thick overhanging trees, while cactuses and flagrant-flowered shrubs fenced in the path with a wall of verdure; here and there we caught glimpses of the lake through the trees, and at intervals narrow, well-beaten paths branched off to the small and large farms scattered over the country.

After riding some miles we came to open fields, and passed by several fine estates, surrounded by ditches and cactus hedges in full bloom. The Mansion was there which we came to visit. The proprietor was in town; but we were received with the greatest civility by the Mayor-domo. He showed us a large square space where the ground was beaten hard and swept clean, in which the nuts were spread on skins to dry, before being assorted, one by one, and packed in skins.

After resting a while, we rode through a long gravelled walk, fenced in, and arched over, by magnificent mango trees, golden with fruit, and through a vista of orange trees beyond, to the cacao plantation. It resembled a

beautiful park of huge trees with broad walks in every direction. The cacao tree seldom rises higher than twenty feet; its leaves are long and pointed, somewhat like those of the cherry, but much longer; flowers small, of a pale red. They are surrounded by oval pointed pods, grooved like a musk melon, although smaller. The nuts are numerous, some pods having fifty. It produces two crops a year; but it is never without some pods on it. The trees are planted fourteen feet apart, in a good soil. It is peculiarly necessary to defend this tree from the scorching rays of the sun, and at the same time sufficient warmth should be afforded for vegetation. This is done by shading it with the plantain tree, and the erythrina. As the cacao advances in size, the plantain is cut down; the erythrina, or coral tree, or, as it is sometimes called, cacao mudæ, mother of the cacao, having attained sufficient height to protect it from the sun. It begins to bear at seven years old, comes to perfection in about fifteen years, and lasts forty or fifty years. The coral tree grows to sixty feet high, and drops its leaves at the end of March, or beginning of April; and then is covered with crimson flowers, shaped like a scimitar.

The taste for chocolate grows with its use; and hardly any person resides under the tropics long to whom it does not become a necessity. One man is able to take care of a thousand trees, and harvest their crop. The estate is, therefore, more valuable than those of sugar, indigo, cotton, or cochineal. A good plantation yields 1200 lbs. to 100 trees. At the usual market rate of twenty-five dollars the cwt., this would give 300 dollars per annum to each 1000 trees and each labourer. The plantation I was inspecting contained 9500 trees, valued at one dollar each.'

Cotton is spun universally by the Indian women, and manufactured in the country in bright colours.

The cheapest raw sugar of the country consumed by the natives is sold at three farthings a pound, a fact well worth attention in reference to the destiny of our own West Indian islands, and also to the slave produce of Cuba and the Brazils. The better qualities produced by refinement from this raw sugar are nearly as hard and as white as the refined sugar of commerce,

and some of both sorts is already exported to Peru and Chili. The cane is of native American origin, and more productive than the Asiatic cane introduced into the West India islands, and the soil is richer.

But this new element of commercial prosperity is accompanied by the all-important fact that free labour is much cheaper in Central America than in the West Indies, and so much more economical than the slave labour of Cuba and Brazil, that the exportation of thousands of Indians from this region to the south in former days was a too tempting source of profit. The extent of country in Central America available for this purpose is enormous; and the population, already above 2,000,000, are industrious, requiring only political tranquillity to become active producers. With order secured under the good influence of the joint protection of the United States and England, in which the concurrence of all the other maritime governments is invited, there is no difficulty in the production of this cheap sugar being carried on so successfully in this region as in a few years to obtain for it the markets of Europe. Great staples spring up rapidly under favourable circumstances. The wool of Australia and South Africa is of our own days. The coffee of Brazil was a novelty not long ago. Already capitalists in the West India islands contemplate a three or four months' voyage to Australia to escape from gradual decay. The transference of their machinery and stock to the rich valleys of the Isthmus a few days' sail off is an easier and a wiser step.

In the meantime the condition of the West India islands gives occasion to much anxiety. The fall in the price of this great staple has impoverished many proprietors, more especially the owners of mortgaged estates; and there is little prospect of a return of their wealth. But the change is incorrectly attributed to idleness in the free negroes. The quantity of sugar made in Jamaica, for example, is about the same since their emancipation as before, and the number employed in field labour does not materially vary. The work done by them, therefore, is not lessened; much, however, of that work is done for themselves, and their physical condition is generally improved. Nor does it appear from the criminal records that their conduct is worse than in times past. In future, without doubt, a mixed population of little freeholders will spring up there in the place of vast fortunes, subject to be lost by the periodical recurrence of 'distress;' and the more profitable produce of Central America must hasten this change.

Mr. Squier enters largely into the subject of the inter-oceanic passage through the lake of Nicaragua; and he describes its ports and line with care. The works have been carried on by

the American engineers with great spirit for three years; and it will probably succeed for small vessels. Whether the ships that usually navigate the Pacific can ever take that way is doubtful. The channel is rocky, and too hard to be deepened without enormous cost; the rapids are frequent, uncertain, and formidable. Therefore, although the summit level is low, the length of the cuttings, and the floods, must limit the undertaking to the smaller class of steamers.

Two rivals of the Nicaragua passage for the transmission of gold and Californian adventurers are, the Tehuantepec line from the Gulf of Mexico, and the Panama railway, now near its completion, and both undertaken by enterprising citizens of the United States.

