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dible swiftness, where no horse could travel at all, if he could even live. Without sustenance, the gift, however, would be of no avail: this is anticipated and supplied. In that rigorous climate, so adverse to vegetation through the greatest part of the year, a moss is, nevertheless, produced in profusion, hardly found in other climates, where it would be of little use; this the animal finds beneath the snow by a peculiar instinct, and by this it is amply sustained. This is a single evidence that the Supreme cares even for the humblest of human beings, the Laplander; and I could no more bring myself to believe that it is not to His plain intention that he is indebted for his sustenance, or that such sustenance was insufficient, than I could, that the noble animal on which his existence depends, is the product of an animated film fed upon moss, which never rested in its improving efforts, till it supplied itself with snow shoes.

"In a word, all the laws of the vegetable, as well as the nature of animal, existence, are plainly subservient to the solace and sustentation of human beings; and, in pursuing the proof of this to whateyer limits, we should not be in the predicament of some who think that miracles end where knowledge begins; but, on the contrary, we should find that, as our knowledge increased, the miracle of the Divine wisdom and benevolence would enlarge, till the feeding of an ancient Seer in the wilderness of Carmel by ravens, would seem to make a far less demand upon the prescience and the power of the Deity, than the constant and mysterious operation of that endless chain of causes and effects, receiving its primary impulse from the same power, by which every single being, rational or irrational, is sustained and fed. We have, indeed, obscured our intellects, and benumbed our feelings, by making use of words that, strictly speaking, as we too frequently employ them, have no meaning. We talk of causes and effects, as words of course, quite plain in their signification to the slenderest capacity. As expressing facts deduced from our observation of the laws of Nature, this phraseology may be allowable but when we have observed two or more facts in a certain, constant connexion with each other, and have remarked the order of their priority, we are as far as ever from furnishing, either to the judgment or the imagination, any light as to the reason of such connexion. The motions of a grain of sand conform to certain laws which we have observed upon, and to this conformity we give a name,-attraction; but we know as little about the nature of

e;

this attraction as the unprotected child hurt by the fall it has occasioned. What are, therefore, denominated causes, are nothing more than determinations of the Deity; which, as founded in infinite wisdom, may be uniform and unchangeable in their nature. If, therefore, I put into the earth a seed, it may chance be of wheat or some other grain,' and trace the miracle of vegetation from its commencement to its completion, when I observe it has extracted from the earth matter hundredsof times its own weight, and of a nature totally dissimilar to the elements from whence it springs, and for purposes essentially different, I may notice, throughout, a number of connected effects, but I discern no cause beyond the will of the Deity. In like manner, if I regard the purposes for which this crop of grain is evidently designed, namely, for food, and when, becoming such, it is, by quite as inexplicable a process, partly converted into an animal substance, and becomes a portion of myself, I again discern effects, but no causes, beyond the will of the Deity. It is thus, therefore, that I have treated the, subject under consideration throughout. In establishing the balance between life and its sustentation, I have pointed at the plain indications of the Supreme will; that will once ascertained, it is as plain as the indissoluble connexion between what are called causes and effects, that the balance of food and numbers is eternally established."

Mr Sadler, in a former part of his Dissertation, has spoken, as we have seen, of certain facts regarding migratory animals, which have reference to themselves, but he now alludes to others which refer plainly. to the welfare of our species. Nature thus affords a timely supply of sustentation to human beings, espe- . cially in the first stages of society, when their numbers are few, and the earth but partially cultivated. Many briand says, have the periods of their edible quadrupeds, as Chauteaumigration as exactly calculated, as that of birds, and like them, evidently accommodated to the utility and necessities of men. Then, if we look to the sea-from the prolific North, what innumerable shoals are sent forth and directed, by some mysterious impulse, to all the shores! Only think of the pigeon species in North America! The amount of a single flight of them steering towards the North, in order to supply that less fruitful region with abun

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dance, was calculated by Alexander Wilson, the celebrated Scottish ornithologist, to amount to 2,230,272,000, or at least a brace of pigeons each to every man, woman, and child in the world! Our insular position, Mr Sadler observes, prevents us from witnessing the migration of quadrupeds; and as to the fishes and the fowls, which obey the same benevolent law, the unexampled richness of

our internal resources enables us to overlook the addition to our food which the air and the ocean offer to our acceptance, unless with a view to vary our luxuriant repasts. But place us, he adds, in the inhospitable regions of nature, and how should we then regard the subject? This amazing provision would appear as a perpetual repetition of the ancient miracle of the wilderness; and none who were not divested of reason, as well as feeling, would fail to recognise, in the timely supply, that hand so visibly stretched forth in behalf of his offspring.

