antique sandals on her feet afforded evidence of her having been buried there for many ages; yet her nails, hair, and skin, are described as having shown hardly any marks of decay. In a turbary on the estate of the Earl of Moira, in Ireland, a human body was dug up, a foot deep in gravel, covered with eleven feet of moss; the body was completely clothed, and the garments seemed all to be made of hair. Before the use of wool was known in that country, the clothing of the inhabitants was made of hair, so that it would appear that this body had been buried at that early period, yet it was fresh and unimpaired. In the Philosophical Transactions, we find an example recorded of the bodies of two persons having been buried in moist peat, in Derbyshire, in 1674, about a yard deep, which were examined twenty-eight years and nine months afterwards; "the colour of their skin was fair and natural, their flesh soft as that of persons newly dead."

'Among other analogous facts we may mention, that in digging a pit for a well near Dulverton, in Somersetshire, many pigs were found in various postures, still entire. Their shape was well preserved, the skin, which retained the hair, having assumed a dry, membranous appearance. Their whole substance was converted into a white, friable, laminated, inodorous, and tasteless substance; but which, when exposed to heat, emitted an odour precisely similar to broiled bacon.'-vol. ii. pp. 210-216.

No very clear explanation is given of the source whence peat derives this antiseptic property. As to the animal remains which are found in them, they are to be accounted for in one of two ways; the living animal must have fallen into the peat when in a semifluid state, or it may have burst from its moorings, as sometimes happens, and in its devastating progress must have overtaken and overwhelmed the victims which are found buried in its bosom. The Solway Moss, for instance, as described by Gilpin, "is a flat area, about seven miles in circumference, situated on the confines of England and Scotland. Its surface is covered with grass and rushes, presenting a dry crust and a fair appearance, but it shakes under the least pressure, the bottom being unsound and semifluid. The adventurous passenger, therefore, who sometimes in dry seasons traverses this perilous waste, to save a few miles, picks his cautious way over the rushy tussocks as they appear before him, for here the soil is firmest. If his foot slip, or if he venture to desert this mark of security, it is possible he may never more be heard of." There was a tradition, that at the battle of Solway, in the time of Henry VIII., a fugitive troop of horse plunged into this morass, and that it immediately closed over them. The truth of the tale has been substantiated by peat-diggers, who found a man and horse in complete armour, both in good preservation, in the place where it was always supposed the battle took place.

With respect to the bones of men and inferior animals, which are found in caverns, Mr. Lyell judiciously observes, that great caution must be used in drawing any chronological inferences from them, where the signs of successive deposition are wanting.

In treating of the preservation in subaqueous strata, of the

remains of man and his works, the author enters into some striking calculations as to the loss of life, and the destruction of shipping

at sea.

• We shall hereafter advert to a calculation, by which it appears that more than five hundred British vessels alone, averaging each a burden of about one hundred and twenty tons, are wrecked, and sink to the bottom, annually. Of these the crews for the most part escape, although it sometimes happens that all perish. In one great naval action several thousand individuals sometimes share a watery grave.

Many of these corpses are instantly devoured by predaceous fish, sometimes before they reach the bottom; still more frequently when they rise again to the surface and float in a state of putrefaction. Many decompose on the floor of the ocean where no sediment is thrown down upon them, but if they fall upon a reef where corals and shells are becoming agglutinated into a solid rock, or subside where the delta of a river is advancing, they may be preserved for an incalculable series of ages in these deposits.

Often at the distance of a few hundred feet from a coral reef there are no soundings at the depth of many hundred fathoms. Here if a ship strike and be wrecked, it may soon be covered by calcareous sand and fragments of coral detached by the breakers from the summit of a submarine mountain, and which may roll down to its base. Wrecks are known to bave been common for centuries near certain reefs, so that canoes, merchant vessels, and ships of war, may have sunk and have been enveloped in these situations in calcareous sand and breccia. Suppose a volcanic eruption to cover such remains with ashes and sand, and that over the tufaceous strata resulting from these ejections, a current of lava is afterwards poured, the ships and human skeletons might then remain uninjured beneath the superincumbent rock, like the houses and works of art in the subterranean cities of Campania. That cases may have already occurred where human remains have been thus preserved in a fossil state beneath masses more than a thousand feet in thickness, is by no means improbable, for in some volcanic archipelagos a period of thirty or forty centuries might well suffice for such an accumulation of matter.

