comment. We have ample passages from Professor Silliman's journal, and from an autobiographical memoir written during his last years, as well as extracts from his letters and the letters addressed to him. It is an easy and pleasant way of writing personal history, and it would be an easy and pleasant way of reading it, if life were as long as art. But we fear that the popular usefulness of this work and the biography of the eminent man who did so much to popularize science should be in the hands of all-must be impaired by its magnitude; and we are disposed to regret that Professor Fisher did not think fit to reject that part of the correspondence which contributes nothing to the movement of the narrative or the development of character, and condense much of that material which has only a value reflected from the interest already felt in Professor Silliman. These are faults in a work from which we have risen with a clear sense of the beauty and goodness, as well as the greatness, of the eminent scientist. It is admirable to see how his career, begun in another century and another phase of civilization, ended in what was best and most enlightened and liberal in our own time. A man could hardly have started from better things, or been subject at important points of his progress to better influences. Benjamin Silliman was of Revolutionary stock, which had its roots in the soil of the Reformation. The Connecticut Puritan came of Tuscan Puritans, who fled their city of Lucca, and finally passed from Switzerland through Holland to our shores. Brain and heart in him were thus imbued with an unfaltering love of freedom, chastised by religious fervor; and when he became a man, he married with a race of kindred origin in faith, sentiment, and principles. He advanced with kis times in a patriotic devotion to democracy and equality, but he seems to have always kept, together with great simplicity of character, the impression of early teaching and associations, and something of oldtime stateliness and formality. His youth, like his age, was very sober, modest, and discreet. The ties which united him to his family were strong; and he loved his mother, who long survived his father, with the reverent affection of the past generation. He inherited certain theological principles from his parents, and never swerved from them for a moment. Some friendships came down to him from his fa

There was in this grave youth the making of many kinds of greatness. He who became so eminent in science could have been a great jurist, for he had the tranquillity and perseverance necessary to legal success; he could have been a great statesman, for his political views were clear and just and far-reaching; he wrote some of the most popular books of travels in his day, and he could have shone in literature; while he appears to have been conscious of the direction in which a sole weakness lay, and with early wisdom forsook the muse of poetry. He tells us that it was no instinctive preference which led him to the study and pursuit of the natural sciences, but the persuasion of Dr. Dwight, who was President of Yale in Silliman's twenty-third year, and who opened this career to him by offering him the Professorship of Chemistry, then about to be established. At that time Silliman was studying law; but, once convinced that he can be of greater use to himself and others in the way proposed, he enters it and never looks back; goes to Philadelphia to hear the learnedest professors of that day; goes to Europe for the culture unattainable in this country; overcomes poverty in himself and in Yale; will not be tempted from New Haven by the offer of the Presidency of the University of South Carolina, but devotes himself to a generous study of science, to the diffusion of scientific knowledge, and the promotion of the greatness of the institution to which he belongs. His devotion is not blind, however: he finds time to write attractive accounts of his voyages to Europe, to concern himself in religious affairs, to sympathize and cooperate with whatever is noble and good in political movements. He lives long enough to enjoy his fame, to see Yale prosperous and great, and his country about to triumph forever over the evil of slavery, which he had hated and combated. It was a noble life, simple, pure, and illustrious, - and its history is full of instruction and encouragement.

Fifteen Days. An Extract from EDWARD COLVIL'S Journal. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.

THIS is a work of fiction, in which the passion of love, so far from being the prime motive, as in other fictions, does not enter at all. The author seeks to reach, without other incident, one tragic event, and endeavors to make up for a want of adventure by the subtile analysis of character and the study of a civil problem. The novelty and courage of the attempt will attract the thoughtful reader, and will probably tempt him so far into the pages of the book, that he will find himself too deeply interested in its persons to part from them voluntarily. The national sin with which the author so pitilessly deals has been expiated by the whole nation, and is now no more; but its effects upon the guilty and guiltless victims, here alike so leniently treated, remain, and the question of slavery must always command attention till the question of reconstruction is settled.

In "Fifteen Days " the political influences of slavery are only very remotely considered, while the personal and social results of the system are examined with incisive acuteness united to a warmth of feeling which at last breaks forth into pathetic lament. Is not the tragedy, of which we discern the proportions only in looking back, indeed a fateful one? A young New-Englander, rich, handsome, generous, and thoroughly taught by books and by ample experience of the Old World and the New to honor men and freedom, passes a few days in a Slave State, in the midst of that cruel system which could progress only from bad to worse; to which reform was death, and which with the instinct of self-preservation punished all open attempts to ameliorate the relations of oppressor and oppressed, and permitted no kindness to exist but in the guise of severity or the tenderness of a good man for his beast; which boasted itself an aristocracy, and was an oligarchy of plebeian ignorance and meanness; which either dulled men's brains or chilled their hearts. In the presence of this system, Harry Dudley lingers long enough to rescue a slave and to die by the furious hand of the master,

-a

man in whose soul the best impulse was the love he bore his victim, and in whom the evil destiny of the drama triumphs.

