has Antonelli to live in the floor above him; as, he says, he should not feel quite comfortable unless he was under his old friend and counsellor. This is pure burlesque, and is meant to be so. La Nouvelle Carte d'Europe bears the same relation to La Question Romaine that Germaine and the other stories of Paris life bear to Tolla and Le Roi des Montagnes. M. About is never himself when he gets away from the basis of facts which he has observed and collected. There is the same emptiness in this new pamphlet as there is in those of his novels where M. About only exhibits the amount of experience of life which is necessary for the composition of light comedy. The wit that is intended to compensate for this emptiness is generally lively, but it is sometimes strained. Perhaps the difference between the smart vagueness of this account of an imaginary party at the Hôtel du Louvre and the effective definiteness of M. About's account of the Papal States is worth studying on this side the water. English novelists are very fond of taking up political subjects and alluding to them more or less fully. But vague opinions on politics, however neatly put, are very worthless things; it is only when a novelist works as hard as ordinary dry politicians work that his book is instructive and valuable. Brilliancy of style and a ready sense of the comic are most admirable adjuncts when they accompany such an amount of honest investigation and shrewdness of perception as are displayed in works like M. About's Question Romaine and Mr. Trollope's volume on the West Indies. But vague speculations on politics are generally worse when they proceed from a novelist than when they come from more prosaic men; for they are aided by the story and the style, and a needless degree of suspicion is engendered lest they should possibly have more in them than they appear to have. We must do M. About the justice to say that he is well aware of this, and that he seems to see as distinctly as could be wished that when he is embodying the floating dreams or opinions of the day in funny or epigrammatic sentences, he is not doing a very great or useful thing. Without saying any thing severe of fugitive productions like his last, we may express a hope that when he next takes up his pen he may employ it to a better purpose. The pamphlet on Prussia, which has recently appeared with his name, has so evidently been written to order, that we need not criticise it further than to regret that he has abandoned the position of an independent writer; and to remark that he does not seem to have placed much brilliancy of style at the command of the government in return for the thoughts that were communicated to him. ART. II. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE ANCIENTS. The History of Herodotus. A new English version, edited with copious Notes and Appendices, illustrating the History and Geography of Herodotus, from the most recent sources of information, and embodying the chief results, historical and ethnographical, which have been obtained in the progress of Cuneiform and Hieroglyphical discovery. By George Rawlinson, M.A., late Fellow and Tutor of Exeter College, Oxford; assisted by Col. Sir Henry Rawlinson, K.C.B., and Sir J. G. Wilkinson, F.R.S. In four volumes. Vol. II. London: John Murray, 1858. A History of the Literature of Ancient Greece. By K. O. Müller, late Professor in the University of Göttingen; continued, after the Author's death, by John William Donaldson, D.D., Classical Examiner in the University of London, and late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. In 3 vols. London, 1858. Chapter xl.: "Aristotle." Aristotelis Opera omnia quæ extant uno volumine comprehensa, sejunctis quantum potuit ab genuinis suppositiciis, genuinis autem rectius quam antehac factum ordinatis, præmissa introductione cum argumentorum conspectu, adjectoque rerum indice. Edidit Carolus Hermannus Weise. Lips. 1843. THE history of the physical sciences exhibits something of that periodic character, that tendency to come back to the same point, which marks so many human affairs, from the merest trifles of dress and fashion to the deepest thoughts and feelings of mankind. A comparison of the earliest youth and the present mature age of these sciences might almost make us think that we have made little advance; at any rate, it might be sufficient to check that inordinate self-satisfaction with which men ignorant of all time and all knowledge that is past are too apt to regard the time and the knowledge that is present. The physical sciences begin, as they end, in the widest generalities; they begin, not as the sciences, but as science. The thoughts of the ancient naturalists may have been inaccurate or false, but they were thoughts about the prima philosophia, which is the highest and ultimate development of all knowledge. If science seems thus to spring up as a single and unbroken stream, it is destined, after many and wide separations, after many stagnant shallows and dangerous rapids, at last to form again one single stream, and to flow in one undivided channel. The connection of the sciences is only another phrase for the same union as that in which they began; to us every-day, science, not the sciences, becomes the true and proper word to express our studies in nature. We more and more come back to the simplicity of early thoughts; the age of distinctions and clear, sharp divisions is the middle age in the history of science; the youth and old age are times, not of distinctions, but of unity and identity. The infancy of the sciences is a time in which the elements are thought to be few; the forces that operate on them are conceived of as few likewise. In the middle ages, every thing tends to diversity and number; the minds of inquirers are occupied with the vast variety of substances, the vast variety of forces. But