'We stated that at the distance of about forty miles from the base of he delta of the Ganges, there is a circular space about fifteen miles in diameter where soundings of a thousand feet sometimes fail to reach the bottom. As during the flood season the quantity of mud and sand poured by the great rivers into the Bay of Bengal, is so great that the sea only recovers its transparency at the distance of sixty miles from the coast, this depression must be gradually shoaling, especially as during the monsoons the sea, loaded with mud and sand, is beaten back in that direction towards the delta. Now if a ship or human body sink down to the bottom in such a spot, it is by no means improbable that it may become buried under a depth of three or four thousand feet of sediment in the same number of

years.

Even on that part of the floor of the ocean whither no accession of drift matter is carried, (a part which we believe to constitute at any given period, by far the larger proportion of the whole submarine area,) there are circumstances accompanying a wreck which favour the conservation of skeletons. For when the vessel fills suddenly with water, especially in the

night, many persons are drowned between decks and in their cabins, so that their bodies are prevented from rising again to the surface. The vessel often strikes upon an uneven bottom and is overturned, in which case the ballast, consisting of sand, shingle, and rock, or the cargo, frequently composed of heavy and durable materials, may be thrown down upon the carcasses. In the case of ships of war, cannon, shot, and other warlike stores, may press down with their weight the timbers of the vessel when they decay, and beneath these and the metallic substances the bones of man may be preserved.

'When we reflect on the number of curious monuments consigned to the bed of the ocean in the course of every naval war from the earliest times, our conceptions are greatly raised respecting the multiplicity of lasting memorials which man is leaving of his labours. During our last great struggle with France, thirty-two of our ships of the line went to the bottom in the space of twenty-two years, besides seven fifty-gun ships, eighty-six frigates, and a multitude of smaller vessels. The navies of the other European powers, France, Holland, Spain, and Denmark, were almost annihilated during the same period, so that the aggregate of their losses must have many times exceeded that of Great Britain. In every one of these ships were batteries of cannon constructed of iron or brass, whereof a great number had the dates and places of their manufacture inscribed upon them in letters cast in metal. In each there were coins of copper, silver, and often many of gold, capable of serving as valuable historical monuments; in each were an infinite variety of instruments of the arts of war and peace, many formed of materials, such as glass and earthenware, capable of lasting for indefinite ages when once removed from the mechanical action of the waves, and buried under a mass of matter which may exclude the corroding action of sea-water.

'But the reader must not imagine that the fury of war is more conducive than the peaceful spirit of commercial enterprize to the accumulation of wrecked vessels in the bed of the sea. From an examination of Lloyd's lists from the year 1793, to the commencement of 1829, it has appeared, that the number of British vessels alone lost during that period amounted, on an average, to no less than one and a half daily, a greater number than we should have anticipated, although we learn from Moreau's tables that the number of merchant vessels employed at one time in the navigation of England and Scotland, amounts to about twenty thousand, having one with another a mean burden of one hundred and twenty tons. Out of five hundred and fifty-one ships of the royal navy lost to the country during the period above mentioned, only one hundred and sixty were taken or destroyed by the enemy, the rest having either stranded or foundered, or having been burnt by accident, a striking proof that the dangers of our naval warfare, however great, may be far exceeded by the storm, the hurricane, the shoal, and all the other perils of the deep.

• Millions of dollars and other coins have been sometimes submerged in a single ship, and on these, when they happen to be enveloped in a matrix capable of protecting them from chemical changes, much information of historical interest will remain inscribed and endure for periods as indefinite as have the delicate markings of zoophytes or lapidified plants in some of the ancient secondary rocks. In almost every large ship, moreover, there are some precious stones set in seals, and other articles of use and ornament

composed of the hardest substances in nature, on which letters and various images are carved-engravings which they may retain when included in subaqueous strata, as long as crystal preserves its natural form.

'It was a splendid boast, that the deeds of the English chivalry at Agincourt made Henry's chronicle.

as rich with praise

As is the ooze and bottom of the deep,

With sunken wreck and sunless treasuries;

for it is probable that a greater number of monuments of the skill and industry of man will, in the course of ages, be collected together in the bed of the ocean, than will be seen at one time on the surface of the continents.

