tain two knives in place of one by simple traffic. The Australian is already trafficking with the colonist and beginning his lesson of want and supply. There is no regeneration in all this, though the difference between the parties may be as great as between Newton and an ape. It is all progress, and man, when he has made some considerable advance, never reverts to his earliest state. Nowhere has knowledge once stamped on the mind among a people been obliterated. The solitary savage returns to his woods when his sojourn has been short, and his mind unaffected with civilised life, but once having travelled a little way onwards, he returns no more, especially when he discovers that his utmost strength is weakness before the civilised man. This is not a regeneratio' but an advance.

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In nations that have fallen from mental culture into low pursuits, or have been subjugated by barbarous conquerors, or oppressed by the vicious and powerful, in some corner of such a country, where all appears neglect and depression, knowledge has been kept alive in the retired chamber, and the solitary student has preserved the sacred fire until the evil time had gone past. Before the invention of printing, the efforts of those who would extinguish knowledge was often partially successful, but the facility of multiplying copies obviated for ever the danger of the extinction of the labours of the mind by demoralising power, rendering its progression in the mass more rapid, and retrocession impossible.

The notion that our present enlightenment is but a "regeneration" is an error, unless it be admitted that modern discoveries, the experimental philosophy of Bacon, the revelations of Newton, Locke, and other great men, have only been repetitions; that chemistry and geology, to go no further, and all we know connected with the sciences, have been lost, and are gradually coming to light again. The thing is too absurd, and can only be set down among those weaknesses of writers who are ready to credit, and advance upon credit, anything novel which is not even specious. There have not been wanting those who asserted that Solomon wrote the "Iliad," and that some species of fish are only acci dentally mortal. There is still one great fact, it must be acknowledged, that remains unchanged from the past time, neither a "regeneration" nor a progress, and that is the small value set upon truth and reason by the multitude, and the impenetrable character of its credulity in place of its enlightenment by the abundant means scattered upon every hand for that desirable purpose. Spiritualism, table-rapping, mesmerism, mormonism, phrenology, fortune-telling, and the like, are evidences not of the revival of the superstitions of the ancients, so much as of the stolidity of the moderns, seeing that some of these delusions are purely figments, in behalf of which even the Germans cannot make out a case of reproduction or "regeneration" by any mode of torturing their dreamy ideas into realities. Here we must leave to the enjoyment of their own obscure vision the advocates of the doctrine of our existing progress being no more than a "regeneration," believing, to parody the words of Galileo, "the world moves for all that!"

END OF VOL. CXIX.

C. WHITING, BEAUFORT HOUSE, STRAND.