men for the invasion of England, he applied himself to the destruction of her commerce, the foundation of her naval power. In pursuit of this object, and on his plan of a western empire, he conceived, and in part executed, the design of consigning to plunder and destruction the vast regions of Russia; he quits the genial clime of the temperate zone; he bursts through the narrow limits of an immense empire; he abandons comfort and security, and he hurries to the pole, to hazard them all, and with them the companions of his victories, and the fame and fruits of his crimes and his talents, on a speculation of leaving in Europe, throughout the whole of its extent, no one free or independent nation: to oppose this huge conception of mischief and despotism, the great potentate of the north from his gloomy recesses advances to defend, against the voracity of ambition, the sterility of his empire. Ambition is omnivorous, it feasts on famine and sheds tons of blood, that it may starve in ice, in order to commit a robbery on desolation. The power of the north, I say, joins another prince, whom Buonaparte had deprived of almost the whole of his authority, the King of Prussia; and then another potentate, whom Buonaparte had deprived of a principal part of his dominions, the Emperor of Austria. These three powers, physical causes, final justice, the influence of your victories in Spain and Portugal, and the spirit given to Europe by the achievements and renown of your great commander, together with the precipitation of his own ambition, combine to accomplish his destruction. Buonaparte is conquered; he who said, "I will be like the Most High," he who smote the nations with a continual stroke; this short-lived son of the morning, Lucifer, falls, and the earth is at rest; the phantom of royalty passes on to nothing, and the three kings to the gates of Paris; there they stand, the late victims of his ambition, and now the disposers of his destiny, and the masters of his empire; without provocation he had gone to their countries with fire and sword; with the greatest provocation they come to his country with life and liberty; they do an act unparalleled in the annals of history,' such as nor envy, nor time, nor malice, nor prejudice, nor ingratitude can efface; they give to his subjects liberty, and to himself life and royalty. This is greater than conquest! The present race must confess their virtues, and ages to come must crown their monuments, and place them above heroes and kings in glory everlasting. When Buonaparte states that the conditions of the treaty of Fontainbleau are not performed, he forgets one of them, namely, the condition by which he lives. It is very true there was a mixture of policy and prudence in this measure; but it was a great act of magnanimity notwithstanding, and it is not in Providence to turn such an act to your disadvantage. With respect to the other act, the mercy shown to his people, I have underrated it; the allies did not give liberty to France, they enabled her to give a constitution to herself, a better constitution than that which, with much laboriousness, and circumspection, and deliberation, * The Duke of Wellington.' and and procrastination, the philosopher fabricated, when the Jacobins trampled down the flimsy work, murdered the vain philosophers,: drove out the crazy reformers, and remained masters of the field in the triumph of superior anarchy and confusion; better than that, I say, which the Jacobin destroyed, better than that which he afterwards formed, with some method in his madness, and more madness. in his method; with such a horror of power, that in his plan of a constitution, he left out a government, and with so many wheels, that every thing was in movement, and nothing in concert, so that the machine took fire from its own velocity; in the midst of death and mirth, with images emblematic of the public disorder, goddesses of reason turned fool, and of liberty turned fury: at length the French found their advantages in adopting the sober and unaffected security of King, Lords, and Commons, on the idea of that form of government which your ancestors procured by their firmness, and maintained by their discretion. The people had attempted to give the French liberty, and failed; the wise men (so her philosophers called themselves) had attempted to give liberty to France, and had failed; it remained for the extraordinary destiny of the French, to receive their free constitution from kings. This constitution Buonaparte has destroyed, together with the treaty of Fontainbleau, and having broken both, desires your confidence; Russia confided, and was deceived; Austria confided, and was deceived. Have we forgotten the treaty of Luneville, and his abominable conduct to the Swiss? Spain and other nations of Europe confided, and all were deceived. During the whole of this time, he was charging on England the continuation of the war, while he was, with uniform and universal perfidy, breaking his own treaties of peace, for the purpose of renewing the war, to end it in what was worse than war itself, - his conquest of Europe.' We have quoted this passage because it exhibits in a limited compass the excellences and defects of Mr. Grattan's oratory. In contradiction to the ordinary progress by which the fire of imagination becomes cool with advancing years, it should seem from this specimen that he allowed it a more unbridled career as he drew nearer to the verge of his political and his natural existence. The aberrations of the human intellect naturally resemble each other; and when we were reading, in the speech of which we have just extracted a part, ' of heaven and earth being set adrift from one another,' and 'making God Almighty a tolerated alien in his own creation,' we were forcibly reminded, by the extravagant mysticism of the passage, of one of the flights of the Della Crusca school of poetry, where the poet makes "the Creator blush to see How horrible his works can be." We now close this article; which we have conscientiously lengthened, from a conviction that even our frail and perish able able pages ought to assist in upholding the just fame of a great and good man. Such persons, who are equally the ornaments of public and private life, ought not to be penuriously praised. To Mr. Grattan, making due allowance for the imperfections of our common nature, we sincerely believe that the words of one of the most philosophical poets of antiquity may be strictly applied, and we know not whether human panegyric can go beyond them: 66 Compositum jus fasque animi, sanctosque recessus ART. II. Memoirs of the Wernerian Natural History Society. Vol. III. For the Years 1817, 1818, 1819, 1820. With Twenty-five Engravings. 8vo. pp. 572. 