CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS

BY THE EDITOR.

As the following remarks on the influence of the American climate bear also on the United States, they cannot but interest the British reader. To show, therefore, that similar ideas have been impressed by the evidence of facts on other minds, the Editor begs leave to quote the following passage from Humboldt, the most enlightened traveller of the present day. That writer, it is true, does not on this point take quite so extensive a view, and his generalizations are more limited; but still they corroborate the Editor's remarks.

"In China and Japan, those inventions are considered as recent, which have not been

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known above two thousand years: in the European colonies an event appears extremely old, if it date back three centuries, or about the period of the discovery of America.

"This absence of memorials, which characterizes new nations, both in the United States, and in the Spanish and Portuguese possessions, is well worthy of attention. The void has not only something painful to the traveller, who finds himself deprived of the most delightful enjoyments of the imagination; it has also an influence on the greater or less powerful ties, which bind the colonist to the soil on which he dwells---to the form of the rocks surrounding his hut, and to the trees which have shaded his cradle.

"Among the ancients (the Phoenicians and the Greeks, for instance) traditions and national remembrances passed from the mothercountry to the colonies; where, perpetuated from generation to generation, they never ceased to have a favourable influence on the opinions, the manners, and the policy, of the colonists. The climates of these first establishments beyond the seas differed but little from those of the mother-country. The

Greeks of Asia-Minor and Sicily were not strangers to the inhabitants of Argos, Athens, and Corinth, from whom they boasted their descent. A great analogy of manners contributed to cement the union which was founded on religious and political interests. The colonists frequently offered the first fruits of their harvests in the temples of the metropolis; and when by some sinister accident the sacred fire was extinguished on the altars of Hestia, messengers were sent from the farther part of Ionia, to rekindle the flame at the Prytaneion of Greece*. Every where, in Cyrene, as well as on the banks of the Mæotis, the inhabitants carefully preserved the traditions of the mother-country. Other remembrances, equally fitted to affect the imagination, were attached to the colonies themselves. They had their sacred groves, their tutelary divinities, their local mythology, and, what gave life and durability to the fictions of the first ages, they had poets, who extended their glory as far as the metropolis itself.

* Clavier. His. des premiers temps de la Grèce, t. ii, p. 67. t. 1, p. 188.

"These advantages, and many others, are wanting in modern colonies. The greater part are settled in a zone, where the climate, the productions, the aspect of the sky, and the scenery of the landscape, differ altogether from those of Europe. The colonist vainly bestows on mountains, rivers, and valleys, those names, which call to his remembrance the sites of the mother-country: these names soon lose their attraction, and have no meaning with the generations that succeed. Under the influence of an exotic nature, habits are generated, that are adapted to new wants; national remembrances are insensibly effaced; and those that remain, like phantoms of the imagination, have neither "a local habitation nor a name." The glory of Don Pelagio, and of the Cid Campeador, has penetrated even to the mountains and forests of America: the people sometimes pronounce these illustrious names; but they form no other notions of their existence than that of heroes belonging to some vague period of fabulous times.

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"This foreign firmament, this contrast of climate, this physical conformation of the