in many respects, in bondage. The mind is to be disenthralled. The will is to be tutored, and rendered capable of self-government. The affections are to be purified and elevated by the benign influences of Christianity. We shall watch with great interest the progress of the change. We shall look for some interesting phenomena in the philosophy of the human mind and character. The popular theories of African imbecility will either receive confirmation, or be put to flight. There is good sense and christian benevolence enough in Great Britain to supply all needed intellectual and moral apparatus, so that there shall be no failure, unless it result from the intrinsic feebleness and perversity of the African intellect. At the same time, we must wait with patience. Nations cannot be renovated in a day. The conjoined influence of African superstition, and of an iron servitude, extending through several generations, with all its accompanying sensuality and debasement, cannot be broken up at once. The gospel itself, without miraculous interference, is not adequate to the work of revolutionizing instantaneously, the intellectual and moral nature of man. African intellect is in a dead calm. No signs of life, it may be, pervade the inert mass. More than one or two generations must pass away before the children of Ethiopia can stand on a level with the Anglo-Saxons. How slow was the improvement of the ancestors of these very Anglo-Saxons, for several generations after they emerged from the forests of Germany; and that too, under all the advantages of a temperate climate, and of the excitements growing out of war and of a piratical commerce?

This subject it will be seen, is one of permanent interest, and is well deserving of a place in the pages of the Repository and and Observer. It is our intention, as far as possible, to make this publication a store-house of matters of enduring interest and value, not only in respect to biblical and classical literature, but in regard to political philosophy, and human improvement in general. For these reasons, we proceed to embody some of the more important facts and statements concerning the British West Indies.

It is the recorded tradition of Plato, and of other ancient writers, that at a period of time indefinitely remote, there existed a vast insular territory, stretching beyond the coasts of Africa and Europe, which bore the appellation of Atlantis; and that for three days this western land was shaken to its founda

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tions by the incessant and hourly concussions of an earthquake, when at length it yielded to some mysterious power, and sunk with its immense population into the bosom of the ocean. subsequent times, pieces of curiously carved wood, large jointed reeds, and trees of a kind unknown in Europe, were picked up to the westward of Cape St. Vincent, and at the Azores after long continued westerly winds. At Flores, the bodies of two human beings were washed ashore, whose colour and features were distinct from those of any men, who had before been known. Urged by these and by some sound geographical reasonings, Christopher Columbus sailed from Palos, Spain, on the 3d of August, 1492, and on the 12th of October discovered San Salvador, one of the Bahamas. Cuba was the next island of importance discovered; subsequently, Hispaniola, Trinidad, Jamaica, Porto Rico, etc. For some years, the Spaniards were left in almost undisturbed possession of these islands, many of which they had colonized, but the French and English soon began to molest them. The first English vessels seen in the West Indies, were two ships of war, under Sebastian Cabot and Sir Thomas Pert, vice admiral of England, in 1517. They touched on the coast of Brazil, and then proceeded to Hispaniola and Porto Rico. The first trading English vessel which visited the islands, arrived at Porto Rico, in 1519, being, as was said by the captain, sent by the king to ascertain the state of those islands, of which there was so much talk in Europe. The Spaniards at St. Domingo fired on her and compelled her to return to Porto Rico. The governour blamed them for not sinking her, and preventing any dissemination in England of a knowledge of the West Indies. An English fleet under the command of captain Hawkins, visited the West Indies in 1565; another, in 1572, under Francis Drake; and a third, in 1595, under Sir Walter Raleigh. Barbadoes was the first territory colonized by the British, having been occupied by the servants of Sir William Courteen, in 1624.

When Columbus first discovered the new world, he found the continent, and every island, however small, densely peopled with a mild, and generous race of men, (not the Caribs) with skins of a copper or light bronze colour, long silky black hair, finely formed limbs, and pleasing features; in some instances warlike, and considerably civilized; in others, living in luxurious idleness, under the evervating effects of a tropical climate. Within a few short years after the discovery of the Islands by

however, to resort to any example at all problematical. The subject, however, is so full of interest that we may resume it at a future time.

