elephant. In the afternoon he presides in the Royal Councils, or officiates at the installation of a Sovereign. At one time he stands a bonesetter in his charnel-house, mustering around him the grinning citizens of Golgotha; and before the day is closed, he appears in the Royal Saloon, encircled with beauty and fashion-among genera and species which it would defy the moralist to classify, and amidst the glitter and flutter of ephemeral life, hurrying heedlessly onward to the catacombs of mortality.

The universality of Cuvier's knowledge, and his habits of order and of business, pointed him out, at an early period of his life, as peculiarly qualified for regulating and superintending the multifarious concerns of public instruction. Napoleon recognized, and availed himself of this peculiar talent, and hence Cuvier was led to devote to the subject the vigour of his faculties. In three printed reports he has given the most valuable information respecting the system of instruction in foreign schools and universities, and he has endeavoured to develop those hidden causes which have occasioned, in different countries, a decline in literature and science. Regarding the education of the people as the basis of public morality, and the best safeguard of the state, he strove to organize the initiatory schools as well as the metropolitan colleges, and to give to all the educational institutions of the empire that systematic form which could alone ensure the accomplishment of such high and important purposes. In the - schools for primary instruction, the people were to be taught reading, writing, and arithmetic; in the institutions for secondary instruction, a more extended general education was to be given; and in the universities for special instruction, the youth were to be prepared for the learned professions, and for those judicial and administrative functions which are so essential to the right government of a great nation.

As a Protestant, Cuvier devoted much of his time to the management and improvement of the Protestant schools. He obtained the erection of fifty new cures which had long been wanting; and in carrying out these important objects, he had often to struggle against the Jesuits, who not only endeavoured to insinuate themselves into the universities, but to resist or to modify all his plans of public instruction.

The memory of Cuvier has not escaped the imputation of hostility to those political changes which the progress of society so imperiously require, and which an indignant people so often and so loudly demand from their rulers. Under the governments to which he belonged, and the singular circumstances which led to their formation, the most liberal statesman could scarcely fail to expose himself to the same charge. Cuvier avowed and defended the

principle, that the education of the people should precede the acquisition of political rights; but, while it was his wish, it was also his strenuous endeavour to fulfil the condition upon which their attainment was to depend; and we cannot regard that statesman as an enemy to the people's rights who offers them the best and the quickest means of obtaining and enjoying them. A secular education is doubtless an essential preparation of the public mind; but the only sure foundation of a stable government is a religious and moral education, in which morality is instilled by instructors who are themselves moral, and religion taught by pastors whom the people choose.

Valuable as the administrative talents of Cuvier were to his country, it is only as a Naturalist and a Philosopher that he is viewed by the historian of science; and unless we adopt the maxim of Napoleon, that the intellectual hero requires the rest and the variety of civil duties, we must concur in the wish so common among his countrymen, that the labours of Cuvier had been confined to the Museum and the Institute. When Newton became Master of the Mint, he had completed the great task to which his life had been devoted; but Cuvier was summoned to official duties in the very climax of his discoveries—and every hour that he devoted to politics was lost to science.

Notwithstanding these disadvantages, he stands pre-eminent and unrivalled as a naturalist and a philosopher. Linnæus and Buffon were but the morning stars that heralded his advent; and if we seek for his name in the lists of immortality, we must find it on the same level with that of Newton and of Kepler. When the laws of the planetary system were announced in the Principia, the scientific world was prepared for their reception. Minds of the highest order had contributed their contingent, and in the final struggle, Newton had the good fortune to be the first who reached the goal. Cuvier, on the contrary, had no precursor, and no rival in his career. The scientific world was unprepared for his discoveries. They were opposed to the existing philosophy, as well as to the most hallowed prejudices of the age; and but for the evidence of demonstration which he marshalled in their support, they would have been regarded as the fictions of romance, or as the dreams of a disordered mind. In its expansive range, the genius of Newton carried him to the very limits of the visible universe; and in the survey of his achievements, the imposing ideas of magnitude and distance tend to exaggerate our estimate of them, and give a false colouring to their impressions. But time has its depths as well as space, and if Cuvier's genius was confined to our own globe, it ranged through periods of unlimited duration; it grasped in its syllogisms the ruins and regeneration of successive worlds; and it exhibited, in their remains, the waving forests of

our primeval earth, the huge reptiles that took shelter in its caves, and the gigantic monsters that trod, uncontrolled, its plains.

Before Cuvier's time, history and tradition, and stern reason, had indicated to man but one creation, and one period for its duration. The starry heavens disclosed to us no indications of their origin, and exhibited no prospect of their passing away. But, now that it has been proved that our globe has been the theatre of such transcendent movements-the seat of so much revolution and change the birth-place and the grave of so many cycles of organic life-may we not expect to find analogous laws in the planetary system of which that globe forms a part? Launched on the boundless ocean of space, the ark of human reason has no pilot at its helm, and no pole-star for its guide; but an authority which cannot err, has issued the decree, that the heavens themselves shall wax old as a garment, and as a vesture shall be folded up; and that while they shall perish and pass away, a new heavens shall arise the abode of happiness, and the seat of immortality. What this change is to be, we dare not even conjecture; but we see in the heavens themselves some traces of destructive elements, and some indications of their power. The fragments of broken planets- the descent of meteoric stones upon our globe-the wheeling comets welding their loose materials at the solar furnace-the volcanic eruptions on our own satellite-the appearance of new stars, and the disappearance of others are all foreshadows of that impending convulsion to which the system of the world is doomed. Thus placed on a planet which is to be burnt up, and under heavens which are to pass away-thus treading, as it were, on the cemeteries, and dwelling in the mausoleums of former worlds-let us learn from reason the lesson of humility and wisdom-if we have not already been taught it in the school of revelation.

