to the Antilles and French Guiana. These two works are both by M. Bonpland, are both complete, and constitute one of the most splendid botanical publications, which has ever issued from the press.

6o. Essai sur la Geographie des Plantes, accompagné d'un tableau physique des Regions Equinoxiales: 4to. M. de H. has in this work united into one view, the aggregate of physical phenomena, presented by the torrid zone in America, from the level of the South sea, to the highest summit of the Andes viz. the vegetation, animals, geological relations, the culture of the soil, the temperature of the air, the limits of perpetual snow, the chemical constitution of the atmosphere, the electric action, the barometrical depression, the decrease of gravitation, the intensity of the blue color of the sky, the enfeeblement of the light in traversing the strata of the atmosphere, the horizontal refractions, and the heat of boiling water, at different altitudes. Fourteen scales, adapted to a profile view of the Andes, indicate the modifications, to which these several phenomena are subjected by the influence of the elevation of the soil above the level of the sea. Every groupe of vegetables is placed at the height which nature has assigned to it.

The geography of plants is one of the most curious instances of the connexion of the various arts and sciences with each other. Far from being a topic which ought to be assigned exclusively to the botanist, the subject of the localities, of the original country of plants, and the regions to which they have been transported, is one of the most precious documents for tracing the descent, the affinity, and the emigration of ancient nations. Books we have few, one might rather say none, which acquaint us with the primitive fortunes of our Plain reading and writing, handy as we are at them now a days, are things of which the majority of men, taking the ages of the world together, have known nothing. We speak not now of the old and somewhat arbitrary division of barbarous and civilized; but the people that built the pyramids and the temples of Thebes, knew nothing of what we call reading and writing. Their hieroglyphics were in the hands of the priests, and besides were about as much of a popular science as the integral and differential calculus at the present day; with the advantage in favor of the latter, that all who have the

race.

intellectual capacity to learn it, have the means, while the hieroglyphics were a sacred mystery. The Assyrians, Chaldæans, and Persians, at the most flourishing periods of their politics, cannot have had any other kind of writing. There is no proof of any thing among them more commodious than the arrow-headed character, of which the construction excludes every thing like a popular use. It may have served the purposes of religion and the state, and been, perhaps, associated with astronomical hieroglyphics, to record some observations of the heavenly bodies. No one who has ever looked at a Babylonian brick, or drawings of the Persepolitan ruins, can suppose, that it extended its use to the common purposes of life. But this is to speak of the most ancient days and distant regions. The Trojan war had been fought, all the Grecian cities founded, and the laws of Lycurgus established, before the Greeks learned to read and write; and prose is so modern among them, that we can show the period of its origin. With the Romans, as with the Etruscans before them, writing was a mysterious art, in the hands of the priests, till the intercourse between Greece and Rome was established. Nor is it probable, that in common life, any extensive use was, at any time, made of the art. In the middle ages of Europe it was still less practised. Charlemagne himself was awkward at it, and set up schools, that his subjects might be better taught than their master. Even at the present day, if the human race were to pass in review before us, for one who could read a book, there would be about ten to whom it would be a sad waste of fair rags. That almost idolatrous preference, therefore, which we give to written documents above all other means of information, has, as far as the oldest antiquity is concerned, little foundation in justice, and is much to be deplored, when it leads us to neglect more permanent documents of the history of our race. It is not in the form of books, that languages themselves are the best witnesses of the most remote antiquity. The coincidence of the structure and vocabulary of languages carries us much farther back, than any record they contain, for the reasons, that the oldest records have perished, and still more, because men spoke long before they wrote, and ages on ages of speaking men, to whom writing in all its forms was unknown, transmitted their languages to posterity. But language, in any application, is but one of the monuments, that

survive the transitory generations of men. Their works and their institutions, their superstitions, and their ceremonies, in various forms, outlive them; and it is not even without example, that the lineaments of the face descend, for thousands of years. Let men but make some progress in civilization, and they divide the starry heavens into arbitrary signs, of which the tradition travels down to the latest posterity, which establish a connexion between the Hindoo, the Egyptian, and the Greek, anterior to any other record of it, and leave a memorial in their lunar houses and solar aspects, for ages after marble and paper are alike reduced to dust. This observation had not escaped philosophers.* M. de Humboldt has called the attention of those, who love to study the history of man, not in the genealogy of kings or the tale of battles, but in its grand features of humanity, to another most elevated and attractive speculation. Most of the vegetables, which serve for the nutriment of man, the grains, the roots, the berries, which make up his food, have undergone migrations with the human tribes, and in passing from region to region, and climate to climate, have gone through various stages of development and improvement. Of many we know the native soil, and the period of their removal to others. On an extensive collection of facts of this kind, notices of the native places, the transportation, the improved form, and the use for food of the cereal vegetables, the potato, the palm, &c., M. de Humboldt has founded the most ingenious historical conclusions, and taught us, that if, in one series of observations, the history of our race is written in the heavens above us, it may be traced in another on the surface beneath our feet. The essay on New Spain contains a number of speculations of this kind, of the most curious nature, that are more particularly pursued in the work before us; which is completed, and itself an independent and separate work.

