with America is at the present moment seriously engaging the attention of scientific and commercial men. The more daring engineers are sanguine of the practicability of laying a submarine cable directly across the Atlantic, from Galway to Cape Race in Newfoundland. Now that we have Lieut. Maury's authentic determination of the existence of a shelf across the North Atlantic, the soundings on which are nowhere more than 1500 fathoms, the feasibility of the project is tolerably certain. The principal question is whether if a line were laid an electric current can be passed through 3000 miles of cable. No doubt, by the expenditure of enormous battery power, this might be accomplished through wires suspended in the air, but it is a question whether it can be done along a vast length of gutta-percha coated wire, passing through salt-water. There is such a thing as too great an insulation. Professor Faraday has shown that in such circumstances the wire becomes a Leyden jar, and may be so charged with electricity that a current cannot, without the greatest difficulty, move through it. This is the objection to a direct cable between the two Continents: if, however, it can be overcome, doubtless the ocean path would in all possible cases be adopted where communications had to be made between civilized countries having intermediate barbarous, or ungenial lands. To escape this at present dubious ocean path it is proposed to carry the cable from the northernmost point of the Highlands of Scotland to Iceland, by way of the Orkney, Shetland, and Ferroe islands-to lay it from Iceland across to the nearest point in Greenland, thence down the coast to Cape Farewell, where the cable would again take to the water, span Davis's Straits, and make right away across Labrador and Upper Canada to Quebec. Here it would lock in with the North American meshwork of wires, which hold themselves out like an open hand for the European grasp. This plan seems quite feasible, for in no part of the journey would the cable require to be more than 900 miles long; and as it seems pretty certain that a sandbank extends, with good soundings, all the way to Cape Farewell, there would be little difficulty in mooring the cable to a level and soft bottom. The only obstacle that we see is the strong partiality of the Esquimaux for old iron, and it would perhaps be tempting them too much to hang their coasts with this material, just ready to their hands. The want of settlements along this inhospitable arctic coast to protect the wire is, we confess, a great drawback to the scheme; but, we fancy, posts might be organized at comparatively a small cost, considering the magnitude and importance of the undertaking. The mere expense of making and laying the cable would not be much more M 2

than

than double that of building the new Westminster bridge across the Thames.

Whilst England would thus grasp the West with one hand, her active children have plotted the seizure of the East with the other. It is determined to pass a cable from Genoa to Corsica,* and from thence to Sardinia. From the southernmost point of the latter island, Cape Spartivento, to the Gulf of Tunis, another cable can easily be carried. The direction thence (after giving off a coast branch to Algeria) will be along the African shore, by Tripoli to Alexandria, and eventually across Arabia, along the coasts of Persia and Beloochistan until it enters Scinde, and finally joins the wire at Hydrabad, which in all probability by that time will have advanced from Burmah, across the Indian peninsula, to welcome it. America will shortly carry her line of telegraph to the Pacific shore, and run it up the coast as far as San Francisco. Can there be any reasonable doubt that, before the end of the century, the one line advancing towards the West and the other towards the East-through China and Siberia-will gradually approach each other so closely that a short cable stretched across Behring Straits will bring the four quarters of the globe within speaking distance of each other, and enable the electric fire to put a girdle round the world in forty minutes?'

The cable to connect the mainland with Corsica, 110 miles in length, is already completed, and, in all probability, by this time has reached its destination. It was manufactured by W. Kuper and Co., of East Greenwich. We witnessed the spinning of this cable, and were struck with astonishment at the ease with which half-a-dozen different processes were being carried on upon the same rope at the same time; the laying round each other of the six wires insulated with gutta percha, the envelopment of these in tarred spun-yarn, and the coating of the whole with twelve iron wires of No. 1 gauge, went on in different parts of the factory simultaneously. At one entrance, in fact, all the materials in a disconnected state were continually entering, and at another the finished rope was continually emerging at the rate of two miles and a half in the twenty-four hours. The rope, when finished, measured seventy-five feet in diameter, and twenty-four feet from the convex to concave of one side of the coil. The six wires which it enclosed were connected together, when all was completed, and extra insulated wire added until the length of 1000 miles was made up. Along this enormous distance the current was passed freely enough at first, yet it was evident that some moments of time were necessary to discharge the accumulated electricity in it, which in some degree bears out the idea we before expressed,—that a too well insulated rope of a very great length becomes, for the moment, a Leyden jar. It may be as well to state that the rope belongs to the Mediterranean Electric Telegraph Company, and that the shareholders are principally English.

ART.

ART. VI.-1. Life in Fejee, or Five Years among the Cannibals. By a Lady. 1851.

2. Journals of the Bishop of New Zealand's Visitation Tours. Printed for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. 3. A Letter to His Grace the Duke of Newcastle on behalf of the Melanesian Mission of the Bishop of New Zealand. By Lewis M. Hogg, Rector of Cranford, Northamptonshire. London. 1853.

