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work, we have endeavoured to convey to the reader some notion of the rich store of interesting matter it contains. The chemist, the physiologist, the medical man, and the agriculturist, will all find in this volume many new ideas and many useful practical remarks. It is the first specimen of what modern organic chemistry is capable of doing for physiology; and we have no doubt that, from its appearance, physiolo

force produces mechanical effects in the animal body is altogether unknown, and is as little to be ascertained by experiment as the connection between chemical action and the phenomena of motion which we can produce with the galvanic battery. All the explanations which have been attempted are merely representations or descriptions, more or less accurate, of the phenomena, and comparisons of known phenomena with these unknown ones. In this respect we resemble the ignorant man, to whom the motion of an iron piston-rod in a cylinder, in which the eye can detect no visible agent, and its connec-gy will date a new era in her advance. We tion with the turning of thousands of wheels at a distance from the piston-rod, appear incomprehensible.

We know not how a certain something, in itself invisible and imponderable, namely, heat, gives to some bodies the power to exert an enormous pressure on surrounding objects; we know not even how this something is produced,

when we burn wood or coal.

'So it is with the vital force, and with the phenomena presented by living bodies. The cause of these phenomena is not chemical attraction; it is not electricity-nor magnetism: it is a force which possesses the properties common to all causes of motion and of change in

the form and structure of matter; and it is a peculiar force, because it exhibits manifestations not to be found in any of the other forces.'

The remaining sections contain the application of the principles developed in this one to the investigation of the modifications in waste and supply which characterize the vital processes in infancy, in adult age, and in old age; they offer to us besides a theory of health and of disease, in the most general sense; and finally an elaborate research into the means by which the blood in the lungs is enabled to absorb oxygen and to convey it to those parts where it is to be employed in the vital transformations. These sections are probably the portions of the work which will attract the greatest share of attention among physiologists, but it would be unfair to the author to give an imperfect account of his striking and original views on such subjects, and more we could not attempt in this already too long article. The Appendix contains a large number of the most recent and accurate analyses, which constitute the evidence on which the conclusions of our author are founded. Among other things it includes extracts from a most ingenious paper by Gundlach, on the production of wax from sugar by the bee. Professor Liebig has throughout been most conscientious in quoting his authorities, and in giving due credit to his predecessors and cotemporaries.

have reason to know that the work, when in progress, at all events the more important parts of it, were submitted to Müller of Berlin, Tiedemann of Heidelberg, and Wagner of Göttingen, the most distinwithout inferring that these gentlemen are guished physiologists of Germany; and in any way pledged to the author's opinions, we may confidently state that there is but one feeling among them as to the vast importance of chemistry to physiology at the present period: and that they are much gratified to see the subject in such able

hands.

ART. V.-Journal of a Tour in Greece and the Ionian Islands. By William Mure of Caldwell. 2 vols. 12 mo. Edinburgh and London. 1842.

GooD sense and good taste will enliven the most barren, and freshen the most wornout, subject. Mr. Mure's Journal is not only the work of a shrewd and intelligent observer, and of a sound though modest scholar, but withal a very pleasant book. He is neither too rapid nor too elaborate in his descriptions; his classical illustration is apposite and copious, but without pedantry; and his glimpses of the existing state of things in the new Hellenic Kingdom apparently just and discriminating. He is no romantic Philhellene, yet inclined to judge the leaders in the war of freedom, as well as the young kingdom of Greece, with fairness and candour.

Travels in Greece are now inevitably doomed, like the country itself, to this singular and ill-harmonised contrast of the grey and venerable Ancient with the glaring and unimposing Modern. The ruins were doubtless far more solemn and picturesque when nothing was seen but an indolent and turbaned Turk reclining among shattered pedWhile we have given but a very imper-iments and fallen pillars, not disturbing the fect sketch of this original and profound grave stillness, but with the contrast of his