If our species be of as recent a date as we suppose, it will be vain to seek for the remains of man and the works of his hands imbeded in submarine strata, except in those regions where violent earthquakes are frequent, and the alterations of relative level so great, that the bed of the sea may have been converted into land within the historical era. We do not despair of the discovery of such monuments whenever those regions which have been peopled by man from the earliest ages, and which are at the same time the principal theatres of volcanic action, shall be examined by the joint skill of the antiquary and the geologist.

There can be no doubt that human remains are as capable of resisting decay as are the harder parts of the inferior animals; and we have already cited the remark of Cuvier, that "in ancient fields of battle the bones of men have suffered as little decomposition as those of horses which were buried in the same grave." In the delta of the Ganges bones of men have been found in digging a well at the depth of ninety feet; but as that river frequently shifts its course and fills up its ancient channels, we are not called upon to suppose that these bodies are of extremely high antiquity, or that they were buried when that part of the surrounding delta where they occur was first gained from the sea.'-vol. ii. pp. 254–258.

There is a rock, still in process of formation, on the north-west coast of the mainland of Guadaloupe, in which the skeletons of men have been found more or less mutilated. This rock is said to be harder than statuary marble. Similar formations are in progress in the whole of the West-Indian archipelago, consisting principally of minute fragments of shells and corals. But we need hardly wonder at such formations as these, when we reflect upon the numberless coral islands which have grown into existence in the Pacific, within the memory of man. Much light has been thrown upon the peculiarities in the structure of these islands, by the information collected during Captain Beechey's late expedition. That able and enlightened navigator examined thirty-two of these, of which the largest was thirty miles in diameter, and the smallest less than a mile. They were all increasing in their dimensions. The coral reefs are sometimes of great extent, reaching from one island to another, to a distance of six hundred miles and upwards. The inhabitants of some of the islands in the Pacific are thus enabled to pay visits to each other, and when they are on their route for

that purpose, they are said to "present the appearance of troops marching upon the surface of the ocean."

The object which Mr. Lyell has in enumerating these and a multitude of other facts, which he has collected in this volume, will be fully elucidated in the third volume, now in course of preparation for the press. We may, however, clearly infer, that his main design is to shew that there is nothing to be found in the monuments of past ages, that may not be accounted for by the influence of causes which are still seen in operation. If the extirpation of particular species be a matter that can be ascertained to have taken place within historical memory, we are not to be surprised at the occasional discovery in caverns, or rocks, or other depositaries, of the remains of animals, of which there are at present no similar examples. If we discover the skeleton of an elephant in a cold climate, we are not, therefore, to conclude that the climate was formerly a warm one, and that it has been changed by some violent alteration in the position of the earth, or in the direction of its axis. In the same way we are to avoid a similar conclusion-one, by the way, upon which shallow geologists have frequently insisted-when we discover in the south the skeleton of an animal whose natural habitation is in the north. Accident, the pressure of a severe season, the necessity of emigration, shipwreck, the floating of an ice island, are more than sufficient to account for most of these appearances; and it reflects great credit upon Mr. Lyell's sagacity, that he has at length discovered the only clue which can at once serve to explain those appearances, and to confirm the notions which we have received from the Scriptures concerning the period and progress of the Creation. His facts are well arranged, and when they come to be applied to the theory which he is to erect upon them, we have little doubt that the superstructure will be worthy of the foundation.

ART. VI.-On Political Economy, in connexion with the Moral State and Moral Prospects of Society. By Thomas Chalmers, D. D., Professor of Divinity in the University of Edinburgh. 8vo. pp. 566. Glasgow Collins. London: Simpkin and Marshall. 1832. THERE is hardly a single topic discussed by Dr. Chalmers in this volume, which is not of the most vital and pressing interest at this moment, when we may be said to have entered upon the reconstruction of our entire social and political system. The enormous abuses which existed in the constitution of the democratic branch of our legislature are about to be, we trust effectually, removed. The tithe is about to be abolished in Ireland, and although it would seem to be the intention of the government that an equivalent to that odious impost should still be paid in that country, under a different name, and by a different hand, for the support of a church which the great majority of the people have uniformly