"The land where the lemon-tree blows, In darker leaves bowered the gold orange glows," for Seville oranges and lemons came to Europe only through the Arabs. The latter are not even found on the walls of Pompeii, and the common orange, which is a Chinese by birth, was brought to Europe first by bold Portuguese sailors.

In Europe, these fruits lingered a while, were remodelled from their first rough shape, developed and refined, and then sent, ennobled in shape and quality, across the broad Atlantic. Here they have rapidly spread from State to State, and are even now on their way, through California, back to their original home. The day may not be far distant, when the youthful Union, which has already given grain back to starving Ireland, and loads the tables of the rich with the finest apples the world knows, may send its grapes and unsurpassed nectarines to ancient Persia, from whence Europe received the hard, unflavored peach. Strange it is, that as Europe has never returned any similar gifts for the many presents it has received from the East, so America also has given to Europe nothing in return for her many kindnesses. For the whole rich blessing of our grain harvest; for the wholesome rice, the profitable cotton; for sugar and spice, oranges and pomegranates, all of which we owe to the Old World, we have sent back but two rather equivocal gifts. For smokers alone will be disposed to think the introduction of tobacco a real, valuable present. A plant which affords no edible root, fruit, or other nutritious part, distinguished neither by beauty nor by sweet odor; but, on the contrary, by a disagreeable sinell and taste, which produces, when eaten, nausea, vomiting and giddiness, and is, in large quantities or concentrated, even deadly poison-such a plant is surely at least a doubtful gift. So it is with the potato, which has long been considered by its enthusiastic admirers an incomparably rich gift of the West to the East, but which now might easily be looked upon as the fatal fruit marking in the annals of history the first decline of European nations.

But even tobacco is not accepted as a Western gift by all botanists. Although it is said that the Spaniards found it used in Mexico medicinally, especially in the treatment of wounds, and saw it smoked there, as the English did in Virginia, still it was certainly known as

early as 1601 in Java and China, and there is good reason to believe at an even earlier date in China. Now, as tobacco did not reach Europe before 1559, when it was first used in Portugal-and, consequently, in Europe-as medicine, it may at least have been known in Eastern Asia long before the discovery of America. Nature, moreover, seems almost desirous to avenge the unnatural movement from West to East by the rapid degeneration which marks the culture of both these vegetables in Europe. But even if maize really came from this Continent first, if the Indian fig and the closely related agave, which now grow wild around the Mediterranean, and add so much to its picturesque scenery, have their true home in the New World, these two plants would still be the only ones that have ever travelled eastward, single and isolated exceptions to the great law of Nature, that plants, animals and men, all must travel towards the setting sun.

This mysterious but undeniable movement is still going on. It proceeds, even in our day, on a grand and imposing scale, and essentially alters, from time to time, the vegetable character of whole countries, as they are newly discovered or newly settled. It shows us in indelible signs the silent, irresistible force with which humble plants prescribe their path on earth to both the animals that feed us and the different races of men. For such is the strange relation. between plants and Man: they are of paramount importance for his existence not only, but also for his welfare. It is little to say that they feed and clothe him, and that they enable him to sustain the life of those animals, from whom he receives in return not only food and comfort, but, what is incomparably more valuable, service, affection, and gratitude! The cerealia have become the first, and most binding social tie between men, because their culture and preparation require vast labor and mutual service. As no society, moreover, can exist without laws, it may well be said, that these short-lived grasses are in truth the first cause of all legislation. Not without good reason, then, was it that the Romans called their Ceres not only a goddess, but also a legislator.

To the careless observer, animals seem to be as permanent features in Nature as plants. Apparently the same sparrow picks up grains of wheat in the harvestfield that robbed our cherries in early

summer, and the same game which our forefathers hunted, tempts us now in field and forest.

It is, however, not so. The demoralized domestic animals, it is true, are nearly the same now that they ever were; the same sheep of whom "Abel was a keeper," sleep night after night on our pastures, and the "cattle on a thousand hills" rove now on our plains. But all nobler, higher life among animals moves restlessly round the globe. Here also there is an incessant going and coming, flying and pushing, an endless change of home, to exchange a used-up past for a promising future.

No class of animals, high or low, escapes entirely the general law of movement, and if we read occasionally of flights of storks and shoals of herrings, these are mere anecdotes, nothing but single, detached features of that unwearied life which moves in grand and restless masses round the terrestrial globe.