But there is another important purpose to be answered by the migratory principle. Mr Sadler ventures to suggest that Nature, in imposing it on so many and most important orders of animal beings, purposed to disperse them over the habitable globe, as so many seeds of future increase, wherever man should be found to avail himself of the boon. The cow probably was, in its untamed state, migratory; the deer certainly is; and when we add the great number of birds that are-all useful to man-Mr Sadler's suggestion seems right. Indeed, of all the migratory tribes, he observes, those, and those only, are capable of being domesticated and retained, that are serviceable for human sustentation.

"In closing these thoughts on the nature and objects of the migratory principle in animal creation, I would pause to ask, who can trace, even in a single instance, those dependent and connected laws of nature by which these supplies

are afforded to man? Who can trace the different stages of their progressive preparation, or measure, even in thought, the vastness of the repast which is ever pouring forth in its full maturity? Deep in the unfathomable ocean, or concealed in the wild and wooded wastes of the inaccessible north, the mighty process is, while we are thus feebly essaying to speak con

cerning it, proceeding unobserved, in a never-ending succession of renewals and completions. Meantime, these innumerable flights are almost untouched, and the inexhaustible bounties of the ocean barely tasted; and no wonder; for the mother Earth herself, nowhere fully cultivated, lies in many of her most fertile regions totally neglected. Man, nevertheless, age after age, has become more and more

fastidious in the choice of his food, and

more profuse in its use; till, in this period of culpable luxury, the cry of prospective famine is raised a cry, of which all the elements re-echo the falsehood, and which rises to the throne of the Eternal as an insult on all those perfections through which he condescends to the very senses

of mankind."

Near the end of the Dissertation, Mr Sadler, after having proved all his positions, and established the balance of the food and numbers of animated nature, alludes finely to a system of reasoning pursued by the wisest of the heathen philosophers, which he thinks specially applicable to the present subject. Thus they inferred immortality from the intense desire for it implanted in the human soul, because, as far as they had scanned nature, they saw no desire without its appropriate gratification. Look again at the senses. For which of them has not the Deity provided an adequate and appropriate gratification? If, says he, very beautifully, when the sense of sight is awakened, it opens to a flood of" bright effluence of bright essence increate," perfectly sufficient for its purpose, namely, to drink in the surrounding works of the Deity,-can we, can any man believe that that eye must wax dim, and become dark for ever, because another and a neighbouring sense, on which all the rest depend, which equally longs for gratification, and is has no supply of its wants and deequally capable of being gratified, sires, but is doomed to suffering, privation, and destruction? No! The mouth, the teeth, the stomach of man are guarantees that God has provided him with subsistence-these are

patents for food," that the Deity himself has granted; proofs, indeed, that numbers and food are balanced.

The Dissertation closes with a noble passage-than which indeed we know few passages nobler in modern English prose. Mr Sadler has been

pointing to the actual condition and existence of animated beings, in full proof that their numbers and food are balanced. Nothing can be clearer, he truly says, than that animal happiness is totally irreconcilable with an insufficiency of food. If there be the alleged tendency in all animated life to increase beyond the "nourishment provided for it"-if nature has scattered existence with profusion, but has been sparing in its sustentation, then must there be universal misery through every tribe of the animal creation. But he appeals to human experience if this be the case.

"To advert to that part of animated nature, of which man takes little or no heed, and which is generally removed beyond the limits of his interference: I ask, are they seen multiplying around us in unsustainable numbers? After having represented nature as an arena of universal carnage, where her offspring are

Never ending, still beginning,

Fighting still, and still destroying,'are these warring germs of existence, though still feeding upon each other, starving? Does nature, I ask, exhibit these scenes of unceasing strife and confusion, where slaughter is the sole and evident business of life; to which want and famine are to be superadded, to rectify the constant tendency to redundancy? Do the insects sport awhile in the air, and, before their natural date of being, drop by exhausted myriads, and strew the ground with expiring animation? Do the birds pour their faltering and unfinished songs, and, adorned with the mockery of beauty and gaiety, drop from the branches, and flutter, and die at our feet? Do the fishes, increasing so as to spread the devastation through the other element, become torpid and expire by millions, till the pure medium to which they appertain is polluted with their floating carcasses? Or, if these queries be dismissed through the door of absurdity, by saying that the constant tendency of all these tribes of beings to have too little food, is accompanied by a constant tendency to an excess of it; which is precisely the argument founded on mutual destruction, as the case is put by those who maintain the superfecundity of all animated nature; to stop at once this loophole of retreat, let us ask whether those animals, on which none others prey, are, in their native haunts, seen in this constant state of inanition and death, which would be the inevitable consequence of their increasing beyond the balance of