in still maturer age every thing tends to bring us back to the original simplicity of conception; we find the apparently numerous elements are but forms of a very few elements; the apparently numerous forces are but utterances of one or two primary forces. Again, the infancy of the sciences knows of no distinction between things spiritual and things physical. In modern times, we are wont to regard these two classes of things as related by analogy; the ancients, at least the very earliest philosophers, thought of them as of one class and identical; and this difference in conception is often somewhat bewildering, and must ever be borne in mind, if we would enter into the meaning of their speculations. Now, without attempting here any proof of such a proposition, we think it may be fairly asserted that the course of modern discoveries tends to lead us to a more and more close connection of the spiritual and physical worlds-to make us believe that force, in whatever form, never is, nor can be, due to any thing but spirit. And does not this adult age of the world seem reproducing the speculations of the first dawn of philosophy? What are attraction and repulsion, under all their thousand forms, which play so large a part in modern science, but the pixía and veikos of Empedocles? Were not the atoms of Democritus a splendid dream, if nothing more, of Dalton's great discovery of the atomic theory? Did not Lucretius assert the existence of latent heat? Did not Philolaus the Pythagorean maintain that the earth revolves round a central fire? and did not Heraclides and Ecphantus, whilst denying the local motion of the earth, assert it to have a rotatory movement round its own centre, like a wheel? And what are all the splendid speculations of Oken and Geoffroy and Goethe about the morphology of animals and plants but repetitions of Plato's theory of original forms? So truly are they such, that Owen, in summing up the subject, † Plut. de Placit. lib. iii. c. 13. * Lucret. i. 900. finds the simplest expression of the whole matter in a reference to the thoughts and the language of the old Greek. Surely these are not all mere fortuitous coincidences, but rather these old speculations have in them somewhat of intuition and insight. For it cannot be doubted that the mind of man is, in a sense, set over against nature; so that the thoughts of man have a tendency to run parallel with the creative thoughts of God, that is, with the facts of nature. If this were not so, we should have nothing but mere hap-hazard to guide us in our discoveries; we should find nothing of that intuitive insight into nature which is the only guide in all inductive experiments, the anticipatio nature of Lord Bacon; nothing of that intimate alliance between nature and genius which Schiller so well describes: "Mit dem Genius steht die Natur in ewigen Bunde; And as in the childhood of each man there are, amongst all his foolish and infantile thoughts, thoughts which in their simplicity and beauty seem more divine than the best thoughts of his graver years, so perhaps in the infancy of our race, amidst many idle and untrue dreams about science, there are some thoughts of nature that rise beyond the level of the more cautious period of exacter science, that seem more directly like shadows in the mind of man of thoughts in the Divine Mind. The first efforts, then, at exact observations in natural history, as distinguished from science at large, are not to be expected from the philosophers; they come from a different source, the poets and the travellers. Thus, in the Hebrew literature, we have in the book of Job those most poetic descriptions of the horse, of leviathan, and of behemoth, that in their force and beauty have never been excelled. In the Psalms, in the poetry of Solomon, and in the far loftier poetry of the Prophets, there are allusions of exquisite beauty to the trees, the flowers, and creatures of the Holy Land, which only want some one to do for them what Mr. Stanley has done for the geographical notices of the Bible to bring them to our minds with a greatly augmented vividness and reality. And as it is with the Jews, so it is with the Greeks; their poets give us their earliest materials in natural history: and the earlier amongst them perhaps even the most simply and most sincerely love and sing of natural things, not for association, not for metaphor, but for their own sake. Take Anacreon, for instance: how full he is of themes from nature! the rose, the pigeon, the swallow, the spring-tide, and the grasshopper, each claim a poem. And even when dealing with subjects remote from our present object, he shows the same familiarity with natural history; as, for instance, in his spiteful little verse about womankind, where he compares her beauty with the other means of defence which nature has given to other animals. By way of specimen, let us take the pretty little poem on the Grasshopper, which Cowper has neatly translated: "Happy songster, perched above, None thy pleasures can create. Or what can more perfectly describe the simple enjoyment of Nature than such lines as these? τί κάλλιόν ἐστι βαδίζειν It has been often said, and truly, that the great dramatic poets of Greece have but little of this feeling for nature and natural beauty in themselves; that their inspiration is drawn far more from the agora than from the fields, from the haunts of men than from the solitudes of nature. And so, when they do allude, as oftentimes they do, to the objects of natural history, it is generally in some relation or association with civil life or political history. Perhaps there are no lines in the Greek tragedy more justly celebrated for their beauty as a description of natural scenery and things than the chorus in the Edipus Coloneus of Sophocles, where the poet describes the glories of his own village home (668-719, edit. Dind.). |