Mr. Wathen experienced so much civility from several of the Chinese gentry to whom he was introduced, and heard at the Factory so good an account of the Hong Merchants, that he is extremely reluctant to believe that great nation so passing roguish, as a multitude of the most authentic reporters have concurred in representing them; in the same manner as he strives, with an obstinate charity, against that condemnatory estimate of the Hindoo character, which is now so fast prevailing against the fables of its loveliness and innocence. It is in the temperament of our Author, as we have already noted, to behold things and men on the fairer side; and it might seem hard to impute it to want of judgement that, when the opinion is so benevolent a one, he should be satisfied to form it on a very transient and limited inspection.

But at whatever price we rate the integrity of the Chinese, we shall all agree that no language can go to excess in extolling that of the English, in all their transactions in the East; insomuch that we shall hardly deign the slightest civility of acknowledgement in return for the high compliment practically paid us by the Chinese in the remarkable fact, as stated by our Author, that well closed boxes of dollars, given in payments by the English, each box bearing on the outside a mark of the value contained, will very commonly return to Can on without having ever been opened, after having circulated in payments through a large extent of the empire. But how long can we believe it possible the Chinese will forbear to avail themselves of this our high reputation, to raise a little commodious, clandestine tax, by eliciting a few dollars per box, in spite of the dictates of Fo, and the incomparable moralizings of Confucius ?

There is a commendable despatch in the narrative of the homeward voyage, in which St. Helena affords the principal subjects of description and delineation. The run from this island to the Lizard, a distance of above 5200 miles, was performed in fifty-six days; and the voyager salutes his native land with a pardonable excess of affectionate flattery; though it must be acknowledged that the ascription to its scenery of the superlative degree of sublimity, is quite the utmost excess that can be pardoned, by any stretch of the reader's patriotism and indulgence, when such terms are employed as to vaunt our middling eminences, ravines, and cascades, over the stupendous spectacles in South America.

For me,' he says, its variable climate, never bordering on extremes, its genial spring, warm summer, sober autumn, and frosty winter, have more charms than the ever-verdant, monotonous dress of Nature in the tropical climes. Its scenery too, the motive and object of all my wanderings, surpasses, in beauty, variety, and

sublimity, any to be found within the tropics, in India or America.' p. 228.

Mr. Wathen shews the most unaffected modesty in his pretensions as an author, or rather, he makes no pretensions at all, except to the merit of strict veracity. He considers his drawings as the more valuable part of his labours, and assures us the prints in this volume are faithful representations. The greatest part of them are good, and several, remarkably beautiful. The colouring of a great proportion of them has very considerable delicacy and effect. One or two, especially 'Camoens's Cave,' have been spoiled by the engraver and the colourer. Great excellence in point of perspective, appears to be a general quality of Mr. W.'s performances.

We will confess that, considering what a number of drawings were made by our Author in the course of this adventure, we are tempted to wish a different plan had been adopted, namely, that slight plain etchings had been made, in imitation of drawings not more than half finished. There might thus have been given, without failing of a faithful and effective representation of the form and expansion of the scenes and objects, a far greater number of his views at the same expense, and with much more certainty, to the inspector, of having the true effect of the drawings. It is, we repeat, the consideration of what a very small proportion of the productions of a pencil, which so particularly excels in general truth of sketching, we can have the benefit of by any other means, that has excited this wish; and we venture to express it in the way of suggestion respecting Mr. W.'s avowed design of giving to the public many more of his drawings, of various selection as to the locality of the subjects, if the present work shall competently succeed. We wish that design may be speedily effected; and, as the thing to be desired is, that the future work may be in the greatest proportion possible actually his work, we hope he will aim at giving a very great number of his masterly sketches, as an object very preferable to an elaborate finishing of the plates, and preferable beyond measure to the dubious improvement of colouring. This addition, besides its expensiveness, is very difficult, as applied to landscape, to be performed at all to the satisfaction of persons of taste; and it puts far out of our sight the genuine, original delineation traced on the spot, often without time for any such nice process as that of colouring, which therefore, if added, is done from memory. The colouring of the print interposes between us and that delineation what is of arbitrary and uncertain execution, liable to vary throughout all the impressions from each individual plate, per

formed by many hands, and necessarily very subordinate ones in the painting art, and often made a veil and protection to bad engraving, as it obviously discourages the care indispensable to the excellence of that primary operation. The mode we have thus presumed to suggest to our Author and artist, would allow him the additional very important advantage of a much larger size than the ordinary quarto.

We take our leave of him for the present, with most sincere good wishes for the success of every graphical work which may be the result of his interesting and indefatigable peregrinations.

Art. III. The Physiognomical System of Drs. Gall and Spurzheim, founded on an Anatomical and Physiological Examination of the Nervous System in general, and on the Brain in particular; and indicating the Dispositions and Manifestations of the Mind. By J. G. Spurzheim, M. D. 8vo. pp. 556. price 17. 10s. London. Baldwin and Co. 1815.

(Concluded from Page 335.)

