always to produce upon his enharmonic organ insupportable passages. The more completely his apple was an apple, the less feasible was it to write it down a pear, and to imagine its nature and functions changed by this difference in the notation. H. G. NEGRO EMANCIPATION. A WINTER IN THE WEST INDIES. By J. H. Gurney. Murray.-After an absence of more than three years, devoted, as we are informed, chiefly to a "gospel mission " in different parts of North America and the West Indies; not however, without some worldly calculations of the benefits to be derived from change of air and a pleasurable excursion, Friend Gurney sits down to write a series of letters to Henry Clay, of Kentucky, on the actual results of negro emancipation in our West India colonies. These letters are unfortunately open to the suspicion of being written, not by an impartial observer, but by one who has a natural bias towards evidence exclusively in favour of the fulfilment of his own prophecies, and is more of a philanthropist than a philosopher or a politician. It is therefore more than probable that the facts contained in the volume before us will be doubted by many, and quite certain that their influence will be slow upon the minds of the planters of the Southern States. We believe, however, in the general truth of the statements in these letters, from which we shall make a few extracts, and congratulate ourselves and all lovers of their species upon the satisfactory progress of the coloured population in their newly-taught lessons of freedom and civilization : ST CHRISTOPHER's. "On my way I ventured to call at one of the estates, and found it was the home of Robert Claxton, the Solicitor-General of the colony, a gentleman of intelligence and respectability. He was kind enough to impart a variety of useful, and, in general, cheering information. One fact, mentioned by him, is highly encouraging. Speaking of a small property on the island belonging to himself, he said, ' Six years ago (that is, shortly before the act of emancipation), it was worth only 2,000l. with the slaves upon it. Now, without a single slave, it is worth three times the money. I would not sell it for 6,000l.' This remarkable rise in the value of property is by no means confined to particular estates. 66 'Wages, in this island, are from 7d. to 9d. sterling per day, besides the usual privileges; but the negroes have no difficulty in earning from 2s. to 3s. sterling per day by job work. Under this system, particularly, they perform a far greater quantity of work in a given time than could be obtained from them under slavery. When we called on our excellent friend, R. Cleghorn, a faithful and intelligent stipendiary magistrate, he summed up his favourable report of the labourers of St Christopher's by the following emphatic remark: They will do an infinity of work for wages.' ANTIGUA. "First month (January) 15th. How are the labourers going on?' said I to the pilot who brought us into port. Beautifully,' replied he; eight estates which had been broken up under slavery are now again in cultivation.' This information was afterwards substantially confirmed. Only six of these estates, however, had been broken up, namely, Potter's, Dunning's, Jenning's, Patterson's, Tranquil Vale, and Hill-house; the other two were stock farms. The whole eight are now under cultivation for sugar. It cannot be denied that the first fact of which we were informed respecting Antigua speaks volumes." DOMINICA. "The negroes of Dominica neither squat on the wild land, nor show any wildness themselves; the trifling unsettlement which took place at the date of full freedom soon subsided; and they are working in a quiet, inoffensive manner on the estates of their former masters. Their conduct,' says one of the stipendiaries (in his last report to the Governor-General, dated January 1, 1840), 'is orderly, quiet, and peaceable.' A second says, 'They continue to conduct themselves with every propriety;' a third observes that their general conduct is orderly and industrious.' The solution of the problem is easy. Educated, or uneducated, the negro loves his home, humble though it be, and has no wish to exchange it for a wild life upon the mountains. With equal sincerity he loves the silver mochos which are placed in his hands as the reward of his labour, and it is natural to him to work in order to obtain them." JAMAICA. "After visiting the Hope estate, we rode to an independent village consisting of the settlements of seventy families, who have purchased good plots of land, and have built, or are building for themselves, pretty comfortable cottages. We were glad to find that the men of this settlement are still working for wages on the neighbouring estates. Our friend Manning was with us, and the people at the village seemed very anxious to obtain, through his assistance, some permanent arrangement for a weekly religious service. The village appeared to us to be a scene of thrift and contentment. "How many dollars should I find in thy purse at home?' said a friend in our company to a young married negro, who was guiding us along one of the mountain passes. 'Should I find five?' 'Yes, sir,' replied he, and no great matter neither.' How very few of our labourers in England would be found with twenty shillings in their purse of spare money, was our reflection on the occasion. 