was more than thirty years before the voyage of Columbus and the discovery of the New World. There," says Tetzel, "one sees nothing beyond, save the sky and sea; and they say that the sea is so stormy that no man may voyage over it; and no man knows what there may be beyond it. And it was told to us, that some had desired to find out what was beyond, and had fared forth with galleys and ships; but no one had ever returned." Ssassek says, that "nothing is to be seen beyond, but the waves and the sea, the end whereof God only knows." According to Tetzel, they saw the king again at Evora, whither he had fled from the pestilence; and the letters of the empress were delivered to him there. At an interview with the king at Braga, according to Ssassek, the following scene took place. The king had made a very complimentary speech, and promised to grant him whatever he would ask. The baron returned thanks for so great an honor, and entreated the king to bestow upon him two Ethiopians.

"The brother of the king, who was standing by, hearing the request, burst into a loud laugh, and said, 'Friend, what you ask for is of no importance; ask for something more valuable and more creditable than those Ethiopians. But since that is the only thing you request, I beseech you add to them a third gift from me; to wit, a monkey; and so you will return richly endowed to your country. Perhaps,' said he, you have no negroes and monkeys in your regions, and that is the reason you have asked for them before all other things?' When my lord said they were rarely seen there; 'Yet we,' replied the Duke, ‘have great store of those things. The king here, my brother, possesses three cities in Africa, and his custom is to lead an army thither every year; and he never returns from an expedition, however slight, without bringing a hundred thousand or more Æthiopians, of every age and sex, and they are all sold like cattle; for the custom is for men to come together from other regions to buy them, and the king derives a larger income from the sale of them than from all the revenues of his kingdom. A little negro (parvulus Ethiops) fetches twelve or thirteen gold pieces of Portugal; but a grown-up one a much higher price.

"And there is this custom," continues the journalizer, “that whoever has obtained a stout negro, and fit for labor, causes him to be baptized, and cannot sell him or alienate him, except he make him a free gift to a friend. But as long as the negro remains unbaptized, he has the right to sell him for as much as he can get."

They encountered many dangers on their return. They passed through the territory held by the pretender to the throne of Castile, through Merida, to Toledo; thence, by way of Madrid, then a place of small importance, into Aragon. At Saragossa, they were received by King John the Second; thence they journeyed through Catalonia, fighting their way to Barcelona. They passed on, by way of Perpignan, Montpellier, Nismes, and other cities, to Milan, where they were hospitably entertained by the magnificent duke, Galeazzo Maria. They visited Verona and Venice; in the latter city, they were present at an assembly of the senate, and witnessed the method of voting. Thence they proceeded to Gratz, where the emperor, Frederic the Fourth, was then holding his court. Here they jousted; but having left their harness in England, they were obliged to equip themselves in borrowed armor. They visited the empress at Neustadt, where they passed eight days in sports and revelry. The negroes and the monkeys, which they had brought from Portugal, gave the empress great delight. Leaving the empress, they experienced great difficulty from the hostile disposition of the king of Hungary; but at length they reached Prague in safety, where they were received with joy and festivities, and were loaded with all the honors due to men who had performed such distant and perilous journeys.

Soon afterwards, Gabriel Tetzel returned to Nuremberg, where, as we have said, history informs us he was held in such high estimation, that he was raised in the following year to the dignity of burgomaster. The subsequent fate of Johannes Zehroviensis is involved in impenetrable obscurity; perhaps nis overthrow by the short, thick man in Spain broke his eart; at any rate, his triumph appears to have ended there. We must now take leave, however reluctantly, of this pleasant and worshipful company, with the single remark, that we have rarely met with a book which, by its quaint and picturesque simplicity, set before us the men and the manners of a past age so vividly and so truthfully as this.

ART. VII. Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. New York: Wiley & Putnam. 1845. 12mo. pp. 291.

THIS is one of the most striking and ingenious scientific romances that we have ever read. The writer of it is a bold man; he has undertaken to give a hypothetical history of creation, beginning, as the title-pages say, at the earliest period, and coming down to the present day. It is not quite so authentic as that of Moses, nor is it written with such an air of simplicity and confidence as the narrative of the Jewish historian; but it is much longer, and goes into a far greater variety of interesting particulars. It contradicts the Jewish cosmogony in a few particulars, and is at variance with probability and the ordinary laws of human reasoning in many others. But the rather liberal rules of interpretation, which it is now the fashion to apply to the first chapter of Genesis, will relieve the reader from any scruples on the former account; and as to the latter, in these days of scientific quackery, it would be quite too harsh to make any great complaint about such peccadilloes. The writer has taken up almost . every questionable fact and startling hypothesis, that have been promulgated by proficients or pretenders in science during the present century, except animal magnetism; and for this omission we have reason to be thankful. The nebular hypothesis, Laplace's or Compte's theory of planets shelled off from the sun, spontaneous generation, some of these vagaries, we admit, are of much older date than the year 1800, the Macleay system, dogs playing dominoes, negroes born of white parents, materialism, phrenology, he adopts them all, and makes them play an important part in his own magnificent theory, to the exclusion, in a great degree, of the well-accredited facts and established doctrines of science.