Of the earliest migrations of animals, even of those whom Man has bound up with his own existence, we know but very little. History, which tells us nothing of man's own first journeys, condescends not to speak of beings less noble. We guess, rather than we know, that the domestic animals at least left their common home in the great centre of all earthly life, Upper India, together with the first migrating nations. We conclude this mainly from the fact that the races of men separated at a time when they were all shepherds. This we know from Language; for in all idioms the words relating to pastoral life are cognate words, whilst in other respects the relationship is far more complicated and difficult to trace. A remarkable instance of this connection is the word "daughter" in German, "tochter," from the Greek duyarnp, which is in Sanscrit "duhitri," and there means "milking woman," because we know that it was the custom of all pastoral nations to leave the milking of the herd to the daughter of the owner. The animals themselves maintain a certain connection with their first home on earth, for most of them have still some wild relations on the high table-lands of Middle Asia, where, in primitive fierceness, strength and beauty, they rove about, and race for hundreds of miles along the valleys to exchange exhausted lands for new rich pastures.

Animals, like plants, travel occasionally by means of the various agents whom (To be concluded

nature herself places at their disposal. The giant rivers of the earth, the Ganges, Congo, Amazon, Orinoco, and Mississippi, annually float islands towards the ocean, covered with living inhabitants. Nothing is more common than to meet out at sea, thousands of miles from all land, masses of fucus floating on the surface of the water, and serving as a resting-place for small shell-fish, unable to transport themselves by swimming, far from their native shore. Off the Moluccas and Philippines, sailors often meet, after a typhoon, with floating islands of matted wood, full of life, and covered with large trees, so as to deceive their eyes, and to endanger the safety of their vessels. Trunks of trees, also, are found drifting in the great currents of the ocean, perforated from end to end by the larvae of insects, and filled with the eggs of molluscs and fishes. At other times, they have been known to convey lizards and birds from land to land, and on the island of San Vincent there appeared once a huge boa constrictor, twisted around a large, healthy cedar-tree, with which it had been torn from its home in the primeval forests of Brazil, and swallowed several sheep before it could be killed by the astonished natives. The gulf-stream, it is well known, carried, more than once, dead bodies of an unknown race, with unu sually broad faces, to the Azores, and thus contributed to the discovery of our continent by confirming Columbus in his faith in the existence of a New World. Greenlanders and Esquimaux have even been carried alive across the Atlantic, and found themselves, to their amazement, on the coast of England.

Nor are these always individual journeys. Currents of air carry myriads of vegetable seeds, and with them countless eggs of insects and infusoria all over the world. To settle this formerly disputed question, a German philosopher, Unger, placed several plates of glass, carefully cleaned, between the almost air-tight double sashes with which he protected his study against the rigors of a fierce northern climate. Six months later, he took them out and examined the dust that had fallen on them through imperceptible cracks and crevices, with the microscope. The result was, that he discovered in the apparently inorganic dust the pollen of eight distinct plants, the seeds of eleven varieties of fungus, the eggs of four higher infusoria and living individuals of at least one genus!

in our next.)

I

CHAPTER I.

WAS at a party; where, is none of your business, and immaterial to the following relation. On second thoughts, however, as localization increases the interest of a narrative, I will say, at New York, in a Fifth-Avenue palace.

Perhaps it would be well to say something introductory about myself. I was twenty-five-between you and me, fair reader, I am not so very much older now-tall, well-formed, strong and active, both mentally and physically, and an extensive and omnivorous reader and student. The only trait of my character which has any special significance, relatively to the matter in hand is, that I have a considerable endowment of that magnetic power used in throwing "sensitives," as they are technically termed, into the mesmeric state, although I very seldom exerted it, and my possession of it was known, I believe, only to myself. Did it never happen to you, respected reader, when looking intently into a person's eyes during conversation, that you saw the thought, and even the very words, which passed through his or her mind, in comment or reply? The whole group of phenomena, of which that is one-embracing some classes of dreams, much mental action, animal magnetism, biology, the whole circle, in fact, of physico-psychological science-is, at this present writing, the most profound, comprehensively, multitudinously and variously related, the most promising, important and intensely interesting, and the least understood, of all the departments of human knowledge. I wish I could stop to indicate a few of the complex and astonishingly intimate ramifications by which this philosophy-the philosophy of the combined and reciprocal inter-action of mind and body, the wondrous march or border-territory whereon spirit and matter bear conflicting and contested sway-underlies and entwines itself with human interests and human actions. But that is not my present design; and for the narrator, especially, must hoc age be inscribed upon his pen. Mind this; not that, nor the other.

The relevancy of these remarks consists in this, namely: that the few circumstances which I propose to narrate are an actual exemplification of the

working of the laws to whose existence and influence I have alluded. I have permission from the lady most interested to record and publish them; for, however insignificant in themselves, they will, at least, form some portion of the archives from which a future generation is certainly to draw facts coöperative in constructing a fabric of universal philosophy, more marvellous in architecture and more immeasurably magnificent in dimensions, than any the wildest dream hitherto figured by the loftiest human intellect. This splendor, however, is of course. Systems of actual truth, the work of the All-powerful--as their awful vastness unveils itself before human eyes-must as much transcend the beauty and the size of the one-sided little elaborations of human minds, as the unimaginable splendors of evening clouds excel the blue and yellow dabs of that landscape-goat of a "paintaster," Skumble; as the great palaces of the heavens surpass the ecclesiological glories of the Wooden Gothic.