their food. Is the eagle of the north seen thus pining away; with that eye which lit its fires at the meridian blaze faded; with those pinions with which he once scaled th heavens, drooping; and the mighty talons with which he was wont to strike and destroy, powerless and reOr is laxed;-dying for want of food? the majestic monarch of the animal creation, the lion, found in his native seats, thus subdued and quailed by want, till, weak and cowardly, he becomes the ready prey of every careless obtruder or otherwise has he to raven on his species in default of other food, till his haunts are strewed with the carcasses of his own kind? I repeat the question, is the scene

of nature one of general suffering, agony, and death? No:-such a condition, as it respects the universal number of existences, is as a single exception to the vast plurality of cases; as it regards that single exception, the moment of actual suffering is probably short, in comparison with the allotted term of enjoyment; nor can even

that individual instance be traced to an insufficiency in the general provision of Nature for all animated beings.

"Turn we then from the view of this phantasma, formed by distorted principles and distempered feelings, to the contemplation of nature, in the sober lights of philosophy and truth. Let her secluded haunts be open to the inspection, I care not of whom, so that he have an eye to see, and a heart to feel, the happiness of her animated progeny. Without sending such a one with Humboldt to the southern regions, swarming with universal animation; or with Acerbi to the north, which, notwithstanding our notions of it as a dreary solitude, is probably, both on earth and ocean, at least as luxuriant of life, let him penetrate into the wilder scenery with which this country even yet abounds, or lose himself in the seclusion of some of those afforested demesnes which still exhibit nature in her loveliest, because most unconstrained attitudes, and which recall to our ideas that paradise which the poet of England has taught imagination to restore. There, on the wane of some summer's day, and before the animal tribes have retired to their timely repose, let him lay himself down upon the sloping cowslip-covered bank,' and, shaded by a canopy of flowering and luxuriant foliage, look and listen. He will find, according

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to a celebrated observer of nature, all the animal tribes, down to the insects, wallowing in luxury; or, as Paley says of them, so happy as not to know what to do with themselves.' Close to his eye, to which the clearness of the air and the nearness of the objects give a sort of mi

croscopic acuteness, he sees innumerable insects, many of which, if he is not a practised entomologist, are minute and brilliant strangers; and if he is, are constantly putting his knowledge to a severe test; all full of life and enjoyment, leaping about with incredible agility, climbing up the spiry grass, or disporting on the flowers with which it is embroidered; amongst these the bee is plying its busy harvest, and filling up every interval of labour with its song; a conspicuous example, perhaps, of the happy business of every inferior wing. If he chance to look to the roots of his verdant pillow, still he sees nature swarming with animation; innumerable terrene insects strike his notice, many of them, perhaps, resting during the sultry hours, but whose labours he would have witnessed had he been there at the dewy dawn instead of the close of the day, in innumerable shining threads suspended from every point of grass, and investing the whole surface of the meads with a film of inconceivable fineness and lustre. Whichever way he looks, there is not a plant or a flower without its appropriate population. Further from him he sees throngs still more innumerable,

Which flutter joyous in the solar beam,

And fill the air, or float the dimpling stream,' all expressing, as far as motion and appearance without language can express it, the utmost measure of enjoyment. Nor are even sounds wanting to signify the reign of universal pleasure. Far more unequivocal than the busy noise arising from the crowded haunts of human beings, is that continuous murmur of unnumbered wings, and the ceaseless hum, with which their universal occupation is plied, which soothes and falls upon the ear in one continued and unbroken unison, save when the exulting songs of the painted birds, responding in innocent rivalry, add melody to this pleasing and perpetual note of harmonious nature. In the shallows of the clear stream which flows babbling at his foot, he sees multitudes of existences which flit along like living shadows full of activity and pleasure; while dimpling its surface, or gathering in clouds above it, another order of beings, that of insects of different tribes and various degrees of brilliancy, are disporting; forming a world

of their own, replete with equal plenty and joyousness. The wild animals, meantime, occasionally scud past him, intent upon their pastime, from which his intrusion on their haunts startles them; some of the nobler ones, whose stately forms excite his admiration, gaze at him at a distance, and pass on. Through an opening vista of the wooded solitude, he sees a whole herd of these moving as by one impulse; every motion as buoyant as though they were almost aerial. And far beyond the bounds of the surrounding domain, a still more magnificent prospect The surface of the spreads before him. earth, to the distant horizon, is tesselated with enclosures, and glows with many coloured crops. Here the pastures are clothed with flocks; there the valleys are covered over with corn; the little hills rejoice on every side; they shout for joy, they also sing! Human habitations are sprinkled over the prospect, like gems on the mantle of nature; and here and there they cluster into a town; while the temples of Divine worship,' which point with taper spire to heaven,' are seen rising as far as the eye can stretch, and crown the happy prospect with the proof, that mankind are neither insensate nor ungrateful; that they know who it is that gives them rain and fruitful seasons, filling their hearts with food and gladness.' He gazes till the tints of day fade, and the glorious prospect recedes from his sight. The busy tribes of life are hushed in repose, one solitary and unrivalled songster only keeps up the vigil in the temple of nature, but in what strains does she charm the listening shades, and teach the night his praise!'

