may

be also one of those salutary operations of nature by which the effects of a too refined and artificial existence may be remedied; and thus our crowded and luxurious cities are yearly pouring out their thousands, who spread themselves over the uncultivated wilds of America and Australia.

We mark, however, a difference between the early and the later migrations of the human race. Formerly it was an operation of division and dispersion; feuds and animosities, no less than seas and mountains, rent nations asunder, and new languages as well as different habits and feelings kept them irretrievably separate. With emigration, too, for the most part, followed ultimate degradation. Seldom indeed did colonies go forth carrying improvement and increased civilization in their train,-so imperfect were the means of communication to distant regions, that when once a colony or a straggling party went forth from the parent stock, they were lost and forgotten. The multiplication of languages, and the excessive division and dispersion of tribes and nations, impeded vastly the acquisition of knowledge, and much of what had been accumulated by experience or locally acquired, was ultimately lost to the world.

A very different state of things seems now to have commenced. The human family seems to be consolidating rather than dispersing. There is no such event as the origination of a new language; and nations, if they are not actually uniting as regards territorial bounds, are becoming more and more one in opinion and in peaceful unanimity.

The extraordinary facilities of intercourse between nations, both by land and sea-the great modern triumph of art over space and time-is producing wonders in this respect. Who could have dreamed, two centuries ago, of crossing the Atlantic in twelve days, or of traversing the island of Great Britain in nearly as many hours! The time was, in the annals of the human race, that the emigration of Britons to North America would have given rise to a distinct colony of human beings, having a different language and different manners from the parent stock; but a common literature, common tastes and interests, and incessant intercourse, have all tended to preserve them the same,-a vast nation, now far exceeding in numbers that of the parent stock at the period when they separated.

It is scarcely within the bounds of probability to conceive another complete state of isolation over the habitable globe. Changes will inevitably occur-wars and commotions, and temporary interruptions; but hope bids us look for that period when knowledge shall extend from sea to sea, and illuminate all corners of the world. Yet pleasing as it is to contemplate this probable diffusion of intelligence, the analogies of the past, had

we no better grounds of hope, are not without forebodings for the future. Hitherto we have seen the nations of the earth rise in succession into power and intelligence, and, having obtained a maximum of perfection, sink again into sloth and ignorance. The tide of intelligence and national greatness has flowed in successive waves,-here swelling out for a time, and again subsiding, instead of pouring onward in an uninterrupted and increasing current. Where are now the mighty cities and empires of the earth? Babylon is forgotten. Nineveh, "that great city," lies silent, and undistinguished from the wastes around. Thebes and Luxor possessed their thousands of busy, ingenious, and refined inhabitants. All the arts calculated to benefit and adorn life were intimately known and practised by them. Neighbouring nations came and drank at the fountains of their knowledge. Merchants from afar crowded their marts with costly spices, oils, and precious stones. They lived in luxury, and reared mighty monuments to perpetuate their greatness, and palace-tombs to enshrine their embalmed bodies. But time has scattered all to oblivion, and the rude wandering Arab stalks over the solitary desolation. Where are the once numerous cities, like swarming hives, of Asia Minor? Where the Etruscan capitals, known only to posterity by the remnants of their mouldering tombs? Where the Greek and Roman commonwealths, where taste and refinement, fostered by unbounded wealth and power, rose to the most exquisite pitch of excellence? All are faded from the earth, and vanished as if they had never been. The history of the progress of nations is something like that of the individual. They begin with a youth of struggles,increase to a mature age in the path of improvement,-but some law of their constitution forbids a farther advance, and they gradually sink into the dotage and imbecility of old age. Nor, perhaps, would a more permanent prosperity be compatible with the destiny of man. Such an universal diffusion of intelligencesuch certain means of acquiring knowledge-such an uniform progress of society, would interfere with that probationary arrangement-that mixture of good and evil-which we are led to believe is the lot of man while upon earth.

If ever there was an era which held forth the promise, by the operations of natural means, of a general diffusion of intelligence over the globe, it is the present. The high perfection of the arts-the facilities of rapid conveyance-the influence of printing, and the awakened energies of society, all point in this direction. That the diffusion of true knowledge, and the awakening of an industrial activity in the general habits, with an expertness and proficiency in all the useful arts of life, must tend to benefit the great mass of society, there can be no doubt.

But we must beware of allowing ourselves to imagine that man, in the aggregate, is a being capable of unlimited improvement, or that all the knowledge to which he can possibly attain will ever raise the mind of the species above that point at which the Creator fixed its limits. With his present faculties of mind, the physical attainments of man must have a boundary, which it is by no means difficult to conceive or even to define. These faculties are adapted for the apprehension of effects or phenomena-not for the comprehension of ultimate causes. With all our knowledge of the facts of nature, we are totally in the dark as to a single cause. We speak of gravity and attraction, and organic forces-but these are mere sounds to stand in the place of actual knowledge. As long as effects alone are cognizable by man, he may go on accumulating his store of information, varying his pleasures in the comforts and necessaries of life, and diversifying his imaginative powers by turning these into various channels; but in the meantime his mind has not made a single step beyond its original boundaries-it has acquired a wider field to expatiate upon, and more numerous facts and analogies on which to ruminate, but its conceptions of ultimate causes, and its powers of reasoning remain the same. The probability is, that as great and powerful minds existed in times past as ever may yet fill the future records of fame. The mind of Socrates was as great as that of Newton, though the former was ignorant of the fact that the planets rolled round the sun in certain orbits and in certain periods. Archimedes probably had as much ingenuity of invention, and practical sagacity as Watt; and Homer luxuriated in his fertile fancy with as exquisite a richness as Shakspeare.