From the conversation of Harry and the botanist, his friend, the author retrospectively develops in its full beauty a character illustrated in only one phase by the episode which the passages from Edward Colvil's journal cover, while she sketches with other touches, slight, but skilful, the people of a whole neighborhood, and the events of years. Doctor Borrow, the botanist, is made to pass, by insensible changes, from a learned indifference concerning slavery to eloquent and ardent argument against it, and thus to present the history of the process by which even science, the coldest element of our civilization, found itself at last unconsciously arrayed against a system long abhorrent to feeling. In the Doctor's talk with Westlake, we have a close and clear comparison of the origin and result of the civilizations of New England and the South, the high equality of the North and the mean aristocracy of the Slave States, and the Doctor's first perfect consciousness of loving the one and hating the other. The supposititious Mandingo's observations of the state of Europe at the time of opening the African slave-trade form a humorous protest against judgment of Africa by travellers' stories, and suggest more than a doubt whether the first men-stealers were better than their victims, and whether they conferred the boon of a higher civilization upon negroes by enslaving them. But the humor of the book, like its learning, is subordinated to the story, which is imbued with a sentiment not wanting in warmth because so noble and lofty. The friendship of Colvil and Dudley is less like the friendship between two men, than the af fectionate tenderness of two women for each other; and the character of Dudley in its purity and elevation is sometimes elusive. The personality of Colvil is also rather shadowy; but the Doctor is human and tangible, and the other persons, however slightly indicated, are all real, and bear palpable witness, in their lives, to the influences of that system which, though cruel to the oppressed, wrought a ruin yet more terrible in the oppressor.

THE 'HE strictly professional man may have overcome his natural aversion to some of the most interesting objects of his study, such as snakes, and toads, and spiders, and vermin of all kinds; but people in general have always required that any attempt to force such abominations upon their notice should be preceded by a more or less elaborate and humble acknowledgment of their hideous aspect, their ferocious disposition, their dark and bloody deeds, and the utter impossibility of their conducing in any way to human comfort and convenience.

But, while admitting the truth of much that has been thus urged against spiders as a class, I must decline, or at least defer, conforming to custom in speaking of the particular variety which we are about to consider, and I believe that it will need only a glance at the insect and its silk, and a brief notice of its habits, to justify my indisposition to follow the usual routine.

Without apology, then, I shall endeavor to show that in the structure, the habits, the mode of growth, and, above all, in the productions of this

spider are to be found subjects worthy the attention of every class of minds; for to the naturalist is exhibited a species which, though not absolutely new to science, was never seen nor heard of by Professor Agassiz till the spring of 1865, and which is so narrowly circumscribed in its geographical distribution that, so far as I can ascertain, it was never observed by Hentz, a Southern entomologist, who devoted himself particularly to spiders, and is met with only upon a few low, marshy islands on the coast of South Carolina, and perhaps of other Southern States. Its habits, too, are so interesting, and so different in many respects from those recorded of other species, that the observer of living creatures has here an abundant opportunity, not only for increasing his own knowledge, but for enlarging the domain of science. And this more especially in America; for while, in England, Blackwall and others have been laboring for more than thirty years, spiders seem to have received little attention on this side of the Atlantic.

We have now, moreover, in our ob

servation of these insects, an incentive of sovereign effect, namely, the hope of increasing our national wealth; for to the practical man, to the manufacturer and the mechanic, is offered a new silken material which far surpasses in beauty and elegance that of the silkworm, and which, however small in quantity at present, demands some attention in view of the alarming decrease in the silk crops of Europe. This material is obtained in a manner entirely new, not, as with the worm, by unwinding the cocoons, nor yet, as might be suggested for the spider, by unravelling the web, but by drawing or winding or reeling directly from the body of the living insect, even as you would milk a cow, or, more aptly, as wire is pulled through a wire-drawing machine.

To the admirer of the beautiful and perfect in nature is presented a fibre of absolute smoothness, roundness, and finish, the colors of which resemble, and in the sunlight even excel in brilliancy those of the two precious metals, silver and gold; while the moralist who loves to illustrate the workings of God's providence in bringing forth good out of evil, by comparing the disgusting silk-worm with its beautiful and useful product, may now enforce the lesson by the still more striking contrast between this silk and the loathed and hated spider.

The statesman who, after a four years' war, sees few indications of a better spirit on the part of the South, and is almost ready to exclaim, “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?" may now perhaps discern a spot, small indeed, but brilliant, on the very edge of the dark Carolina cloud; and it may not be too much to hope that, in course of time, the cords of our spider's golden and silver silk may prove potent bonds of union with the first of the rebellious States.

As to the mathematician who believes in the inborn tendency of mankind to variation and imperfection, and holds up to us, as shining examples of mathematical accuracy, the work of certain

insects, and who-since Professor Wyman has shown that the hexagonal form of the bee's cell is not of original design, but rather the necessary result of difficulties met and overcome in the most economical manner, though by no means always with perfect exactness and uniformity - has fallen back upon the ancient and still prevalent belief in the precise construction of the spider's web, (which, as will be seen, really displays it no more than does the bee's cell,) to this disappointed man of geometry and figures is now offered the alternative of either finding a new and truer illustration, or of abandoning his position entirely.

Let us, then, wait till we have seen this spider and heard his story. His story! That reminds me of another class which may possibly be represented among my readers, and whose members, in the contemplation of the domestic economy of these insects, will, I fear, discover many and weighty arguments in favor of the various opinions entertained by the advocates of Woman's Rights; for here is a community in which the females not only far exceed the males in number, but present so great a contrast to them in size and importance, that, but for absolute proof, they never would be regarded as belonging to the same species.

Here, then, is a life-size picture of our spider and of — I was about to say, his partner; but in truth it is she who is the spider, and he is only her partner. Such is the real physical, and, so to speak, mental superiority of the female, that, even if we insist upon the legal equality at least of the masculine element, we can do so only in name, and will find it hard to avoid speaking of him as the male of the Nephila plumipes, thus tacitly admitting her as the truer representative of the species. Their relative size and appearance are shown by the figures; but it may be added that she is very handsome; the fore part of her body, which, being composed of the head and chest soldered together, is termed cephalothorax, is glossy-black and covered, except in