Two cheap lines in the republic of Costa Rica seem likely to interfere materially with the profits of all the others. They are in the hands of French and English parties; and extend to colonizing operations in fertile districts.

Two other passages, less known to the public, are speculated upon with great confidence by the undertakers. The first of these lies in the direction of the famous Scottish colony of Darien of the reign of William III. It is undertaken by Messrs. Fox, Henderson, and Brassey, practical men, already eminent for their success in the construction of the Crystal Palace and other great works in Europe. They have obtained the authority of the government of New Grenada for their undertaking; and their preliminary surveys are now in progress. The region in which this pas sage is to be constructed lies between Point Mosquitos, a few leagues west of Port Escoces, and another point a few leagues east of that port towards the Gulf of Darien on the Atlantic; and the Bay San Miguel on the Pacific, where two rivers fall into that bay. This psssage is to be constructed for the largest ships; but the undertakers seem to be too sanguine in their expectations of success, inasmuch as this region was familiar to those who frequented it in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the facilities of access now relied upon escaped those eager explorers.

The last and most promising line is up the rivers Atrato and Niapipi to Cupica Bay on the Pacific. The evidence is strong in all respects in favor of this line, and there seems to have long existed in the minds of the Spaniards a conviction that a ship passage to the south seas could be found in this direction. Down to a recent period, the Spanish government made extraordinary sacrifices to prevent such a passage being used; and a law was passed, imposing the penalty of death on all who should attempt it, or reveal the geography of the Atrato region

to foreigners. No such law prevailed respecting any other lines across the Isthmus.

These gigantic enterprises, ranging in point of cost from £200,000, to £8,000,000 sterling, prove that Mr. Squier is correct in his estimate of the importance of the region forming the Isthmus that connects North and South America. But his error is a capital one in holding the citizens of the United States to be the only foreigners interested in the prosperity of that region, or its fittest guardians. When his countrymen, who have undertaken ship-passages and railroads there, came to London and Paris for money to complete their works, they practically confuted that pretence in point of interest; as the point of sympathy and feeling was settled against the United States, when Mr. Squier could not venture to tell his Indian friends in Nicaragua that their fellow redmen of the north are in the course of rapid extermination by white people, who perversely refer to their legal equality, or protection, and as perversely stamp all men of colour with the brand of inferiority.

On our part, whilst our capital, our enterprise, and our science are stamping Central America with a new British character, let not our advancement of her welfare be in humiliating contrast with our disregard to the settled rights of the men of every race-who have equal pretensions to our respect and affection-in Asia, Africa, and Australia.

ART. IV.-Manual of the Anatomy and Physiology of the Human Mind, By the Rev. James Carlile, D.D. London: Hall and Co. pp. 269. 2. Historical Sketch of Logic, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day. By Robert Blakey. London: Baillière. pp. 524.

3. An Essay on the New Analytic of Logical Forms. A Prize Essay. By Thomas Spencer Baynes. London: Simpkin and Marshall. pp. 157.

WE are not altogether sorry to see new books frequently coming out, of a popular character, on subjects the very names of which have long frightened not only grave maiden ladies and boarding-school misses out of their propriety, but which have been looked at with a kind of mysterious horror even by many classes of educated men. Of all things in the world, logic and

metaphysics have been to many among the most ominoustheir very names have been regarded with suspicion. It is curious, too, that many persons who really do not very well know what they are, talk about them as if they did, and seem only too familiar with them, in parlour, pulpit, and everywhere else. Now, when we meet with publications which are somewhat readable by the average run of learning and intelligence, we are gratified; because, although such books seldom possess anything original, and do not of themselves extend the bounds of science, they tend to promote inquiry at least, and they lead the previously uninformed, who would be utterly repelled by more strict and elaborate treatises, to see that there really is something in subjects which they may have misapprehended, even if they did not regard them as wholly mystic and unintelligible. On the above ground, we do not at all sympathize with our German neighbours, who condemn popular works on subjects such as those before us. We would have both. We would have the scientific treatise, and we would also have knowledge made as 'easy' as it can be.

Dr. Carlile's book does not pretend to any originality, but it arose from the laudable endeavour to compare what we know of the soul by our own consciousness with what is revealed of (by) God in scripture.' The issue was this separate work On the Mind.' The author treats of the subject in the following order :

I. Sensation, and the phenomena connected with it; under which are included the senses, memory, judgment as dependent on sensation, emotions derived from sensations, intellectual powers dependent on sensation. II. Perception, and the phenomena dependent on it; or perception, notion of self or personal identity, the will, notions of cause and effect, sensation as modified by perception, memory as connected with perceptions, emotions depending on perception, and intellectual powers depending on perception (under which latter subdivision are arranged classification, induction, reasoning, the use of language, and its influence on imagination or conception). III. Recognition, and the phenomena dependent on it; under which head we have consciousness, discovery of the presence and emotions of other minds, attention, memory as exercised on recognition, emotions as connected with recognition, sympathy, intellectual operations as connected with recognition, taste, the recognition of mental states and operations in the inferior animals, and the recognition of the Deity. IV. The means which the mind possesses of affecting other minds; under which head we have a variety of useful