666 Do you see that excellent new stone wall round the field below us?' said the young physician to me, as we stood at A. B.'s front door, surveying the delightful scenery; that wall could scarcely have been built at all under slavery or the apprenticeship; the necessary labour could not then have been hired at less than 51. currency, or fifteen dollars per chain. Under freedom it cost only from three dollars and a half to four dollars per chain-not one-third of the amount. Still more remarkable is the fact, that the whole of it was built under the stimulus of jobwork by an invalid negro, who, during slavery, had been given up to total inaction.' "With regard to the comparative expense of free and slave labour,' says Dr Stewart, I give you the result of my experience in this parish. Wherever rent and labour have not been mingled together, prices have been reduced, in the picking and curing of coffee, from one-third to one-half; from 10%. per tierce to from 51. to 61. 10s. Grass land is cleaned at one-third of the former expense. A penn in this neighbourhood, when cleaned in slavery, cost, simply for the contingencies of the negroes, 80%. The first cleaning by free labour-far better done-cost less than 241. Stone walls, the only fence used in this rocky district, cost 5l. 6s. 8d. per chain, the lowest 41. under slavery; the usual price is now 17., the highest 11. 6s. 8d. per chain. To prepare and plant an acre of woodland in coffee cost, twenty years ago, 201.; up to the end of slavery it never fell below 167.; in apprenticeship it cost from 10. 13s. 4d. to 12.; now it never exceeds 51. 6s. 8d. I myself have done it this year for 51.; that is the general price all through the district. In 1833 I hired servants at from 16l. to 251. per annum. In 1838, 1839, and since, I have been able to obtain the same description of servants, vastly improved in all their qualifications, for from 8l. to 10l. per annum.' These are pound, shilling, and pence calculations, but they develope mighty principles-they detect the springs of human action-they prove the vast superiority of moral inducement to physical force, in the production of the useful efforts of mankind. It is the perfect settlement of the old controversy between wages and the whip." Mr Gurney touches upon the causes of the discontents of the negroes, which in some instances worked at first unfavourably to the hopes of the abolitionists. These we have no space now to discuss. Independent of the peculiar information which it was the object of the volume to impart, we recommend the work to the reader as an unpretending agreeable sketch of a summer tour in a part of the world abounding with novelty and interest to Europeans. THE CITY OF THE MAGYAR; or, HUNGARY AND HER INSTITUTIONS IN 1839-40. By Miss Pardoe. In 3 vols. Virtue.-The title of this work shows an aiming after effect which is somewhat characteristic of the contents. For a faithful account of one of the most important states of Austria we should desire a greater simplicity of style, and a more sobered tone of description than we find in these volumes. The subject is too important to be treated with the licence permitted to a novelist. Miss Pardoe injures her own reputation by producing an impression that she is less anxious about her facts than the display of her powers. The reader is interested and amused, but feels doubtful whether he ought to rely implicitly upon the truths of the statements set down. With these drawbacks, it must be allowed that Miss Pardoe has produced three extremely pleasant and readable volumes, about a part of Europe with which the English public are but little acquainted. We have tales of banditti equal to any of romance, accounts of fearful inundations, striking sketches of river scenery, and some valuable statistical papers contributed by friends among the authorities of Hungary.. The Magyar, pronounced 'Măjar,' is the name of the original Hungarian race: by the City of the Magyar,' our readers are to understand Presburg; but the work contains quite as long an account of Buda, Pesth, and other towns of the Danube as of the former city. The first volume is embellished with another portrait of the fair authoress (our readers will remember the last in the City of the Sultan'); but this is a foible we must excuse in a lady, when we remember the naked bust of Bulwer, in the ‹ Pilgrims of the Rhine.' PHILOSOPHY. MORAL PHILOSOPHY, OR THE DUTIES OF MAN CONSIDERED IN HIS INDIVIDUAL, SOCIAL, AND DOMESTIC CAPACITIES. By George Combe. Longman and Co.-George Combe and Dr Andrew Combe are both talented writers, but not of equal merit, and it is of some importance that the public should learn not to confound the one with the other, as we find has sometimes happened. Dr Andrew Combe, whose physiological works are beyond all praise, and whose excellent treatise on the management of infancy we reviewed in our last number, is not the same with the author of Moral Philosophy. George Combe, the author of the present work, is known chiefly for his works on phrenology, and for the phrenological bias given to every subject upon which he has written. We have here a system of moral philosophy, like his 'Constitution of Man,' and' Popular Education,' founded upon phrenology. It is difficult to decide, when we take up a work by this author, whether to smile or to weep: to smile at the monomania that would find engraved upon the skull all the mysteries of the human mind, or to weep that, as in the case of Bishop Berkeley (who wrote both the theory of vision and a treatise on the virtues of tar water), the wisdom of the wisest among us should be sometimes mixed up with the wildest folly. The volume before us is really one which has made us angry,-angry that a work, which contains abundant evidence of great practical good sense, and many pages of which are worthy to form a text-book for educationists