We speak lightly of the author's plan, as one can hardly fail to do of a scheme so magnificent, and going apparently so far beyond the ordinary sources of information and the range of the human intellect. But the execution of the work is of so high an order, as fairly to challenge attention and respect. The writer, who has not chosen to give his name to the world, is evidently a man of great ingenuity and correct taste, a master of style, a plausible, though not a pro

found, reasoner, and having quite a general, but superficial, acquaintance with the sciences. His materials are arranged with admirable method, the illustrations are copious and interesting, the transitions are skilfully managed, and the several portions of the theory are so well fitted to each other, and form such a round and perfect whole, that it seems a pity to subject it to severe analysis and searching criticism. It is a very pleasant hypothesis, set forth in a most agreeable manner; and though it contains many objectionable features, these are cautiously veiled and kept in the background, and the reader is seduced into accepting most of the conclusions, before he is aware of their true character and tendency.

Before a just opinion can be formed of the correctness of the writer's views, it is necessary to take to pieces this skilful fabric, and to bring the parts together in a different connection and with greater succinctness, following out each doctrine to its inevitable, but most renote, conclusions, so as to obtain a just idea of the position in which we should be placed by the acceptance of the theory as a whole. For obvious reasons, the author has not chosen to give a general summary of his views, or to mention explicitly all the inferences that may be drawn from them. He merely puts the reader upon the track, indicating its general direction, and leaving it for him. to find out what objects will be encountered by the way, and where the journey will end. We propose to finish the work that is thus left incomplete, and to set forth the doctrine in its plainest terms. We would reduce the theory at once to its narrowest compass and simplest expression; but at the same time, would incorporate into it every doctrine which properly belongs to it, and follow out each hypothesis to its remote, though necessary, inferences and conclusions. this end, it is requisite to separate, as far as possible, the doctrines themselves from the evidence adduced in support of them; and to consider the former as a whole, before proceeding to discuss the cogency of the latter. The following may be taken as the most concise abstract that we can form of the history of the creation, according to this author.

To

In the beginning-we use this word in a kind of preterperfect sense in the very beginning of things, immense portions of infinite space were filled with finely diffused nebulous matter, heated to an intensity that is altogether inconceivable. The particles of this "fire mist," as it is appro

priately called, were the true primordia rerum,—the elements of the universe, the principles of all the forms of inorganic matter and all organic things. At the outset, the Creator endowed these particles with certain qualities and capacities, and then stood aside from his work, as there was nothing farther for him to do. The subsequent progress of creation is only the successive development, upon mechanical and necessary principles, and as fast as proper occasions were offered, of these qualities thus made inherent in the primitive constitution of matter. The atoms thus mar

vellously endowed have gone on, without any further aid from Almighty power, to form suns, and astral systems, and planets with their satellites, and worlds tenanted by successive generations and races of vegetable and animal things. And this work of creation, or rather of development, is still in progress all around us, and in all its various stages, though in the portion most directly exposed to the observation of man it is far advanced towards perfection. Upon this earth, the unaided action of these atoms is still evolving all the phenomena of generation, progress, and decay, of vegetable and animal life, of instinct and of mind. In the abyss of space, it is also forming new suns, and solar systems, and worlds that are to pass through the same stages and wonderful transformations to which our own planet has already been subjected. All that has occurred with respect to this earth, and the system of which it forms a part, is but a type of what is constantly going on in the countless other systems of stars that people the firmament.

As

The first stage in the history of these fiery particles is the formation among them, in some unaccountable way, of nuclei, or centres of aggregation, like the bright points that are now visible in some of the nebula of the heavens. soon as these centres are formed, gravity, one of the original principles of matter, begins to act, and the atoms in all the neighbouring parts of space are attracted towards the nucleus. and heaped upon it. In this manner, a central sun of vast dimensions is formed, which soon assumes a motion of rotation upon its axis from the general law which gives a circular movement to all fluids that are drawn towards a common cen

The centrifugal force thus generated tends to throw off matter from the equatorial regions of the great orb, but is restrained by the attraction of gravitation, which would