THE fourth chapter of the treatise under review, presents to us the principal physiological arguments in defence of the doctrine of plurality in organs.' That which stands first in the list, is the circumstance of the faculty of attention becoming fatigued by one species of study, and renovated by changing the object,

If the brain (says our Author) were a single organ performing all the functions of the mind, why should not the organ be more fatigued by this new form of study?'

This statement, however, seems to us to be a mere assumption of the question; for as we have already asserted the possibility and reasonableness of one set of nerves being endowed with two kinds of susceptibility, the one of which may be worn out, while the other preserves its original freshness, so may it be in reference to the brain,-the excitability may be exhausted by one species of stimulus, but open to, and ready for, another. For this principle we have indeed a sufficient number of facts to vouch; one which just now occurs to our recollection may suffice. A person engaged in a literary undertaking, the circumstances of which were such as to render it necessary for his attention to be preserved in uninterrupted exercise for thirty successive hours, adopted the expedient of taking tea, coffee, brandy, and opium, at regulated intervals, and by so doing, he effected much more than would have been accomplished by an equal

quantity of only one of the above exciting powers. It could not be that these different stimuli acted upon different organs, because the object to be effected, was, the preservation in exercise of only one faculty, and, on the theory of Spurzheim, of only one organ.

Further; An individual fatigued, and exhausted by one species of study, shall transfer his attention with comparative alertness and vigour to another, although this second object shall, even by the admission of our theorist himself, be an exercise of the same organ. Suppose a person to be occupied in the study of two languages at the same time, after being wearied by a long application to one, he will gladly go off to his exercises in the other, although his organ of language' must be necessarily occupied in either case, and that too in the same degree, provided the languages are equally difficult to acquire.

6

The second argument our Author adduces in this division of his subject, is founded upon an appeal to the phenomena observed in sleep, and somnambulism; but we apprehend that the whole series of affections and peculiarities observed in the states in question, are traceable to the varied states of the sentient and perceptive faculties. Let the dreamer, or the somnambulist, be subjected to some sudden impulse which shall be of sufficient force to recall the departed idea of perception, and the fairy wand, by the aid of which he has been roving through the fields of fancy, is instantly shivered into a thousand pieces. It is the same in some kinds of madness. Only let the perceptive faculty be brought into due exercise, and all the chimeras of imagination instantaneously disappear, and the insanity is for the time cured.* Now nothing of this momentary effect could ever be occasioned, were all the organs acting in that disproportional measure, and partial manner, which the theory of Gall supposes. The act of waking from sleep, must always be a long and tedious process; indeed by the time it was accomplished, the hour for repose would again return, and sleep, as a German theorist once suggested, would be the natural state of

*Explanations of the insane state, in general, we think commence, so to speak, at the wrong end. It is rather a deficiency, than an augmentation of faculties, which gives rise to the appearances of madness. A poet, in his moments of inspiration, has his imagination often raised to a much higher pitch of intensity, than a raving maniac; but the poet is not mad, because he retains his judgement in his possession. His imagination, indeed, takes bold and daring excursions, but he all the time knows that he is merely imagining. In other words, his ideas of perception prevent his conceptions from becoming false.

mau. To be fully awake, according to his doctrine, was to be in a state of disease,-a doctrine which admirably falls in with the notions of craniology.

The appearances in somnambulism are so remarkably illustrative of that intensity of idea, that concentration of faculty, and that apparent irregularity in the exercise of functions, which all arise out of the different states of the perceptive organs, without the necessity of supposing an irregular, disproportionate, and partial exercise of internal organs, that we shall detain the reader with a few further remarks on this interesting topic of investigation. And in the first place, we shall transcribe the narrative of a case, taken from the Encyclopédie, under the article somnambule.^

The Archbishop of Bourdeaux was at college with a student subject to walking in his sleep. On planting himself, from curiosity, in the student's chamber, so as to ascertain his mo<tions, he observed the young man sit down to compose sermons, which he read page by page as he committed them to paper, if it can be called reading when no use was made of the eyes. On being dissatisfied with any passage during the <recitation, he crossed it out, and wrote the correction with ❝ much accuracy over it. The writer of the article saw the beginning of a sermon, in which was the following amendment. It stood at first ce divin enfant. On revisal it struck the student to substitute adorable for divin. So he struck out the first word, and set the second exactly above it. But remarking that the article ce could not stand before adorable, he very nicely set a t after ce, and it stood then cet adorable • enfant.

To satisfy himself that the somnambulist, in all these ope'rations, made no use of his eyes, the Archbishop held something under his chin, sufficient to intercept the view of the paper on which he wrote. But he wrote on without being interrupted by this obstacle in the way of his sight. To discover how the night-walker knew the presence of objects, the Archbishop took away the paper on which he wrote, and pushed other papers under his hand. Whenever they were of unequal size, the student was aware of the change; but when they were equal, he wrote on, and made corrections on the spots corresponding with his own paper.

"One night having dreamed that he was beside a river, into which a child had fallen, he went through all the actions tending to its rescue, and with teeth chattering, as from cold, asked for brandy. None being at hand, a glass of water was given him instead. But he immediately remarked the difference, and with greater impatience demanded brandy, saying he should die if none were given him. Brandy was.