and statesmen, should yet be utterly spoiled by the harping of the writer constantly upon one string; his favourite idea,-that the science of all sciences is the science of phrenology. And with all deference to the opinion of our Scotch friends, who are many of them followers of Mr Combe, we deny that it has yet any claim to be considered a science. The basis of the theory, no doubt, is sound enough, The brain is an organ of the mind, and certain parts of the brain have certain functions, the exact nature of which may, perhaps, by long-continued observation and experiment, be ultimately to some extent ascertained. But it is little short of lunacy to jump from this to the conclusion that the brain is divided into thirty-five organs, each having a duplicate, and that the exact situation and functions of these are so accurately known, that the study of phrenology, with a view to choosing a wife, is the safest way to avoid unhappy marriages. Of the truth of this position, Mr Combe tells us, in his fifth chapter, he has the strongest possible conviction. Even on the subject of the currency, we find Mr Combe writing as follows: "The phrenologist, who knows the nature of the propensities and sentiments, is well able to conceive the deep though often silent agonies that must have been felt when acquisitiveness was suddenly deprived of its long-expected stores, selfesteem and love of approbation were in an instant robbed of all the pride, pomp, and circumstance of worldly grandeur, and when cautiousness felt the dreadful access of despair at the ruin of every darling project." A writer who can assume this style, not jestingly, but in sober earnest, would make us doubt our own identity, if our faith depended upon the credibility of his evidence as an experimental philosopher. He who can assume that the phrenological maps of the brain are as much to be relied upon for general reasoning as a chart of the British islands, betrays the fact that he has overlooked the effects of those crooks in the brain and cracks in the skull, of which, while thinking only of protuberances, he is entirely unconscious in his own person. The very nomenclature of the phrenologists is sufficient to throw doubt upon their best established facts. We are told of a faculty called "destructiveness," but there is nothing in human actions to show its existence. The child pulls its play-things to pieces from curiosity to see how they are made; the soldier fights for pay, for plunder, or the love of glory; the sportsman loves to boast of his skill, and bag his game; the butcher slaughters an ox to divide it into saleable joints; the murderer kills his enemy from revenge, or to rob him in greater safety; but in none of these cases do we discover an instinct for destructiveness, or a natural love of killing. Even revenge has more relation to obscure notions of justice than the mere pleasure of shedding blood, and destructive acts are simply means to an end, for which a destructive faculty is no more required than for turning to the right instead of to the left, or for any other act by which we pursue our path to a given object. The only faculty about which phrenologists show any doubt is "alimentiveness;" and, singular enough, this is the very faculty for which one would expect to find appropriated the largest space in the brain. What class of sensations are so numerous as those connected with taste and hunger? What faculty so much exercised as that which prompts us to take food? What, therefore, ought to be so largely developed if there be truth in the system? We have not now space to discuss the subject further. That our knowledge of the functions of the brain may one day grow into a science is possible and probable; but the foundations of such a science must be laid by more cautious observers and better metaphysicians than any phrenological writers who have yet appeared. H. POETRY. THE HOPE OF THE WORLD, AND OTHER POEMS. By Charles Mackay. R. Bentley.It is long since we have met with a volume of poems that has pleased us better than the work before us. Although it would be too much to say that it contains indications of the highest attributes of genius, it abounds with evidence of true poetic inspiration, and we are of opinion that there are few among his contemporaries from whom the author would not bear away the palm for distinguished merit. We differ, however, with Mr Mackay in his estimate of the comparative excellence of his different poems. We like least those of the most pretension, and would place last those which in his volume appear first in order. The Hope of the World' is tame and prosaical; the style smooth, but often laboured; the sentiments those of a good moral and Christian sermon, done by the author into verse. Many of the minor poems, however, are greatly to our taste. The following, as an example of sacred melodies, (although it reminds one somewhat of Moore, from whom probably the idea was taken,) has seldom been surpassed : "And thou, serenest moon, That, with such holy face, Dost look upon the earth Tell me, in all thy round Hast thou not seen some spot, Might find a happier lot? Behind a cloud, the moon withdrew in woe, And a voice sweet, but sad, responded, ' No!' "Tell me, my secret soul, O! tell me Hope and Faith, Is there no resting-place From sorrow, sin, and death? Is there no happy spot Where mortals may be bless'd Where grief may find a balm, And weariness a rest? Faith, Hope, and Love, best boons to mortals given, Waved their bright wings, and whisper'd, Yes! in Heaven!'" 'The Indian's War Song' is written with great spirit and power. We dislike |