provement. It is reasonless, will-less instinct, limited but undeviating, which alone could have preserved, as they were in the beginning, are now, and ever shall be, the numberless divisions and subdivisions of all merely animal life. As attraction is the planetary curb of the solar system, confining all orbs to their proper spheres, so is instinct the restraint, by which brutes are withheld from incroaching upon the allotted ranges and privileges of their fellow-brutes; from losing their distinct natures in imitation, blending and endless. If imitation were the source of brutal acquirements, whence the undeviating sameness of those acquirements? whence their never extended limit? Wherefore, since the ear of the feathered warbler is open to the immense variety of strains, poured from the throat of birds of other plume, whence its invariable choice of the family song? And when the female sees such numbers of different nests building around her for the reception of the callow brood, whence her inflexible attachment to the family nest?

Dr. Darwin read his chapter on Instinct to a lady, who was in the habit of breeding canary birds. She observed that the pair, which he then saw building their nest in her cage, were a male and female, who had been hatched, and reared in that very

cage, and were not in existence when the mossy cradle was fabricated, in which they first saw light. She asked him how, upon his principle of imitation, he could account for the nest he then saw building, being constructed, even to the precise disposal of every hair and shred of wool, upon the model of that, in which the pair were born, and on which every other canary-bird's nest is constructed, where the proper materials are furnished. That of the pyefinch, added she, is of much compacter form, warmer, and more comfortable. Pull one of them to pieces for its materials; place another before these canary-birds, as a pattern, and see if they will make the slightest effort to imitate their model! No, the result of their labors will, upon instinctive, hereditary impulse, be exactly the slovenly little mansion of their race; the same with that which their parents built before themselves were hatched. The Doctor could not do away the force of that single fact, with which his system was incompatible; yet he maintained that system with philosophic sturdiness, though experience brought confutation from a thousand sources.

Mr. Fellowes, the eminent champion in our day, of true aud perfect Christianity, against the gloomy misrepresentations of the Calvinists, has not less truly than ingeniously observed, that

"Dr. Darwin's understanding had some of the "properties of the microscope; that he looked "with singularly curious and prying eyes, into the economy of plants and the habits of animals, and

"laid open the labyrinth of nature in some of her "most elaborate processes and most subtle com"binations; that he was acquainted with more links "in the chain of second causes than had probably "been known to any individual, who went before "him; but that he dwelt so much, and so exclusively on second causes, that he too generally "seems to have forgotten that there is a first."

Certainly Dr. Darwin's distinguished power of disclosing the arcana of nature, enabled him to explore, and detect, the falacy of many received L and long-established opinions; but the proud consciousness that his scientific wand so often possessed the power attributed by Milton to Ithuriel's spear, betrayed him at times, into systematic error. Convinced, by deep thought and philosophic experience, that mankind received so many prejudices for truths, he looked too jealously at all its most revered and sacred axioms. Beneath the force of that jealousy he denied the power of instinct, and solved it into imitation. To have admitted, on the testimony of all impartial observation, all fair experiment, the unblending natures of instinct and

reason, must have involved that responsibility of man to his Creator for his actions in this his state of trial, which Dr. Darwin considered as a gloomy unfounded superstition. Unquestionably, if reason, like instinct, were incapable of warp from the power of volition, man could have no vice which might justly render him amenable to punishment in a future state; neither could he have any virtue for whose cultivation he might hope eternal reward. But, since his rational faculty is choice, not impulse, capable, at will, of refinement or degradation; whether it shall be his pole-star to virtue and piety, or his ignus fatuus to vice and irreligion, it inevitably follows that man is accountable to God for his conduct; that there is a future and retributory state.

If this brilliant and dazzling philosopher had not closed the lynx's eye of his understanding on that clear emanation from the source of intellectual as well as of planetary light, he had indeed been great and illuminated above the sons of men. Then had he disdained to have mingled that art in his wisdom, which was sometimes found in his common-life actions, and of which he not unfrequently boasted.

That noble simplicity which disdains the varnish of disengenuous design in principal and in

conduct, in conversation and in writing, was the desideratum of Dr. Darwin's strong and comprehensive mind. Its absence rendered his systems, which were so often luminous, at times impenetrably dark by paradox. Its absence rendered his poetic taste somewhat meretricious from his rage for ornament; chilled his heart against the ardour of devotion, and chained his mighty powers within the limits of second causes, though formed to soar

to INFINITE.

If, however, the doctrines of the Zoonomia are not always infallible, it is a work which must spread the fame of its author over lands and seas, to whatever clime the sun of science has irradiated and warmed. The Zoonomia is an exhaustless repository of interesting facts, of curious experiments in natural productions, and in medical effects; a vast and complicated scheme of disquisition, incalculably important to the health and comforts of mankind, so far as they relate to objects merely terrestrial; throwing novel, useful, and beautiful light on the secrets of physiology, botanical, chemical, and aerological.

The world may consider the publication of the Zoonomia as a new era of pathologic science; the source of important advance in the power of disclosing, abating, and expelling disease. Every