barbaric costume heightening as it were, I discovered cities, and the wrecks of its oftenthe classic grace of the broken statues or misnamed temples, when all the mysterious mutilated reliefs, and almost deepening, by gloom of centuries of devastation brooded showing into what hands Greece had fall-over them,-when the region was as it en, the melancholy emotions of decay and were, one vast Campo Santo, a land of desolation. The associations which stirred hoary but sacred sepulchres, with scarcely within at the thought of what Greece had a sound of life, and peopled only with been-Greece, the wreck of whose religion the shadows of the mighty dead. No appeared in those pillars of unrivalled height doubt we shall gain much in the accuracy or exquisite proportion-Greece, the sculp- of our knowledge. The German scholars, tor of those living forms, fragments of which who are encouraged by the court of Athens, strewed the ground-Greece, whose his- will explore every site,measure every buildtory was crowding on the memory with all ing, and assign every temple to its proper its stately and heroic names, whose poetry gods, (and we are the last to speak disdainwas sounding within our hearts, and whose fully of this kind of erudition); but much, we philosophy perhaps had been our favourite fear, of the romance of classic pilgrimage study-what that Greece had been was (if we may couple such words) will be lost; more forcibly displayed by what it was, the we shall be less able to realize the Greece dominion of that utterly unintellectual Bar- of older times; the imagination, the only barian, the possession of a rude iconoclastic restorer of the past, will be checked in its Mahometan. We doubt whether all this re-creative energies, and perhaps, knowing was not far more congenial to the frame of far more, we shall understand less of the mind in which he who was worthy to Greece of our youthful adoration and our gaze on the ruins of Greece contemplated maturer reverence. those memorials of the past, than now that We shall endeavour to keep Mr. Mure's they are peopled by the busy and bustling classical studies, as far as we may, apart so-called descendants of the Athenian and from his observations on the present state the Spartan, or shown by guides and con- of things in Greece. We are indebted to servators appointed for the purpose by a him for some very happy illustrations Secretary of State. As to the actual re- of ancient authors, especially of Homer. mains of ancient buildings, they likewise The first place, indeed, on which he trod were perhaps safer under the contempt- the poetic region of Greece was Ithaca; uous neglect of the Turk, his superstitious and we looked not without interest to the awe of those haunted places, or his jealousy opinions of a scholar, so sensible and well of those supposed treasure-houses of buried informed, on the great Homeric question wealth, than when they are built about by connected with the kingdom of Ulysses. modern dwellings, and enclosed perhaps We acknowledged ourselves (some years in lines of regular streets. The Turk might since) somewhat disturbed by the arguoccasionally use them as a quarry when he ments of a certain Professor Völcker, who wanted stone, or pound their fragments in- had thrown very great doubts on the to mortar; and if decay, storm, or accident Homeric geography of these Islands.* We threw them down, he would take no pre- have since read the reply to those doubts caution to preserve them: but at least they by General Rühle von Lilienstern, which escaped the greatest danger-restoration. has in a great degree restored our peace of In fact desolation is the proper accompani- mind, and brought us back to the orthodox ment of ruins; repose, silence, remoteness Homeric faith; though we are still somefrom the haunts of men, even difficulty of what embarrassed by the disappearance of access, are required to give them their full Dulichium. This indeed was a difficulty influence over the mind. Even scenery which had puzzled Strabo and Pausanias which is hallowed by great events is dese- before us, and we presume we must concrated and vulgarised by intrusive modern tent ourselves with placing it as part of, change. We have every ardent wish for or as connected with, the mainland at the the prosperity of the Græco Bavarian king- mouth of the Achelous. But we are now dom; we hope that the subjects of King fully convinced that the ancient Ithaca need Otho, when they have thoroughly cast off not be banished, as by Völcker, to the exthe slough of their long servitude, may be-treme west of the whole group of islands, come a free, enlightened, and happy peo- but may be restored to its traditionary site ple; but, as lovers of elder Greece, and even in the island which has so long borne the as archæologists, we confess that we envy those who explored its wild oracular glens and fabled mountains, the sites of its dimly

name.

