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October, 1858, and returning to Washington, resumed the position of Commissioner of Indian Affairs.

The Washington Union of November 9th, 1858, in referring to General Denver's resignation of the governorship of Kansas, pays a just tribute to his executive qualities-it says:

"Governor J. W. Denver, having resigned the executive office of Kansas, much to the regret of the administration, and we doubt not of the whole country, has resumed his position as Commissioner of Indian Affairs; Mr. Mix yielding that office and reverting to his original post as chief clerk of the bureau.

"Of all the persons who have successively filled the governorship of Kansas, Mr. Denver is the first one who has succeeded in giving general satisfaction to the people of the Territory and of the Union at large. He is probably the first governor, also, who has resigned the office with the regret of the whole country. His administration has been at once firm, decided, and peaceful. The law has been enforced, violence has been subdued, and order thoroughly established. His course has been firm, straight-forward, and upright, commanding the respect alike of Kansas and the Union. His conduct has been characterized by good sense and good faith; his measures having been just in themselves, and in accordance with the instructions of the federal administration, between whom and himself relations of the most perfect harmony and confidence have subsisted throughout. His administration has been as unaibitious as it has been successful, and he has won the highest reputation for ability and capacity, of all the governors of Kansas, simply by a quiet, firm, and unostentatious discharge of the duties of his office. We do not recollect that Governor Denver has made a single stump-speech during his whole administration. The telegraph has had few of his formal progresses through the Territory to herald, and no "sensation" bulletins concerning him to retail to professional agitators in the East. He has addressed the people of Kansas with pertinence and effect; but his address was, with rare good taste, valedictory, on resigning his office. The universal sentiment of the country in regard to Governor Denver, we dare say, is one of regret that he was not the governor of Kansas long before, and that he cannot be its governor while she continues to be a Territory. It will be difficult to fill Governor Denver's place."

On his return from Kansas, he resumed the position of Commissioner of Indian Affairs, which office he has discharged with that ability which has characterized his administration of every official trust conferred on him. He resigned this office on the 11th of March, 1859, and returned to his home in California, in the steamer of the 20th.

President Buchanan regretted to sever the official connection. between Governor Denver and himself, and addressed him the following feeling and complimentary letter:

"MY DEAR SIR:

"WASHINGTON, March 13, 1859.

"It is with sincere regret that I accept your resignation as Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Your conduct in that highly responsible office has received my cordial approbation, as well as that of the Secretary of the Interior. It will be difficult to supply your place.

"But I cannot consent to sever our official connection, without expressing

my lasting obligations to you for the able, discreet, firm and successful manner in which you performed your duties as governor of Kansas, under the most difficult and trying circumstances. "Wishing you health, prosperity, and success throughout life, I remain, "Yours very respectfully, "HON. J. W. DENVER.

"JAMES BUCHANAN."

The biographer has encountered great difficulty in preparing this sketch. He applied to General Denver for the material to make it up, but he has been so indifferent to any other consideration, in the discharge of his public duties, than a desire to perform them with exact justice, and without reference to any eclat, that he had retained but little material to aid the biographer in the discharge of this service. He has endeavored to do that justice to the subject which his true merit deserved.

HISTORY OF EAST BOSTON-WHAT ONE MAN CAN ACCOMPLISH.

LABOR is man's heritage; and the incentives of poverty and ambition have been imposed upon him by Providence to necessitate his exertions. When, however, we find an individual who, like the generous steed, needs no spur to prompt him on his onward course;-who, surrounded by all the appliances of wealth, and all the respect attaching to a well-spent life, is willing to join the ranks of the active, and bring his talents, resources, and industry to bear in collating the annals of the past, and pointing out to succeeding ages the good accomplished in a quiet way by those who have gone before, we ought certainly to extend towards him our cordial sympathy.

General Sumner, of Boston, a gentleman extensively known both in this country and Europe, has, with indefatigable industry, given us, in a volume of no common size, the history of the origin and progress of East Boston, an addition to the modern. Athens which has enabled her to keep her beautiful common in its pristine extent, and which, but for this enlargement of the city over marshes deemed impassable, would have had to give way to the wants of occupancy.

There is a poetry in the affairs of common life, when viewed in relation to the memories or the past, which renders interest

ing an accuracy of statistics which would at first be appalling from the extent to which it is carried.

The work of General Sumner is rich in the memories of the Revolution, in genealogical details, and in the records of the difficulties to be encountered and overcome in the swaying of corporate bodies of men. The path of the reader is beguiled with portraits of departed worthies, gathered from the family galleries of Europe, aud the treasured relics of Boston homes. Though the transient reader may be affrighted by its size-to the librarian, the archæologist, and the student, it will be a valuable and lasting acquisition.

Noddle's Island, the nucleus of the present East Boston, is situated at the confluence of the Charles and Mystic rivers, the united currents of which separate it from the city of Boston by a third of a mile.

James I., by patent dated November 3d, 1620, gave the Council of Plymouth a grant of lands lying between forty and forty-eight degrees north latitude, and in length by all this breadth throughout the mainland from sea to sea.

