from the odious tyranny of the court, he had gone to Holland. He had some trifling emolument from a studentship in his College; and, as tyranny strikes alike at the great and the humble, the retired student was as much an object of persecution as the noble. It was determined to strip the exile of this paltry provision. Lord Sunderland therefore wrote to Fell to have him expelled. Fell's dishonest and cringing answer was, that "Locke's conduct while in the College had been too guarded to allow of any handle for proceeding against him, though he had been more than once assailed by provocations and conversations to betray himself, so far as to come within the grasp of authority; that he had, however, been summoned to reside, and must consequently either put himself within the reach of government, if they had other matter against him; or, by non-appearance, make himself liable to expulsion for contumacy: but that, if this method would not satisfy the King, his Majesty, as founder and visiter of the College, had power to remove him by mandate."

healer of bodies, "if you were to give me a roasted angel, I would not stay."

From the Journal of a Naturalist.-" The effects of atmospheric changes upon vegetation have been noticed in the rudest ages; even the simplest people have remarked their influence on the appetites of their cattle, so that to "eat like a rabbit before rain" has become proverbial, from the common observance of the fact; but the influence of the electric fluid upon the common herbage has not been, perhaps, so generally perceived. My men complain to-day, that they cannot mow, that they "cannot any how make a hand of it," as the grass hangs about the blade of the sithe, and is become tough and woolly; heavy rains are falling to the southward, and thunder rolls around us; this indicates the electric state of the air, and points out the influence that atmospheric temperature and condition have upon organized and unorganized bodies, though, from their nature, not always manifested, all terrestrial substances being replete with electric matter. In the case here mentioned, it appears probable that the state of the air induced a temporary degree of moisture to arise from the earth, or to be given out by the air, and that this moisture conducted the electric fluid to the vegetation of the field. Experiments prove that electric matter, discharged into a vegetable, withers and destroys it; and it appeared to me at the time-but I am no electrician-that an inferior or natural portion of this fluid, such as was then circulating around, had influenced my grass in a lower degree, so as not to wither, but to cause it to flag, and become tough, or, as they call it in some counties, to "wilt;" the farina of the grass appeared damper than is usual, by its hanging about the blades of the sithes more than it commonly does; the stone removed it, as the men whetted them, just at the edge, but they were soon clogged again. As the thunder cleared away, the impediments ANECDOTE OF NAPOLEON.-At the famous became less obvious, and, by degrees, the diffiinterview at Erfurt, when dining with the Em-culties ceased. The observance of local facts, peror of Russia and an elite of kings, Bonaparte began a sentence with "When I was an ensign in the regiment of La Fère,"-M. de Bausset, who stood facing the royal diners within a few feet, tells us that these words produced a lively emotion among the crowned heads-a shudder, we suppose, ran from one end of the line to the other, to think of the lump of illegitimacy they were cringing to.

The suggestion was adopted; the sign manual countersigned by the Secretary of State; all the powers of angry tyranny were set in motion; and the Dean and Chapter obeyed without remonstrance. Fell's letter, which at some length describes his laying traps for the student under his protection, and which Lord Grenville describes, and most justly, as "stamped with an indelible brand of servility and hypocrisy," is given in an Appendix.

DISTASTE TO PRAYING.-M. Grossi, an eminent physician of Savoy, invited to dine with Count Picon, Governor of Savoy, arrived too soon, and found his excellency at prayer. He was asked to join in the devotions, which he consented to after some grimaces, and fell upon his knees. Hardly however had he recited two aves, when, unable to hold out any longer, he suddenly rose, seized his cane, and went off without saying a word. The Count ran after him crying, "M. Grossi, M. Grossi! stop-we have below on the spit an excellent red partridge."-"My Lord," replied the anti-religious

though unimportant in themselves, may at times elucidate perplexities, or strengthen conclusions."-pp. 356, 357.

BALANCING OF EGGS ON A BARE ROCK.-The following singular fact is stated by the celebrated Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, in his ingenious work, "De Generatione." A bird (Alca Pica, Linn.) lays only one egg, which, without making any nest or preparation for its reception, she deposits on the top of a sharp acute stone, and with such firmness that she can leave it and return to it with safety. If the egg should be removed by any means, it can never be replaced, and rolls thence into the sea. The spot, as I have said, is encrusted with a white cement, and the egg, as soon as it is laid, is slimed over with a soft and viscous humidity, which quickly causes its adhesion to the rock, as firmly as if they had been fastened together with bars of iron.

Literary Entelligence.

KEITH MEDAL.