Quarterly Review, vol. xliv.

clamours of the whole assembly; he would have been rejected as an impudent liar, rather than as a bad poet. So, if he described scenes and places well known to his audience, any important deviation from truth would have been resented as an attempt to abuse their faith, to impose upon them by an idle deception,; and it would have been equally dangerous to have departed from the received historic traditions. These, indeed, might receive some poetic elevation; the heroes might be raised to a higher eminence of power, valour, or dignity, and their honoured descendants would not be too nice in their reception of this more or less delicate or ingenious flattery. The founder of a lineage might be brought down from the gods, or carried up to them, without any remonstrance on their part against the poetic apotheosis. But still they would require adherence to the well-known outlines of his deeds, strict accuracy in the genealogical tree, and fidelity to all the more memorable transactions of their ascertained ancestors' lives. In religious matters the poet would be allowed a wider range. From the infinite richness of mythological legend he might adopt what would suit his purpose; and, however wonderful the fable, religious awe would forbid the hearer from supposing but that it might be true. Gods mingling in the affairs of men, gods with human passions, and not impassive to wounds from human hands, were within the range of popular belief, and no man would venture to take offence at the improbability of such stories. Such an unnatural and untimely sceptic would have been in danger, like Socrates at a later period, of a charge of infidelity and atheism. Provided the true mythic character of each deity was preserved-the attributes assigned according to the general traditionary faith-provided no foreign gods were introduced into the legitimate hosts of Olympus-the field of wonder and of preternatural power lay open to the poet; and in one sense, therefore, Homer might indeed be, as he is said to have been, the inventor of the Grecian mythology, not as having created a single deity, or, unless as bearing on the direct action of his poems, attributed a single act, unauthorised by traditionary acceptance, to any one of the acknowledged deities; but as having popularised and made common to the whole of Greece the tutelar deities of the separate states and races, as having moulded up the countless local traditions and national legends into something like a general system; as having collected all the scattered divini

This is no trivial and unimportant question to those who feel, like ourselves, unexhausted interest in all which throws light on the history of the two great poems of antiquity, or rather on that of poetry itself. It is intimately connected with the person ality of Homer, with the unity of the poetry, that is, its composition by one master-mind, the native place of the poet, and the parts of Greece in which the Odyssey, at least, if not the Iliad, was recited in the courts of the heroic kings. It involves the extent of the Greece of the heroic ages, the limits to which their early federation reached, the boundaries of their acquaintance with the circumjacent regions. Was Ithaca within or without these boundaries? If the descriptions in the Odyssey are altogether loose and inaccurate; if the relative situation of Ithaca with regard to the other isl ands, not according to strict geographical rule, but the ordinary observation of the common voyager, is entirely wrong, if the localities in the island itself, as they appear in the poem, are irreconcilable with the permanent form, structure, and character of the land; if there are no indenting bays; if the whole shore is a flat, level sand, where sea-nymphs could have found no rocks in which to form their grottoes; if there be no site for the city which would answer to the vivid description of the poet,-then Ithaca must be altogether excluded from the Greece with which his hearers were familiar: it was, if not an imaginary island, one the fame of whose existence had dimly reached the popular ear, and which was the lawful domain, we say not of poetic invention, but of any vague conception which the poet might form from common rumour, or the floating intelligence derived from adventurous voyagers. For, it must be borne in mind that Homeric poetry offers itself to the hearer as truth; truth, that is within the limited sphere of the hearer's knowl edge. The Muses are the daughters of memory, not of invention; the poet of those days is the sole historian, and, in a great degree, amenable to the laws of history. The poetic privilege of unreality, of avowed fiction, is altogether of a later period, when poetry has begun to be an artificial and conventional amusement. In everything, therefore, regarding common life, the work would be subjected to the most rigid, though Intuitive, criticism. If the poet of the Iliad, among his warrior hearers, had represented a man slain outright by a blow, which they had often given and received in battle without being much the worse for it, he would have been silenced by the contemptuous

ties of the whole region into one Olym- | In estimating the amount or value of this cor

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respondence, he will also bear in mind how unreasonable it were to exact from the poet of any age, although possessed of the closest personal of action, the rigid accuracy of the land-surveyor, familiarity with the district selected for his scene or to deny him the privilege of his profession, even in his description of real objects, to depart a little from the truth, where a slight variation of site or appearance was necessary to their full effect. To pronounce, therefore, as some have done, in the face of so great a mass of general evidence to the contrary, that Homer had no personal knowledge of Ithaca, because the more fastidious commentator may find difficulty in arranging on his classical atlas, consistently with fountain of Arethusa, or the port of Phoreys, were almost as unreasonable as to deny the "Author of Waverley" any personal knowledge of Scotland, because of an equal difficulty of identifying the bay of Ellangowan or the castle of Tillietudlem.

Anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders.' It is curious that the few circumstances which had reached Homer relating to the Eastern and civilized part of the ultra-existing appearances, the hut of Eumæus, the Grecian world are mainly correct-the hundred gates of Thebes, the manufactures of Sidon; but the western coast of Africa, and the yet scarcely discovered Sicily,everything indeed west of Ithaca,—is peopled with lotus-eaters, Cyclopes, with halfdivine nymphs, and dim swarms of departed spirits.

In which world then does Ithaca lie-in the realm of Greek familiar knowledge, or in the wide and undiscovered ocean? When the poet of the Odyssey described the bays, the havens, the landing-places, the city of this island, did he draw directly from nature, or remotely from imagination? Were his hearers as ignorant, generally, of the situation of these islands, and of their outline and character, as of the coasts of Sicily or Italy? If either the one or the other had ever visited this region, the general features will be found consistent with truth. If they are utterly and inexplicably wrong both as to its situation and its permanent outline, the author of the Odyssey may have been a Peloponnesian, or at least have repeated his poems at the courts of the Peloponnesian kings; but the commerce with these islands must have been precarious and unfrequent-they must have lain beyond the usual coasting adventure of the young navigators of the mainland.

But there can be no reasonable doubt that the modern Theaki is the Ithaca of Homer. Let us hear the opinion of Mr. Mure, the latest, and certainly not the least intelligent and impartial, writer who has brought his personal observation to bear upon this question:

'Equally unwarrantable, on the other side, are the attempts of the more orthodox school of Homeric interpreters to force on existing objects or localities a closeness of harmony with his description, such as was, doubtless, as little congenial to his own taste as conducive to the interest of his poem; and this over-subtilty, as work of Gell, the patriarch of modern Ithacan displayed in the elegant but not very critical topographers, is among the chief causes that have led some of his successors into the opposite extreme. For my own part, I confess that, while nothing can be more delightful than to recognize a strong general resemblance between the descriptions of scenery contained in any poetical which they refer, it would tend but little to enwork of deep interest, and the real localities to hance this pleasure could I be convinced of the accuracy of all their minutest details, even to the back-door, kitchen-offices, and draw-well of the hero's dwelling.'-Vol. i., pp. 60, 61.

We are, perhaps, inclined to allow less latitude to the actual fiction of which a poet, like Homer, might claim the privilege; but we think that, especially in the more distant and, as it were, outlying parts of his picture, he might content himself with appearances, and these appearances as surveyed by a poetic vision, disposed to find what might suit the exigencies of the story. So with regard to the main difficulty, the island of Asteris, where the suitors concealed their galley as they lay in ambush for Telemachus in the strait between Cefalonia and Ithaca. There is, it seems, a rock The impression which a personal visit to this called Dyscallio, but it is small and low; island can hardly fail to leave on the mind of the and, instead of having a port on each side, Now we can impartial student of Homer is, that, so great is has no harbour whatever. the general resemblance between its natural perfectly understand that Homer, however features and those of the one described in the familiar with Ithaca, may never actually Odyssey, the difficulty is, not so much to discover have sailed round Dyscallio; and, even if in each case a bay, rock, cavern, or mountain answering to his description, as to decide, among his songs were recited in Ithaca, may have the many that present themselves, on the precise surmised that the Ithacans in general, one which he may happen to have had in view. though constantly in sight of the island,

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VOL. LXX.

10

might have known no more of its actual conformation. It is perhaps no violent liberty-(less so we think than to make Asteris, from A and £TEP=unsteady-a floating island, created by Homer for the occasion, as Mr. Mure proposes)-to conjecture that Dyscallio in the bard's days may have been somewhat larger and better suited to his description. This is Strabo's opinion, who would rather have recourse to this kind of natural change than to the ignorance or the licence of poetic fiction, κατάψευσιν τῶν τόπων κατὰ τό μυθῶδες. But if this be inadmissible, the hollowing out, as it were, of a port with two entrances, or a kind of open roadstead, the λιμένες ναύλοχοι, ἀμφίδυμοι under the lee of that small rocky island, as it is described by the poet, σa-ov μeyákn -would be no unpardonable deception of the poetic eyesight, a stretch of the fancy which would hardly be detected by the hearer best experienced in the navigation of these straits. We admit that Dyscallio actually lies rather too far to the north; but even this, if we consider the manner in which these small rocky islands loom upon the sight, when seer. from different points; and perhaps allowing for the clearness of the atmosphere, which would enable the ambushed suitors to descry the bark of Telemachus immediately that it put forth from the shore,-this, with but a little voluntary or involuntary ignorance in the poet, a little intentional or unintentional self-deception by the fancy, would account fully for the slight inexactitude, without seriously impeaching either the general knowledge or the fidelity of the historical poet.