On the 13th December, 1622, the Council of Plymouth gave to Robert Gorges, youngest son of Sir Fernando Gorges, all that part of the mainland in New England known as Massachusetts, for ten English miles in a straight line towards the north-east, and thirty-one miles, after the same rate, into the mainland, through all the breadth aforesaid, together with all the islands so lying within three miles of any part of the said land.

John Gorges, his son, in 1628, conveyed to Sir William Brereton, of Handforth, county Chester, Baronet, all the land from the east side of Charles river to the easterly part of the cape, called Nahant. Also two islands-one now known as Noddle's Island, and then called Brereton, and the otherthen called Hog Island-now known as Breed's Island, and owned at present by a gentleman of that name living in England.

The first white inhabitant of Noddle's Island, was Samuel Maverick, to whom it was granted in 1633.

In 1656, after a long litigation, the island passed from the Maverick family to Colonel Burch, of Barbadoes, for £700. The same year it was purchased by one Broughton for £1,378. Sir Thomas Temple, its next owner, in 1667, came over from England at the same time, having, with others, obtained from Oliver Cromwell a grant of lands in Acadie, or Nova Scotia, of which he was made governor. His purchase of Noddle's Island cost him £1,735. He was a man of high position and generous public spirit. In 1672, he gave £100 towards rebuilding Harvard College. On a visit to London, he was presented

to Charles II.; the king complaining that the colonies had coined money, he presented the monarch with a specimen having a tree upon it, and, being asked what tree it was, had the tact to reply, "the royal oak which protected your Majesty's

life."

In 1670 there was another advance in the value of the island, Sir Thomas Temple selling it to Colonel Shrimpton, of Boston, for £6,000. From him it descended to the families of Greenhough, Hyslop, and Sumner, who disposed of it to the East Boston Company, organized by General Sumner, for $86,250. In 1833, at the time of the purchase, the island contained six hundred and sixty-three acres of upland and marsh, surrounded by several hundred acres of flats which also belonged to it. We gather from General Sumner's account that the value of the property of the Company is now several millions, and the population of East Boston over 16,600. As General Sumner surveys the railroads and steamboats which put his new city in communication with Boston, and remembers the time when, in 1833, the Mayor and Aldermen of that city visited the island to select a plot of ground for school-houses, &c., and were rowed across, in the Experiment, a boat of four-man power, capable of holding twelve persons, which General Sumner had purchased at Newport, he may certainly feel that he has achieved something to make his mark on the age.

ANCIENT AND MODERN THEORIES OF MEDICINE. -GIL BLAS AND THE MEDICAL COLLEGES.

"Strange that a harp of a thousand strings
Should keep its tune so long."

WHEN We consider the intricacy of the construction of our frames, and the thousand little accidents which may at any time put an end to our career, so far from being struck with the brevity of human life, we wonder how we are enabled to go through so much, and still survive. Nature has put it in the power of the beasts that roam the field, to detect the herbs fitted for their various complaints, and be their own doctors. Man, however, in his civilized state, is not only devoid of this knowledge which the savage has acquired by experience and tradition, but, fostering his pet appetites, has added to the list of natural ailments a quantity of ills alone attributable to un

guarded indulgence. The power of counteracting these has by no means increased with their advance. The catalogue of deaths is little, if any, diminished with succeeding years, in proportion to the number of births; and the discovery which we hail to-day as a universal panacea, we reject to-morrow as worse than useless. Air and exercise are presented by nature as the two great elements of health, and water is so largely circulated through our globe that its use in a thousand ingenious ways must have suggested itself at an early period. Mingle this element with the simples observed by the hunter who spends his days in the forest glades, or the Indian who roams the prairies, and you have a course of natural medicine which satisfies the man of wandering habits, and carries him through his three score years and ten. The beautiful simplicity of this school of practice was early broken in upon by the discovery that the mineral world contained thousands of combinations capable, in a powdered or liquid state, of acting on our poor frames. A curiosity to become acquainted with our own formation, and an instinct of self-preservation, early led to the cutting up the bodies of the dead, and subjecting them to the investigations of science. All these principles were arrived at in the time of the Egyptians, who also possessed a secret, now lost, of preserving a corpse through ages free from decomposition. With the discovery that the blood was constantly renewed naturally came the idea that there must be times when it could be parted with to advantage. The next easy step for Doctors was to find means of using upon their fellow men the element of fire. Heat dries and fire absorbs impurities. If, says the inspired book, "thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut it off and cast it from thee." Acting up to the letter of this injunction, we doubt not that the skilful surgeon has lopped off many a limb which the vis medicatrix of nature would have restored to pristine usefulness. Mutius Scævola, when he held his hand over the glowing embers to show the courage of a Roman, achieved a lasting immortality-yet since his day vast would be the pile of unrecorded limbs sacrificed on the altar of ignorance, could we arrive at the statistics. So accurate seems to us the account of medical practice given by Le Sage in his Gil Blas, that, old as the story is, we venture to reproduce it from the original.

"I served," says Gil Blas, "for three months the Licentiate Sedillo, without complaining of his depriving me of my rest. At the expiration of this time he fell ill. Fever seized him, and with the discomfort it caused him his gout increased. For the first time in his life, which had been a long one, he had recourse to the doctors. "He called in Dr. Sangrado whom all Valladolid regarded as

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