ART. II.-The Highlands of Ethiopia. By MAJOR W. CORNWALLIS HARRIS, of the Hon. East India Company's Engineers. Author of "Wild Sports in Southern Africa," "Portraits of African Game Animals," &c. In three volumes. London: Longman and Co. 1844.

THESE volumes contain an account of Major Harris' journey to the Christian court of Shoa, in Abyssinia, and of what he learned regarding that court and kingdom during a residence of

eighteen months. He went thither as the chief of an embassy to the Negoos, or King of Shoa, from the British Government; having been chosen by the Governor-General of India, who had charge of the affair, in consequence of previous experience of his talents and general acquirements. The object of the mission was to establish relations of alliance and commercial intercourse between the two governments and their subjects, and thereby to promote the extinction of the slave trade, the diffusion of legitimate traffic, and the increase of geographical and general knowledge.

The Embassy was despatched from Bombay in April 1841. Including savans, it consisted of ten persons, was attended by a small escort of British soldiers, besides some artisans and servants, and was amply supplied with the stores necessary for conciliating, by gifts or bribes, the chiefs of the barbarous countries through which it was to pass. Every security seems to have been taken for the attainment of its objects. And, accordingly, if we may believe Major Harris, the embassy was successful. A commercial convention was in due time concluded between Great Britain and Shoa. It consisted of sixteen articles. They are not published in these volumes, but Major Harris tells us that "they involved the sacrifice of arbitrary appropriation by the Crown of the property of foreigners dying in the countrythe abrogation of the despotic interdiction which had, from time immemorial, precluded the purchase, or display of goods by the subject, and the removal of penal restrictions upon voluntary movement within and beyond the kingdom;" which restrictions, it seems, are a modification of an old national rule, not to permit a stranger who had once entered Abyssinia ever to depart from it. These are certainly great improvements in the laws of the Shoan kingdom; and if the convention shall lead to the actual entrance of British traders and British manufactures among the Shoan people, it will as greatly ameliorate their condition. Major Harris does not say what provision was made for the creation of such actual intercourse between the people of the two governments. The Shoan country is a tempting field for commerce; but its frontiers are between three and four hundred miles distant from the western coast of the Red Sea. The route lies through a country difficult to traverse from its physical peculiarities, and dangerous from the habits and prejudices of its inhabitants. A safe transit must be secured to the trader. Perhaps this was the subject of one of the sixteen articles of the convention. We should have been glad of some information on this point; for one of the first questions which these volumes suggest, regards the practical utility of having a treaty of commerce with the ruler of an inland territory accessible only through

countries so little friendly to the traders for whose protection the convention is designed. But to this, and some other inquiries of equal interest, they give no satisfactory answer.

The objects of the Embassy, and its measures, are not, however, the topics to which we mean to devote this paper. Our design is to extract such information as we can condense within a limited space, respecting the people and country visited by Major Harris. On these subjects, his volumes, and the recent journals of the English Church Missionaries, Messrs. Isenberg and Krapf, afford us much interesting and curious information, and give the first minute account, by modern eye-witnesses, of the southern provinces of the ancient empire of Abyssinia. Neither Bruce the traveller, nor Gobat the missionary, who penetrated farther than any other modern visitors, reached the limits of Shoa. Hence the work of Major Harris opens up what is, to British readers in general, an entirely new country, and depicts a people which, if it cannot be termed new, is only on that account more interesting. Its monarchs claim to be descendants of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. They are the undoubted successors of those Christian Emperors of Ethiopia, who, in the earlier centuries, entered into alliances with the Emperors of Rome, and who, in the sixteenth century, renewed, through the Portuguese, a friendly intercourse with Christian Europe. Since the rupture of that friendship, their country has been almost altogether concealed from view, or has been seen only, as it were, by glimpses, and when placed at disadvantage. Any tolerable description of it must therefore possess a very peculiar interest, bringing before us, as it does, a people who at once excite the curiosity awakened by utter strangers, impress us with the reverence due to historical antiquity, and move in us the sympathies of brotherhood in religion.

It is difficult to imagine a more attractive subject for a book. But the volumes before us, though in some respects highly interesting, are on the whole very unsatisfactory. Their chief defect is a want of precise information. The proceedings of the embassy are not detailed distinctly, or with that specification of names, time, place, and circumstances, by which ordinary journalists give life and authenticity to their narrations. Of the individuals attending it, we learn from a list, that Captain D. Graham was principal assistant, Messrs. Kirk and Impey, surgeons, Dr. Roth, naturalist, &c. But they scarcely appear in the narrative; and neither from it, nor from the vague compliment in the preface, could any reader have the least notion of the great services to the embassy rendered by the Rev. Mr. Krapf. A similar obscurity besets many other topics, and makes the information regarding them most difficult of apprehension. One main cause of this