from early childhood to draw a contrast between the mobility of water and the immobility of the soil on which we tread, and this feeling is confirmed by the evidence of our senses. When, therefore, we suddenly feel the ground move beneath us, a mysterious force with which we were previously unacquainted is revealed to us as an active disturber of stability. A moment destroys the illusion of a whole life, our deceptive faith in the repose of nature vanishes, and we feel transported into a realm of unknown destructive forces. Every sound, the faintest motion of the air, arrests our attention, and we no longer trust the ground on which we stand. There is an idea conveyed to the mind of some universal and unlimited danger. We may flee from the crater of a volcano in active eruption or from the dwelling whose destruction is threatened by the approach of the lavastream, but in an earthquake, direct our flight whithersoever we will, we still feel as if we trod upon the very focus of destruction." Not less striking is the testimony of Dr. Tschudi in his Travels in Peru regarding this singular effect of earthquakes on the human mind. "No familiarity with the phenomenon can," he remarks, "blunt the feeling. The inhabitant of Lima, who from childhood has frequently witnessed these convulsions of nature, is roused from his sleep by the shock, and rushes from his apartment with the cry of Misericordia! The foreigner from the north of Europe, who knows nothing of earthquakes but by description, waits with impatience to feel the movements of the earth, and longs to hear with his own ear the subterranean sounds which he has hitherto considered fabulous. With levity he treats the ap

prehension of a coming convulsion, and laughs at the fears of the natives; but as soon as his wish is gratified he is terrorstricken, and is involuntarily prompted to seek safety in flight."

Now, a partially consolidated planet tempested by frequent earthquakes of such terrible potency that those of the historic ages would be but mere ripples of the earth's surface in comparison could be no proper home for a creature so constituted. The fish or reptile-animals of a limited range of instinct, exceedingly tenacious of life in most of their varieties, oviparous, prolific, and whose young immediately on their escape from the egg can provide for themselves might enjoy existence in such circumstances to the full extent of their narrow capacities; and when sudden death fell upon them, though their remains, scattered over wide areas, continue to exhibit that distortion of posture incident to violent dissolution which seems to speak of terror and suffering, we may safely conclude there was but little real suffering in the case: they were happy up to a certain point, and unconscious for ever after. Fishes and reptiles were the proper inhabitants of our planet during the ages of the earth-tempests; and when, under the operation of the chemical laws, these had become less frequent and terrible, the higher mammals were introduced. That prolonged ages of these tempests did exist, and that they gradually settled down until the state of things became at length comparatively fixed and stable, few geologists will be disposed to deny. The evidence which supports this special theory of the development of our planet in its capabilities as a scene of or

ganized and sentient being seems palpable at every step. Look first at these Grauwacke rocks, and after marking how in one place the strata have been upturned on their edges for miles together, and how in another the Plutonic rock has risen molten from below, pass on to the Old Red Sandstone and examine its significant platforms of violent death its faults, displacements and dislocations; see, next, in the Coal-Measures, those evidences of sinking and ever-sinking strata for thousands of feet together; mark in the Oolite those vast overlying masses of trap stretching athwart the landscape far as the eye can reach; observe carefully how the signs of convulsion and catastrophe gradually lessen as we descend to the times of the Tertiary, though even in these ages of the mammiferous quadruped the earth must have had its oft-recurring ague-fits of frightful intensity; and then, on closing the survey, consider how exceedingly partial and unfrequent these earth-tempests have become in the recent periods. Yes, we find everywhere marks of at once progression and identity of progress made and yet identity maintained; but it is in the habitation that we find them, not in the inhabitants. There is a tract of country in Hindustan that contains nearly as many square miles as all Great Britain covered to the depth of hundreds of feet by one vast overflow of trap; a tract similarly overflown which exceeds in area all England occurs in Southern Africa. The earth's surface is roughened with such, mottled as thickly by the Plutonic masses as the skin of the leopard by its spots. The trap district which surrounds our Scottish metropolis and imparts so imposing a character to its scenery is too in

considerable to be marked on geological maps of the world that we yet see streaked and speckled with similar memorials, though on an immensely vaster scale, of the eruption and overflow which took place in the earthquake ages. What could man have done on the globe at a time when such outbursts were comparatively common occurrences? What could he have done where Edinburgh now stands during that overflow of trap porphyry of which the Pentland range forms but a fragment, or that outburst of greenstone of which but a portion remains in the dark ponderous coping of Salisbury Craigs, or when the thick floor of rock on which the city stands was broken up like the ice of an Arctic sea during a tempest in spring, and laid on edge from where it leans against the Castle Hill to beyond the quarries at Joppa? The reasoning brain would have been wholly at fault in a scene of things in which it could neither foresee the exterminating calamity while yet distant nor control it when it had come; and so the reasoning brain was not produced until the scene had undergone a slow but thorough process of change, during which, at each progressive stage, it had furnished a platform for higher and still higher life. When the coniferæ could flourish on the land and fishes subsist in the seas, fishes and cone-bearing plants were created; when the earth became a fit habitat for reptiles and birds, reptiles and birds were produced ; with the dawn of a more stable and mature state of things the sagacious quadruped was ushered in; and, last of all, when man's house was fully prepared for him-when the data on which it is his nature to reason and calculate had become fixed and certainthe reasoning, calculating brain was moulded