7°. Recueil d' Observations de Zoologie et d' Anatomic Comparée. 2 vols. 4to. In this work are given the history of the condor, experiments on the electrical action of the gymnotus, a memoir on the larynx of the crocodiles, of the quadrumani and tropical birds, a description of several new species of reptiles, fishes, birds, apes, and other mamiferous animals little known. M. Cuvier, who with Blumenbach may be regarded as standing at the head of the science of natural history, has * North American Review, xii. 151.

furnished for this work an extensive memoir on the Axolotl of the lake of Mexico, and the Proteuses in general.* M. Cuvier has recognized among the fossil bones brought from America by Messrs de Humboldt and Bonpland, two new species of mastodontons, and one true elephant. The second volume of the work is devoted to the skulls of Mexicans, Peruvians, &c. on which Mr Blumenbach has also published a memoir from the collection of M. de H. Of the work under consideration, the whole of the first volume and a part of the second, were published in 1817, and the remainder of the second was expected in the course of that year; whether it was published were are not informed. On scarce any subject is the confident ignorance of the savans of the last generation so glaring, as that of the Zoology of America. Clavigero, though no naturalist, had already exposed the errors of Buffon, in his two lists of species, 'confounded with others,' by Buffon, and 'species unknown' to him and two new species of mammoth and an elephant must be allowed to be tolerable make-weights in the scale, on the question whether the American animals are smaller and weaker than the European. The worthy abbé, in the dissertation we have just referred to, takes particular umbrage at the assertion made by Buffon, that the greatest part of the animals peculiar to America are without tails, which Buffon considers a mark of inferiority. The abbé, in reply, enumerates to the count fourteen species of animals of the old continent, that want this sightly appendage, while America furnishes but six.t

8°. It remains to mention but one other work which has grown out of this memorable voyage; it is that, to which we have often referred in the course of our preceding remarks, which bears the name in French of Relation Historique, and in English, of Personal Narrative. This English name, as has been well observed, is badly chosen to convey a correct idea of the nature of the volumes, to which it is attached. They contain every thing relative to the various countries traversed, with the exception of what had gone to form the the separate treatises which we have enumerated, nor do they omit to give a general account even of the subjects, which are particularly * Blumenbach, Naturgeschichte, p. 236. Ed. 9th.

Clavigero, Storia Antica. Vol. iv. Dissertat. iv. It is necessary to read the series of dissertations, which Clavigero has appended to his excellent work, to know how to estimate the popular works on America.

and scientifically discussed in them. Of personal matter, in any common acceptation of that term, there is certainly little ; though there is no omission of any interesting fact or adventure which might awaken the curiosity of the reader. Of this work it was announced, in the general prospectus of M. de Humboldt's publications, that there would be four quarto volumes. The first half of the first volume appeared in 1814,and it is only the past year, that the second half of the second volume has been published; so that after an interval of eight years, one moiety only of the Personal Narrative is before the public. We have already hinted at the causes, which have retarded the publication. We are fully aware of the immense labor of reducing into a continuous narrative the mass of materials gathered in such an expedition; and of the difficulty of finding time for such a laborious enterprize, for a scholar like M. de Humboldt, whose reputation requires him to be au courant of all the philosophical literature of the day, and who besides writing his own books is, as it were, obliged to read those of every body else. While therefore we do full justice to the causes of the delay, which has taken place in the publication of his Historical Narrative, truth also obliges us to add, that this, of all his works, is that of which the effect suffers most by this interruption. By the very nature of the work, we here place ourselves in company with the travellers, we sympathise in their repeated disappointments; we share their impatience at the obstacles they encounter; with feelings wrought up like theirs, we rejoice in the final permission which they attain at Aranjuez, we feel grateful to the generous minister, who opens the doors to them of that little nook of closely watched soil, that lies over seventy-nine degrees of latitude; we partake the excitement of their escape through the English blockading squadron of the harbor of Corunna, and launch forth with them at last on the great highway of nations. Now if the narrative of the tour thus commenced can be laid before us at once, executed with the ability displayed in all M. de Humboldt's works, and rich in all the materials collected in his voyage, we care not to what length it runs; and we believe that his four quartos would be read with as much avidity as one with interest not only sustained, but constantly rising. But if, on the other hand, this narrative be cut up into half volumes, appearing after long and irregular intervals, each suc