With regard to the mountains of Ithaca -the Neritos and the Neios-there is little difficulty in their identification. Even Mr. Mure's more sober judgment was struck with the singular coincidence of the spot assigned by Sir W. Gell for the residence of the swineherd Eumæus.

On the summit of the cliff is a small rocky plain, interspersed with olive-groves and straggling "kalyvia," or farm-cottages. As a site for the dwelling of Eumæus, the spot corresponds well with the Belvedere, or " place of open prospect," which Homer assigns to that establishment. The face of the cliff is also hollowed out at its summit in various places, partly by nature, partly perhaps by art, into open cavities or sheltered terraces, where we might figure the swineherd reposing as the poet describes him:

"Encircled by his cloven-footed flock,

From Boreas safe beneath the hollow rock." The proposal to place the residence of Eumæus on the little plain above the precipice also realizes in a very lively manner to the apprehension the spirit of Ulysses' protestation to the old man,'

that, if his tale turned out to be false, he might
punish him by throwing him from the top of the
neighbouring cliff. Gell's account of the exact
correspondence of the present generation of rustic
swineherd is probably itself a little poetical.
dwellings to the poet's description of that of the
Yet even those I saw presented, it must be al-
lowed, some curious points of resemblance.
They consist of one, or at the most two, oblong
cottages, sometimes with a "circular court"
contiguous, surrounded by a fence, which, al-
though neither "lofty," "large," nor "beautiful,"
corresponds closely in other respects to that de-
scribed by Homer; being a rude wall, "built
with loose stones," and "crowned" with a che-
vaux de frise of "dead thorns," or other prickly
plants. The same style of fence is still very
generally used both in Greece and Italy: in the
latter country, for example, it is common round
of Rome. Vol. i., pp.68-70.
the vineyards in the retired parts of the interior

We are indebted to Mr. Mure for the more distinct and satisfactory solution of the most important of the Homeric geographical problems as relates to Ithaca-the situation of the city of Ulysses. On which side of the island was it to be placed? There are strong arguments for the east and for the west. It was, in fact, quietly observes Mr. Mure, on both :

"The ruins of the city of Ulysses are spread over the face of a precipitous conical hill, called Aetó, or the "eagle's cliff," occupying the whole breadth of the narrow isthmus which connects which is here not more than half a mile across. the two main sub-divisions of the island, and The walls stretch from N. W. to S. E.; their form is that of an irregular triangle the apex of which is the acropolis, or castle of Ulysses, by pre-eminence, crowning the extreme summit or peak of the mountain, and about as bleak and dreary a spot as can well be imagined for a princely residence. There can, therefore, be little doubt that this is the place to which Cicero so emphatically alludes as the city of Ithaca, in eulogising the patriotism of the hero:-"Ut Ithacam illam, in asperrimis saxis tanquam nidulum affixam, sapientissimus vir immortalitati anteponeret," "That wisest of men, who preferred his own Ithaca, perched like a bird's-nest among the most rugged of precipices, even to immortality."

of Opiso Aetó, towards Cefalonia, is the best
'On each side of the isthmus is a port. That
which the channel shore of the island sup-
plies. The hill of Aetó is separated by two
their upper extremities, from the ridge of Ste-
small valleys, connected by a narrow neck at
fano, already noticed as the highest of the
southern division of the island, and identified by
Gell with the ancient Neius. Admitting the
accuracy of this view, nothing can be more ap-
Under-Neius"
propriate than the epithet
(Tovnov,) applied by Telemachus to his resi-
dence; for the mountain, in fact, covers Aeto to
the south and east, which consequently may be
said to "lie under it," both as regards shade
and shelter.

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