18s. Boards. Constable and Co. Edinburgh; Hurst and Co. London. . FOR 1821. OR the originality and the accuracy of information which characterize the records of this Society, the public are perhaps indebted, at least in some measure, to the cautious tardiness with which the volumes are prepared for the press. The present, like its precursors, bears testimony to the virtue of selection and trituration: but the undiminished pressure of claims on our attention compels us to report its materials. with our accustomed brevity. Observations on the Anatomy of the Orang Outang. By Dr. Thomas Stewart Traill, Liverpool.-The subject of these observations was a young female Orang, of the African or Black species, which was brought to Europe by the late Captain Payne, and died at Liverpool. From the natives of Gaboon, Captain Payne received information respecting the natural history of this animal, which accords with the recitals of Dampier, Battel, Bosman, &c., though they were long suspected of exaggeration. The circumstance, in particular, of its carrying off Negro girls, and detaining them for years in captivity, was distinctly stated, and has been recently and pointedly averred by gentlemen who have lived in Western Africa. From the confusion which has prevailed in various descrip tions and figures of the Orang Outang, and from the interesting history of the present specimen, Dr. Traill was induced, in conjunction with his friend Dr. Vose, a zealous and skilful anatomist, to devote some leisure-hours to the examination of its external appearance and internal structure. Camper, Cuvier, and others, had indicated some of the more prominent differences of organization between this species and the human subject ; L subject; and Dr. Traill, in consequence of minute and patient investigation, has considerably multiplied the points of dissimilarity: but these we cannot enumerate without transcribing large portions of his paper. He has likewise occasionally noticed in what respects of conformation the Orang agrees with or differs from the Baboon. 'On reviewing,' says he, the structure of the organs of respiration, of the tongue and larynx, there does not appear any reason why the Orang Outang should not speak. The organization, as far as we can judge, seems perfect; yet this animal, according to the best evidence, has never been known to make any attempt at articulate sounds. Indeed, in this respect it seems inferior to several other animals, which have been taught to imitate and repeat words or sentences. If animal organization were alone necessary to speech, the Orang Outang, from its striking approach to man, ought to possess this faculty in an eminent degree. We must, therefore, refer its deficiency in this respect not to corporeal but to mental peculiarities. It would be, perhaps, extremely difficult to point out the exact boundary between human intellect and the faculties of the lower animals; but one grand distinction peculiar to the human species is the possession of that intellectual power, by metaphysicians denominated abstraction. As the expression of ideas by arbitrary sounds implies the exercise of this faculty, which does not seem granted to the brute creation, it may not be going too far to conclude, that the want of speech in the Orang and other animals, with a corporeal organization so similar, to that of man, is wholly to be attributed to the absence of the faculty of abstraction.' We are aware that Dr. Traill is by no means singular in asserting the analogous structure of the organs of voice in man and the Orang Outang: but the cause of the incompetency of the latter to articulate words may possibly be that the air, as it issues from the larynx, is distributed into the hyothyroidian sacs; so that, whenever these animals cry, the sacs are inflated, and then emptied, and the mouth is not supplied with the sounds which its different parts might otherwise contribute to enunciate. At all events, we cannot implicitly adopt the Doctor's theory as a satisfactory solution of the problem: both because the conduct of several of the inferior animals, especially as they advance in life, and acquire knowlege from experience, appears to be occasionally regulated by processes of generalization and abstraction; and because children and women, not particularly addicted to abstract trains of reasoning, will often enunciate more smoothly and freely than the most profound metaphysician. The mere physical act of human speech, when the organs are perfect, seems to result from imitation; and, while we admit on the one one hand that both oral and written language are greatly indebted for their copiousness and energies to the superior powers of abstraction with which our species is endowed, we ought not to deny, on the other, that our inductions and judgments derive precision and extension from the use of conversation, and our appeals to the recorded wisdom of ages. From the very decided propensity to imitate human actions and gestures, which is inherent in the monkey-tribes, we cannot doubt that they would acquire the faculty of articulating sounds, at least to a certain degree, if they were provided with a complete apparatus for the purpose; and, although the defect of the speaking instrument may have eluded the search of anatomy, it may nevertheless exist, and be ultimately traceable to some very simple cause. On the Connection between the Primitive Forms of Crystals, and the Number of their Axes of Double Refraction. By David Brewster, LL.D., &c.—The ingenious author of this paper, who has devoted much of his penetrating attention to the optical structure of minerals, in the course of his researches ascertained certain relations between the primitive nucleus of crystals and their number of axes of double refraction; and these he has here very distinctly stated, in a tabular form, with the few exceptions to which they are liable. "When I had examined,' says he, the greater number of those bodies whose primitive nucleus was known, I had the satisfaction of observing that all the crystals with one axis arranged themselves under a certain series of primitive forms; and that those with two axes arranged themselves under another series; while the remaining primitive forms were occupied by those crystals whose doubly refracting forces were in equilibrio by the combined action of three equal and rectangular axes. According to these principles, the first class of primitive forms, or crystals with one axis, exhibit the rhomboid, with an obtuse summit; the second class, or crystals with two axes, assume certain modifications of the prism, with a varying base, but reducible to nine definitions, which are here enumerated; and the third class, or crystals with three axes, are comprized in the cube, the regular octohedron, and the rhomboidal dodecahedron. Availing himself of the correctness of these general views, Dr. Brewster proceeds to shew that various crystals, of which the primitive forms had not been hitherto determined, may now be classed in some of the preceding divisions; and their primitive form either deduced from, or approximated by, an examination of those that are secondary. Description of a Species of Delphinus, which appears to be new. K and |