The Royal Society of Edinburgh have communicated to the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, (with a request to have it made extensively known in America,) that "in December, 1820, the trustees of the estate of the late Alexander Keith placed in the hands of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the sum of £600 sterling, the interest on which shall, from November, 1820, form a Biennial Prize, for the most important discoveries in science, made in any part of the world, but communicated by their author to the Royal Society, and published for the first time in their Transactions."

"The Prize is to be given in a gold medal, not exceeding fifteen guineas in value, toge. ther with a sum of money, or a piece of plate, bearing the devices and inscriptions upon the medal."

It is much desired by the American Philosophical Society, that our Literary and Scientific Journals should republish this communication, in order to give American genius an opportu nity of being distinguished abroad.

The literary world, by the excitement of the political one, is deprived of its ordinary share of novelty, both the announcement of new publications, and the usual quota of information, on subjects of fresh interest, being greatly abridg ed. Among the few notices of works about to appear are the following::-a Novel, by an Officer of the 4th Dragoons, describing the exploits of his regiment; another Novel, of the De Vere class, entitled, D'Erbine, or the Cynic; and a new edition of Mr. Coleridge's Poetical Works.

A new Novel, entitled Jesuitism and Methodism, which will, it is expected, be ready for publication early in the ensuing month.

The Philosophy of History, in one vol. 8vo. A second edition is preparing of an Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone, made during the year 1819, by John Hughes, A.M. of Oriel College, Oxford, and illustrated by views from the drawings of De Wint, and engraved by W. B. Cooke, and J. C. Allen, uniform with Batty and other European scenery.

Mr. Valpy is now publishing a series of School and College Greek Classics, with English notes, in a duodecimo form; the Medea and Hecuba of Euripides, as well as the Edipus of Sophocles, are ready: and Thucydides, Herodotus, Xenophon, &c. are to follow in succession.

Mr. Atherstone announces the second volume of his poem, entitled the Fall of Nineveh.

The extensive historical work by Sir James Mackintosh, so long expected, is now so nearly ready for the press, that the first volume will, we are assured, appear in the early part of the ensuing season. Contemporaneously with this work, Sir James has been induced to prepare

for the Cabinet Cyclopædia, a Popular History of England, forming three volumes of that publication. Such a sketch of English history has been long a desideratum in our literature.

University of Leipzig.-From the official "Notice of the Lectures to be delivered during the winter session 1828-9," we observe, that in

Philology and Languages there will be given 24 distinct courses; in History, 12; in Philosophy, 24; in Statistics, 10; in Mathematics and Astronomy, 7; in Natural Sciences, 11; in Agricultural Sciences, 5; in Theology, 53; in Jurisprudence, 68; and in Medicine and Surgery, 66. One portion of the two last consists of lectures, and the other of what are termed exercises, examinations, and controversial ex

ercises.

Mr. W. Carpenter, author of the Scientia Biblica, &c. has in the press, Popular Lectures on Biblical Criticism and Interpretation.

A volume of tales, under the title of Sketches of Irish Character, from the pen of Mrs. S. C. Hall, the editor of the Juvenile Forget-Me-Not, is announced for publication in April.

Mr. W. Jones, author of the History of the Waldenses, &c., has in the press a Christian Biographical Dictionary, comprising the lives of such persons in every country, and in every age, since the revival of literature, as have distinguished themselves by their talents, their sufferings, or their virtues.

The Publishers of the Boy's Own Book have nearly ready the Young Lady's Book, a novel and elegant volume, highly embellished, devoted to the most favourite pursuits and recreations of Young Ladies.

A most important work is on the eve of publication, which will no doubt excite an unusual sensation in the literary and learned world-a Life of the celebrated philosopher, John Locke. It will contain extracts, never before published, from his correspondence, English and foreign, from 1660 to the last year of his life in 1704; also from his Journals and Common-place Books. After his death, his papers, it appears, came into the possession of the Lord Chancel. lor King, his near relation and sole executor, Lord King for elucidating the life and writings and the public will be indebted to the present of that great and extraordinary character.

In the press, an Essay on the Deaf and Dumb, showing the necessity of medical treatment in early infancy, with observations on Congenital Deafness. By J. H. Curtis, Esq, Surgeon-Aurist to the King.

The Poetical Sketch-Book, in one volume. By T. K. Hervey, including a third edition of his celebrated poem Australia, will be publish ed in a few days..

A small volume of Sacred Poems, by Mary Anne Browne, author of "Monte Blanc, Ada and other Poems," dedicated to the Rev. H. H Milman, Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, will be published very shortly.

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