The mathematician, Dr Hutton, could see nothing in the revolutions which the crust of the globe has undergone, but an eternal series of changes, where the two antagonist principles of fire and water have been in ceaseless operation; the latter to wear down continents and convey their detritus to the ocean, and the former to elevate new continents from the deep. In the mechanism of the heavens he thought he saw a correspondent series of revolutions, in which those very disturbing forces that seemed to threaten ruin to the system, by acting periodically in different directions, are made to give to the movement of the planets unending permanency. Thus he excluded all evidence of a creative and superintending agency from astronomy and geology; and this atheistical view of these sciences seems to have been but too generally admitted. But in the powerful language of Dr Macculloch, "the mathematician, accustomed to the sole contemplation of his own science, has forgotten that the laws of machanics comprise but one of the two great powers in the universe. Chemistry is the other right hand of the Creator: the sources of change, the joint governour with mechanics; the opposing power, when its power is required. This mathematician, writing on geology, should not have forgotten that: as a mere astronomer he ought not; for that Chemistry is acting in the comets and in the sun, as it has acted and is acting in every planetary and solar body throughout the universe."* Nor was this mathematician aware of what geologists now admit, that the successive changes to which the earth has been subject, have been improvements in its condition as a habitable world; nor that there has been a correspondent advance towards perfection in the natures of the animals and plants which have been placed on it; nor that these races have been several times destroyed and renewed. In astronomy too, recent discoveries have rendered it extremely probable that there exist disturbing causes in the planetary spaces, which must inevitably produce ultimate derangement and ruin among the heavenly bodies; and, therefore, the present order among the heavenly bodies had a beginning.† Thus have the tables been completely turned on

* Macculloch's System of Geology, Vol. I. p. 510, London 1831. Whewell's Bridgewater Treatise.

this subject; and astronomy and geology, especially the latter, conduct us back to the very act of creative power by which the universe was produced. And this is what no other science can do.

2. Geology furnishes proof, both of the general superintending providence of God over our globe, and also of special interference from time to time with the usual order of things upon its surface.

In spite of all the catastrophes and changes which the crust of the globe has undergone, the disturbing agencies have never been permitted to pass certain limits, nor to interrupt the general order, nor to interfere with the general good. Every change, however sudden and violent, appears to have been adapted to promote some important end in relation to the animals and plants which have flourished on our planet. To preserve a proper balance among such powerful agencies, and to make apparent disorder and confusion subserve the general good, is surely evidence of a divine superintendence, which only infinite wisdom, directing infinite power, can exercise. When events follow their causes with mathematical certainty, and we can see the infallible connection between antecedent and consequent, we are apt to feel as if we need look to no higher power than that which resides in nature to explain phenomena, and the idea of a Divine Superintendence fails to impress us, because we see no need of such an overruling power. But when we see the powerful agencies of nature breaking forth at irregular intervals, as if for the destruction of the world, and ruin actually follows, yet on more thorough research we find these destructive agencies to have their limits assigned them, and to be subservient to important ends, our sense of the need of a superintending Providence greatly increases, as well as our admiration of the wisdom which can employ instruments of destruction for the preservation, security, and happiness of the universe.

Now such a view of Divine Providence as this, geology presents. It does more. It furnishes us with examples of a special or particular Providence. It shows us that the regular order of events on this globe has been repeatedly interfered with. It informs us of several successive conditions of the globe, each different from that which preceded it, and furnished with new and peculiar races of animals, and plants. The fact seems to have been, that the changes which the globe underwent from epoch to epoch, rendered it necessary to repeo

ple it from time to time with new races, whose natures were adapted to a new condition of things. Now it is not difficult to conceive how these variations in the condition of the globe should have gradually destroyed the races of plants and animals that were adapted only to a particular state, as to temperature, climate, water, &c, even without the aid of such sudden and violent catastrophes as we have reason to believe did actually occur. But how, without falling into the grossest materialism, can we account for the repeopling of the renovated earth, without admitting a new and special act of creation? Sir Isaac Newton has said, that "the growth of new systems out of old ones, without the mediation of a Divine Power, is absurd:" superlatively absurd, we may add, if the new system be stocked by new races of plants and animals. Even if we admit what some geologists maintain, (although we think incorrectly,) that species become gradually extinct, and are from time to time replaced by new ones, still we perceive, that the same necessity exists for Divine interference; nay, according to this view, a new creation takes place a thousand times more frequently than the other supposition renders necessary.

If these views are correct, they exhibit to us a more impressive exhibition of a special Divine Providence than can be derived from any other department of science. They carry us back to the period when the universe was produced out of nothing, and present the Deity to us, not as withdrawing from the vast machine of nature, as if it contained within itself the power to regulate and sustain, but watching over it, directing all its movements, and from time to time fitting it up anew for new purposes, just as really and assiduously as any human artist does in relation to a machine of his own contrivance and construction. And these we think are fair inferences from a science, which many good men have regarded, and still regard, as favourable to atheism! It is curious too, that those very revolutions on the globe, disclosed by this science, behind which atheistical minds once entrenched themselves, should be found on a nearer inspection to be inscribed all over with the doctrine of a special Providence!

It ought not to be forgotten too, that the past special interference of the Deity with the regular sequence of events on the globe, is an earnest of a similar interference in future, should His purposes require. And since we now see in slow VOL. V. No. 17.

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