I had selected, according to my custom, a corner, from which I was making my ordinary use of the company, viz.: studying their lives from their faces, and working the detail of expressions and postures into connection with the preexistent mass of mental philosophy, whose acquisition and arrangement had been my study for years.

I

All the usual varieties of young men and women passed in review before the uninteresting person in the corner. was not dressed in fine raiment, wore no gloves, was not known as a "lion," known, indeed at all, to only two or three besides my cousin, the daughter of the house, and only very slightly known even to them and to her. So, nobody stopped to talk with me; and, as I had arranged with cousin Ellen to let me alone, save when I should ask to be introduced, I had a fair opportunity for my secret espials. It was a curious and entertaining spectacle, when rightly viewed. First, I generalized my eyesight-if the expression be allowableand gazed upon the moving mass before me, without reference to any particular individual. This, especially during the dances, furnished a droll spectacle. Such another may be observed by gazing in the same general manner at a church, all waving with fans, like a

flock of great butterflies over a bed of gay cabbages, on a hot Sunday in summer and another, more decided in character, by observing the simultaneous nutations of heads, fingers and arms in an orchestra. These effects are different from that of a band of marching men; for the entire body of these last moves forward by rhythmic progressions, while in the cases just instanced, the company considered together, is stationary; and the rhythmic movement of individual limbs and instruments throws only an atmosphere, as it were,

of ordered motion over the whole.

I threw out of consideration the bodies of the dancers, and only observed their heads. A strong volition of a few minutes' duration enabled me entirely to lose the remembrance of bodies, and to free myself from the sensations coming from the sound of the music; and so, from the silent motions of the dancers, and the accompanying expressions of the faces, in quadrille dances especially, there arose before me a spectacle of such intense absurdity that I was forced to break off my occupation to avoid an obtrusive laugh. I was beholding only faces, it will be remembered, as solely as if I had been looking at heads cut off. The expressions upon nearly all of them were of intense solemnity. Nearly upon a level, they bobbed up and down in couples and fours; swam about, cocking themselves oddly to one side or to the other; turned towards each other in the alternations of rest, and gibbered slightly; anon, launched forth again upon the inane vagaries of their solemn mummery. I nearly laughed aloud, but ceased gazing and, forthwith, grew angry. Apish phantasms of silly sport, the winking, wiggling heads were a fair representation of the earnestness with which the "first circles" bury themselves in the mindless frivolities of polite society. I was angry that the observances of fashion should be so much regarded, even by the brainless nobodies who gabbled and fluttered before me; and with a most expansive and ardent aspiration after the Apotheosis of Labor, I left the dancers to their aimless evolutions.

Then I made a similar experiment upon the heterogeneous volume of sounds that arose from the social hubbub of the rooms. Not listening to any single voice, I regarded only the clacking, clattering rattle that flowed turbulently up from so many voices, mingled with the

VOL. V.-10

monotonous dance-music of the two German fiddlers, the harpist and pianist, who officiated as orchestra. The din was stunning. It was as if the English language had been torn into ragged angular scraps and fragments, and vociferated at the utmost possible speed, and entirely at random, by the whole company. Now and then a shrill laugh, or one or two connected words loudly articulated, jumped up from the rough average of the confused noise. The harsh fiddle-notes darted and streamed up and down among the tumult, like so many vocal squibs; and the harp and piano were scarcely audible. A minute or two of such listening satisfied me, and I returned to my invidious business of watching my neighbors.

A flaxen-haired and flaxen-moustached dandy, whose unnaturally slender limbs, cased, secundum artem, in skintight pants, would almost qualify him for the workhouse under the vagrant laws, as "having no visible means of support," stood · diddling” (i. e., imitating the movements of a wretch in an ague-fit), after the approved fashion, and expending washy conversation and washier smiles upon a female counterpart. Two or three city damsels, very much alike, all having the fair complexions, slender forms and large fringed eyes, so common among metropolitan beauties, were giggling and chattering, in the enjoyment of that fluent ladies' talk so incomprehensible and unattainable to us stupid and slow-tongued men. Two or three wizzled antiques of the same sex mumbled sourly together upon a sofa. Several fat mothers conversed in awful conclave, on the other side of the room; and in the middle, the varying dances wove their interminable tangle.

With her back towards me, so near that I could almost hear her words, stood a tall young woman dressed in black, with magnificent shoulders and arms, with raven-black hair of great fineness, length and volume, and a dark but peculiarly transparent complexion. She was surrounded by several gentlemen, whom she seemed at no loss to entertain, at least so far as to bear her full share in the conversation, and in the commerce of wits, whatever they might be; for there seemed to be in the circle much laughter, though not of the pleasantest As I watched the group, I saw one and another of the gentlemen's faces redden, when the others laughed; one

sort.