same as if the wheel had been at rest and the drop had been dashed violently against it at almost a tangent to its rim.

6

The author's second experiment, therefore, does not illustrate the effect he had intended, but quite another action. It illustrates the course which easterly equatorial currents would follow if an impulse to the northwards were given to them. Evidently put on the wrong track by his experiment, for he nowhere seems to discover that he is in error, he proceeds to account for the direction of the Gulf Stream, which flows to the NE., but which, according to his experiment, ought to flow to the NW. He calls into his aid the following theory, When any stream runs against a bank or into a bay, it swings off in some new 'direction, like a charge of shot from a slanting wall' (vol. i. p. 478). And again, if the Gulf Stream, instead of running foul of the bank of Panama,' passed through it, it would flow on northwestwards, till it could flow no further' (vol. i. p. 479). The state of the case really is, that were it not for the obstruction of the American coast, other influences remaining the same, the Gulf Stream would flow to the north-westwards for a while, but the influence of the earth's rotation, combined with that of the convergence of the meridians, would cause it gradually to curve to the right, through N. and NNW., until it ended by running in approximate parallelism to its present course.

Might not an arrangement be contrived, which would accurately accord with the simple conditions of the problem of ocean currents, and trace lines on a globe corresponding to different variations in the constants of those conditions? They would form a very instructive series of curves to compare with the lines of existing currents. The problem in its simplest form is to trace the course of a particle urged to move from the pole to the equator, and thence, if desired, to the other pole, regard being had to the earth's rotation and to the friction of its surface, which retards the velocity of the particle according to the usual approximative law. It would not be difficult to prick out the course of a curve on this principle. We will, for the simplicity of explanation, suppose the particle to be urged from the North-pole towards the equator by a uniform force that would cause it to move south at the rate of one degree an hour if it were not for frictional retardation. Now let the experiment proceed, pricking off the course of the particle at hourly intervals. To find its position at the end of one hour turn the globe through 15°, and prick opposite to 1° on the brass meridian. Then that distance from the pole, diminished according to the

table of retardation, gives the true position of the particle. Take this as the next starting point, and turn the globe 15° from it; prick off 1° to the south of it; join the line with the previous position; continue the line in a parallel direction to the course run during the first hour, and for a distance equal to that course (the terminal velocity of the course at the end of the first hour ought to have been taken; but as we proceed further and the speed varies slowly from hour to hour, the error becomes unimportant). This gives the uncorrected position at the close of the second hour. Correct it as before for retardation, and start afresh.

Many ingenious devices are scattered through Mr. Campbell's pages; nay, even the cover of the book is utilised to convey one of them. The cloth binding is pressed into creases that exactly correspond with the ancient ice-marks found on a piece of slate in New Brunswick. It is a pretty and very instructive ornamentation. Another is the description of an instrument we are surprised to find has not come into general use for self-recording the sunshiny hours of all the year, as well as the power of the sunshine. It consists of a spherical glass ball (or hollow sphere filled with acidulated water to check the growth of confervæ) propped in the middle of a concentric wooden cup. The radius of the latter is such that the burning point of the spherical lens shall fall on the inside of the wooden cup, and burn it away when the sun shines. As the sun's path on one day only partially overlaps its path on the preceding day, a partially fresh track is burnt daily; and the hotter the sun, the deeper does the burning penetrate. The instrument is so cheap, so simple in its adjustment, and requires so little care, that we wonder meteorologists have not advocated its use. We remember that Mr. Campbell published a description of it, in some scientific journal, a few years ago. We have said nothing of his chapters of adventure in the far North, and we do not purpose to do so, because they are out of place where they are. They are, however, particularly amusing, and deserve a book to themselves. He goes into lands where miles are measured by a dog's bark. One of them, called Peneculam,' being as far as a dog can be heard to bark in still weather. He also sees the migration of the lemens, and he shoots the rapids of the Tornea river, which is no child's play. For all this and for much more, we refer the reader to the book. We now take farewell of it, thanking the author for the many pleasant hours we have spent over Frost and Fire,' and though we feel strongly its defects, we assure him we are by no means blind to its great and numerous merits.

ART. VI.-Euvres Complètes d'Alexis de Tocqueville. Tomes VII. et VIII. Correspondance, Mélanges, Fragments Historiques et Notes sur l'Ancien Régime la Révolution et l'Empire, Voyages, Pensées, entièrement inédits. Paris:

1865.