He looks up and beholds the eternal stars successively rekindling their fires, and resuming their courses; and the moon walking forth in her brightness. Áll the near and transitory scenes of nature thus cut off, the soul calls home its scattered thoughts, and centres them in loftier meditations concerning that mysterious being, whose works it had just been contemplating, and who now appears more intimately and awfully present. He rises, and retires to his wonted place: in a frame of solemn devotion which recognises the Deity alone, and him only in his one sacred attribute of unbounded and everlasting goodness."

NOTICES TO CORRESPONDENTS.

A REJECTED Contributor is the bitterest of all enemies-but likewise the most impotent. To be rejected seems worse than to be cut up-and yet reason says that to be buried in the Balaam-Box is not so bad as to be scarified by the Knout. Observe-We never insult our Contributors, gentle or semple, as many editors do-but simply send the stupid ones asleep among the sumphs. Why then all that spleen-bile-and gall spluttered on Maga by unsuccessful suitors? Though she,-capricious coquette, repels, rejects, shuns, or declines their amorous advances, yet never never does she, like some vain beauties we could name, blab to the public ear the secret of their discountenanced loves. Why then should they themselves betray it, by sneakingly seeking to disparage her peerless charms? A single syllable muttered against Maga lets the cat out of the bag- and all the world exclaims, "Oh, ho!" Thenceforth the whey-faced whiner is known wherever he goes, to be a rejected article-other Magas look on him with suspicious eyes, conjecturing that there must be something amiss-and he dies at last of the yellow or black jaundice. Such conduct, to say the least of it, is very ungrateful. Were Maga to encourage the advances of elderly gentlemen, by softly treading upon their toes, laying her silken hand of long, white, slender, pink-nailed fingers on their arm, and with her warm, red, balmy mouth, almost touching their ear, asking in a silvery whisper " If it did not thunder"-shrinking to their side all the while, with her frame all on the tremor like a sensitive plant quivering to the touch, then indeed would it be highly culpable in her, the coquette, to say-in reply to the question when popped-" No-no-sir-you must excuse me-no-no-no!" And were she to add to the cruelty of refusal, the shame of exposure, publishing a monthly list of all the wretches who for her sake must wear the willow-then indeed might the rejected articles, unsatisfied with sympathy, call aloud for punishment. But how far different is her conduct! Never does she consign a suitor to the Balaam-Box without a tear! She sighs to see the tin-lid hea ving to the "hotch" of the poor Contributor below! She shudders when

"awhile the living hill

Heaves with convulsive throes, and all is still."

But farther. Though rejected twenty times, if you be a man or woman of talents or genius, persevere; and who knows but that on the twenty-first attempt," Your joy is like a deep affright," to find yourself figuring before the whole world in a leading article? Some people are so huffy! An Editor must in with their article instanter-that very month-though perhaps the parcel arrives on the twentieth-the very day our excellent friend, Captain Bain, has gone blazing away out of the mouth of the Frith with the James Watt rejoicing in a ten thousand impression of a double number. Had his article been the only article in the whole wide world, it might perhaps have had some small chance of insertion-some time or other-before he died; but when you consider, that, on the very day his article arrived-and not only on that day, but every day before or since-scores of articles, over and above his article, had come flying from "a' the airts the win' can blaw"-an absolute shower of whitey-brown-you must see at once that there was no more chance of his article in particular being snapt up by Maga, than of any one particular fly being snapt up by one trout when all the Tweed was alive with green-tails. Yet the idiot-if he will allow us to call him so-after searching in vain all through our July number for his article-even among the Deaths and Marriages, and in among the Appendix of Bills-scrawls his rage by return of post-screeching for his article the restoration of his article-totally unaware-O the blind minds of men!—that his article had, on the very day of its arrival in Modern Athens, received Christian Burial, along with many other unfortunates who had been swept off by the same epidemic, and interred deep down below the power of Hare or Knox, under the Balaam-Box, that Patent SAFE.

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