To conclude: A rich mine of research still awaits the student of ethnography. The late venerable Blumenbach first led the way; Prichard followed with all the ardour of youthful research, and, not allowing the subject to escape him through the anxious labours of a professional life, has in his late edition of his original treatise accumulated a vast store of highly interesting facts and speculations. The later volumes are particularly valuable, as containing a digest of the labours of several German writers on the subject.

Of the splendid monograph of Dr. Morton on American craniology, it is but justice to say, that, both in the letterpress and numerous accurate figures of native skulls, he has left nothing to be desiderated in the physical history of that interesting and now fast diminishing family of mankind.

We hail, too, the formation of the Ethnographic Society of London, and hope that its labours will tend to elucidate many facts in the history of races and nations.

ART. VIII.-KOZMOZ. A General Survey of the Physical Phenomena of the Universe. By BARON ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT. London, 1845.

WERE the republic of letters to alter its constitution, and choose a sovereign, the intellectual sceptre would be offered to Alexander Humboldt. The New World would send deputies across the Atlantic to assist at his installation, and the princes and the philosophers of every clime, the autocrats of the East and the democrats of the West,-would hail the enterprizing traveller who trod the mountain crests of Europe, ascended the American Cordilleras, and explored the auriferous beds of the Uralian chain. In this estimate of our author's position, we have not forgotten the renown of less popular though brighter names; but it is in the universality of genius, in the wideness of its range and the elevation of its flight, more than in its native originality and power, that we must look for the qualities of an intellectual leader. Leibnitz would have outstripped Newton in a contest for the empire of knowledge; and, as competitors for the throne of mind, Cuvier would have outdone Laplace. In the world of instinct, where physical energy alone is appreciated, we witness another rule. The sagacity of the elephant has not ranked him above his four-footed associates, nor has the wisdom of the raven been held a sufficient title to royal honours. The paw of the lion has vindicated his claim to the throne of the forest; and in the beak and talons of the eagle we recognize his right to the supremacy of the air.

The title of our author to such distinguished pre-eminence will be readily acknowledged by all who have followed him in his brilliant career as a traveller and a naturalist; and those who have known him only by the voice of fame, will recognize in the present work a mind richly gifted by nature, deeply versed in the science and literature of the age, stored with the varied knowledge which study and observation can supply, exercising the highest powers of combination and analysis, intensely alive to the beauty and grandeur of the material world, and thus qualifying its possessor to be the historian and the interpreter of inorganic nature, the expounder of her phenomena and laws,-the highpriest of her holiest mysteries, and the most enthusiastic yet humblest worshipper at her shrine.

It would be a task at once easy and agreeable to give a critical analysis of a work so remarkable both from its subject and from

its author; but such an analysis, unless on a scale which our allotted space could not permit, would be meagre and unsatisfactory, and would fail to convey to the reader any adequate idea either of the varied interest of the subject or of the talent and research which the author has brought to its discussion. We shall, therefore, endeavour to give a popular abstract of KOSMOS, separating what is speculative from what is true, contemplating great truths in their more striking phases, and thus persuading the reader to enter upon the study of the work itself, and of those branches of knowledge of which it is at once the blossom and the fruit.

But before commencing this important task, we are anxious to discharge the preliminary duty of giving our readers some information respecting the life and writings of Baron Humboldt, of which we believe no account is to be found in any English work. If the biography of distinguished men possesses a high interest when the grave has closed over their mortal remains, that interest is not less exciting when the sage is yet sensible to the voice of praise, and can receive the homage of fellow labourers who have toiled along with him, or of affectionate disciples whom he has instructed and amused. If this instruction and that amusement have been derived from the establishment of great truths, from the description of new and striking phenomena, or from the development of general laws, lifting the soul from nature to its Author, and preparing it for its final destination,we know not whether the teacher or the taught will have most reason to rejoice. In this noble enterprize for the abatement of intellectual pauperism and the relief of mental indigence, there has been no such successful labourer as Baron Humboldt. From every zone of the terraqueous globe he has gathered and presented to us all the flowers and fruits of knowledge. On its giant mountain tops, whether tipped with fire or with snow; on its verdant and flowering savannahs, on its burning plains, and in its dark and rugged caverns, he has studied and embalmed nature in all her loveliness and sublimity. Every European community has drawn into its vernacular streams the pure fountains which he has opened up for their use; and now in the seventy-sixth year of his age, and at the close of his intellectual life, he has bequeathed to posterity, in the work before us, the light and heat of its bright and glorious sunset.

Frederick Henry Alexander Humboldt was born at Berlin on the 14th September 1769, and was a younger son of a noble,

*

His elder brother, who was born in 1767, was Charles William Baron Humboldt, celebrated for his literary acquirements. He was Minister of State, Chamberlain, and Privy Councillor to the King of Prussia.