THE

HE critics, who, in common with ourselves, had occasion to review four years ago the 'Memoir and the Correspondence of M. de Tocqueville' (which have since been translated into English by an able hand), ventured to remark that, in spite of the zeal and the fidelity with which M. Gustave de Beaumont had portrayed the life and edited the papers of his illustrious friend, his task was still incomplete. Indeed, he himself informed us that much still remained in the shape of unfinished fragments and unpublished letters which might one day form part of a more extended publication. We urged him to give a larger selection of these documents to the world; for although they may not have received that exquisite finish which M. de Tocqueville himself loved to impart to all he published, yet the scattered thoughts of so powerful a mind are sometimes even more forcible and impressive than his mature compositions, and the charm of his tender and meditative letters to his family and his private friends is inexhaustible. M. de Beaumont has given ear to these observations. Encouraged by the prodigious interest which was excited in France and throughout Europe by his former volumes, he has now enlarged the plan of them. A complete edition of the works of Tocqueville has been prepared for the press, which contains, in addition to the writings already well known to all readers, a volume of the speeches and reports prepared for the Chamber of Deputies, a volume of fragments principally relating to the masterly analysis of the French Revolution on which the author was engaged at the time of his death, and an additional volume of Correspondence. These publications are entirely new, and they are of the very highest interest and value. In the selection of the volume of letters previously published, M. de Beaumont was restrained by motives of delicacy from laying before the world the confidential effusions of intimate friendship, and by motives of prudence from calling attention to the political opinions of Tocqueville, especially with reference to the present Government of France. Already time, death, and the progress of events have removed some of the obstacles to publication which existed three years ago. The result is, that the letters now produced have a deeper meaning and a more

decided tone than those which had formerly appeared-indeed, it was for this reason that they were then withheld from the public; and many of them have a direct bearing on political affairs, even at the present time, to an extent which the admirers and adherents of the present Government of France will probably consider indiscreet and inconvenient. We rejoice, on the contrary, that M. de Beaumont has had the courage to produce these most remarkable papers. They contain the thoughts of a man, great as a writer, but greater still by his undaunted independence and by his undying love of freedom; and we are not sure that Tocqueville, in the full enjoyment of life and intellect, ever wrote anything more likely to rouse the slumbering spirit of his country, or to guide her back from servitude to liberty, than these posthumous leaves, penned many years ago in the solitude of his Norman home and in the confidence of private friendship. There is in these volumes the same profound insight which pervades all the works of the author into the causes of the French Revolution, and those vices of democratic society, which, under the first and the second Empire, have twice thrown back the French nation from the ardent enjoyment of freedom into a submissive obedience to absolute power. And if it be true

that after a vigil of seventeen years, some streaks of dawning light are again visible on the horizon,-if some indications are again felt that this slumber is not to be perpetual-then it is in this language that Tocqueville, and those who like him have watched through the night in despondency, but not in despair, would address the awakened sleeper. To these passages of his correspondence we shall presently direct a more particular attention.

After long hesitation as to the choice of a subject to employ his mind on a great work, when the collapse of the Republic and the coup d'état of 1851 had terminated his political career, Tocqueville resolved to enter upon a philosophical investigation of the phenomena of the great Revolution, which had for sixty years swayed to and fro the destinies of his country. But with characteristic originality, he sought for the earliest indications of these phenomena in the preceding age, and he exhumed the administrative records of the old monarchy from beneath the lava of the great eruption. Probably no living Frenchman had acquired so accurate a knowledge of the state of France before the Revolution, and he said in one of his letters, If anybody wants to found a professorship of the old adminis'trative law of the country, I believe I could fill it.' The result of these inquiries was the book on the State of France

VOL. CXXII. NO. CCL.

H H

before the Revolution,' which is in every one's hands. But this was only the prelude of his task. His intention was to approach the Revolution itself; to pass lightly over the course of events, although he had mastered them with inconceivable labour and precision; and to deduce from them certain general principles which acute reflection and enlarged experience enabled him to trace throughout this protracted convulsion. For it was one of his fixed convictions that, however perplexing, unexpected, and contradictory the course of events may be, they are rigorously governed by laws of human nature as determinate as the laws of the physical world; and that these laws can be traced by a sufficient power of observation and analysis even into the regions of metaphysical abstraction, although the people and even its leaders and teachers may be totally unconscious of the influence by which their movements are directed. Above all, it was his design to arrive, through the Revolution, at the character of Napoleon Bonaparte, and at the institutions established by him in France, not only because these are subjects of extraordinary interest in themselves, but because the name of that remarkable man and the fabric of his power are at this moment the ruling forces of the second Empire, and the key to the last form which the Revolution has assumed. And here we are arrested by a page or two of such eloquence and insight, that although we cannot hope to render the purity of the author's style in another tongue, and we cannot afford to dwell much longer on this portion of the volumes before us, we lay it before our readers. The fragment was written at Sorrento in 1858 :

'What I would seek to portray is not so much the events themselves, however surprising and however great they may be, as the spirit of those events-less the different acts of the life of Napoleon, than Napoleon himself-that singular, incomplete, but marvellous being, whom it is impossible attentively to consider, without contemplating one of the most strange and curious spectacles in the universe. I should desire to show what part in his prodigious enter prise was really derived from his own genius, and what was supplied to him by the state of the country and the spirit of the times-to explain how and why this indocile nation rushed at that moment of its own accord into servitude, and with what incomparable art he discovered in the working of a most democratical revolution all that was apt for despotism, and brought out of it those natural consequences.

In speaking of his internal government, I shall survey the effort of that almost divine intelligence rudely employed to compress human freedom, by a scientific and ingenious organisation of force such as none but the greatest genius of the most enlightened and the