by the creative finger, and man became a living soul. Such seems to be the true reading of the wondrous inscription chiselled deep in the rocks. It furnishes us with no clue by which to unravel the unapproachable mysteries of creation: these mysteries belong to the wondrous Creator, and to him only. We attempt to theorize upon them and to reduce them to law, and all nature rises up against us in our presumptuous rebellion. A stray splinter of cone-bearing wood, a fish's skull or tooth, the vertebra of a reptile, the humerus of a bird, the jaw of a quadruped,-all, any, of these things, weak and insignificant as they may seem, become in such a quarrel too strong for us and our theory: the puny fragment, in the grasp of truth, forms as irresistible a weapon as the dry bone did in that of Samson of old, and our slaughtered sophisms lie piled up, "heaps upon heaps," before it.

THE

HUGH MILLER.

THE FIRST DEATH.

HE first conviction that there is death in the house is perhaps the most awful moment of youth. When we are young, we think that not only ourselves, but that all about us, are immortal. Until the arrow has struck a victim round our own hearth, "death" is merely an unmeaning word; until then its casual mention has stamped no idea upon our brain. There are few, even among those least susceptible of thought and emotion, in whose hearts and minds the first death in the family does not act as a very powerful revelation of the mysteries of life and of their own being; there are few who after such a catastrophe do not look upon the i

TH

JAMES BEATTIE.

HIS poet was born at Laurencekirk, Scotland, on the 25th of October, 1735. His father, who was a small farmer and shopkeeper, and who had a taste for literature and was fond of versifying, died when the poet was seven years old.

On the 11th of August, 1753, Beattie was elected schoolmaster at Fordoun, at the foot of the Grampian Hills. The magnificent scenery of this place is supposed to have had a marked influence in the culture of his poetical taste. In the year 1760 he was appointed professor of philosophy in Marischal College. The appointment provoked criticism on account of his youth, but he proved himself equal to the position, filling it with distinction.

Beattie's fame rests chiefly on his poems of "The Minstrel; or, The Progress of Genius," and "The Hermit." He was fond of controversy and combated the theories of David Hume. His "Essay on Truth" was well received in his lifetime, but has added but little to his fame.

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In his family relations Beattie was very unfortunate. His wife, who was a most beautiful woman, inherited insanity from her mother, and he lost his two sons-his only children-by death. His son James, who had been appointed to the chair of philosophy as his father's successor, died of consumption at the early age of twenty-two. The loss of Montague, also a youth of much promise, by a rapid fever, in 1796, completed the prostration of the poor father. It was the case of Burke over again, but worse, inasmuch as Beattie, a weaker nature, was sometimes driven to seek oblivion in the cup, and as sometimes his reason reeled on its throne,

and he went about the house asking where his son was and whether he had or had not a son. He retired from all society, lost taste for his former pleasures, such as music, which he had once relished so keenly, was seized in 1799 with a paralytic affection which deprived him of speech, and languished on, ever and anon visited with new assaults of the same malady, till at last, on the 18th of August, 1803, the gifter, amiable, but most miserable, 'Minstrel' breathed his last. now lies beside his two dear sons in the churchyard of St. Nicholas, Aberdeen, a graceful Latin inscription from the pen of Dr. James Gregory of Edinburgh distinguishing the stone which covers his ashes."

JOANNA BAILLIE.

He

HIS distinguished poetess was born at Manse of Bothwell, on the banks of the Clyde, Scotland, in the year 1762. While yet young she removed, with her sister Agnes, to Hamstead, a suburb of London, where her brother, the distinguished Dr. Matthew Baillie, resided. In A. D. 1798 she published her Plays on the Passions, illustrating by her various characters the deepest passions of the human soul, such as jealousy, love, fear, hate. In the year 1810 she produced The Family Legend, which was enthusiastically patronized by Sir Walter Scott and acted in London by Kemble and Mrs. Siddons. Her plays were well received, but critics say that they are better adapted to reading than to the stage. Her best tragedies are The Separation, Henriquez, De Monfort and Count Basil. Of her poems the most frequently quoted are her lines to Agnes and "The Kitten," while the popular favorites among her songs are songs are "The Lover's