4. Remarkable Incidents in the Life of the Rev. Samuel Leigh, Missionary to the Settlers and Savages of Australia and New Zealand. By the Rev. Alexander Strachan. London. 1853. 5. Our Antipodes: or, Residence and Rambles in the Australasian Colonies. By Lieut. Col. Godfrey Charles Mundy. 3 vols. London. 1852.

6. Auckland, the Capital of New Zealand, and the Country adjacent'; including some Account of the Gold Discovery in New Zealand. London. 1853.

WE

E endeavoured in a late number to trace the recent history of the spread of Christianity in the multitudinous islands of the Eastern Pacific, inhabited by the Polynesian race. We observed on that occasion on the remarkable similarity of the type of features, stature, and language among tribes so widely dispersed over the surface of that great ocean, belonging to this common stock. It is necessary that we should recur for a moment to the subject, in order to render more intelligible the distinction taken by modern geographers between Polynesia and Melanesia.*

It was long ago suggested that the root of the common Polynesian speech is to be found in the Kawi,' a branch of the Malay language; the researches of William Humboldt are said to have established the fact; and learned men have already affixed to those who speak it the name of Malayo-Polynesians.' We are in no degree qualified to dispute these conclusions. But

The three volumes of the French popular publication 'L'Univers Pittoresque,' devoted to 'Océanie,' are compiled by M. Domeny de Rienzi, himself a voyager in the South Seas and the East. They contain a great deal of information, and, although published in 1836, remain the best Handbook' with which we are acquainted for vast tracts of the populous Pacific. This writer divides that ocean into four regions: Polynesia, comprising the groupes we have already described, and also the extensive archipelagos of the Caroline and Pellew Islands, north of the equator and west of 180; Melanesia, including (besides the groupes we have placed in it) Australia and New Guinea; Malaisia, or the Malay archipelago; and Micronesia, containing the many clusters of small islands in the Northern temperate Pacific.

the

the fact of these islands having been actually colonized from the regions now inhabited by the Malay family, or, as some have supposed, by the Dyaks of Borneo, has always seemed to us of the most problematical character. Those who maintain it, including, we are bound to admit, not only theoretical geographers, but very close observers, such as John Williams, have to get over the difficulty of a series of migrations from West to East, that is, against the steady breeze of the unvarying Trades, and by the aid of those irregular westerly gales, the mad winds,' as some of the islanders call them, from their caprice and uncertainty, which prevail at most for only two months of the year. They have to controvert the equally unvarying current of Polynesian tradition, which (as Mr. Ellis points out) speaks of colonization as uniformly proceeding from the East; corroborated by the insulated cases of migration which have taken place since the Pacific was known to Europeans-all, we believe, in the same direction, when accomplished in native vessels. They have to answer the puzzling question, How is it, if the Eastern Polynesians came from Asia, that they inhabit the part of the ocean farthest from Asia-that a vast portion of the insular region, lying directly between the presumed colony and the presumed mother country, is occupied by a totally different race, the Melanesians, or Oceanian Negroes, whom no one, so far as we know, has connected with any Asiatic origin? Again, we know of no similarity, except that of language, which has been established between the Malays and Polynesians. The slender Malay resembles neither in hue, nor face, nor figure, the tall and bigboned islander; nor has any really significant analogy of habits or religion been pointed out. And to what does a mere radical identity of language amount, as a proof of identity of race? Does any one doubt, for instance, that the mass of the French people are of Celtic, not of Roman, descent?-and yet has not the antiquary the greatest difficulty in detecting a single Celtic root in the common language of the country, which (with the exception of more recently-imported words) is wholly and exclusively Roman? The fact is, that some families of mankind have always shown a readiness to abandon their pristine tongue on occasions of conquest or migration, and acquire a new one, as remarkable as the obstinacy with which others adhere to it.

Supposing the colonization of the Eastern Pacific to have proceeded from its American shore-supposing it effected by one wave of that vast migration, of which another wave carried the Aztecs to the tropical plateau of Mexico-it will be not an unreasonable hypothesis, also, that the singular family of mankind

to

to which recent geographers give the name of Melanesians, comprises the remnant of the original native races whom that colonization disturbed. The confused and fragmentary dispersion of these tribes, so far as we are acquainted with them, as well as their general inferiority, seems to countenance such an hypothesis. Even circumscribed within its narrowest limits-lying north of the parallel of New Zealand, west of the 180th meridian, east of Australia, and south of the equator-Melanesia seems to include rather a multitude of distinct nations than a single people. The inhabitants of these islands differ from the Polynesians proper in being much darker of colour-approaching to the real Asiatic negro of New Guinea, or Negrillo' of the Papuan race, with whom they have been sometimes allied by ethnographers. But, with this exception, they seem to possess no common and distinctive feature. They present, therefore, a remarkable contrast, and very unfavourable one for missionary purposes, to the singularly homogeneous character which, as we have seen, characterises the Eastern Polynesians. Some tribes, as those of Fiji, are remarkable for gigantic stature: others, the reverse. The language of some seems a Polynesian dialect; other groupes have many languages of their own, said to be totally distinct both from the Polynesian and from each other. Some have estimated that in the New Hebrides there is on the average a different language, or dialect, for every 5000 souls. The whole archipelago presents, in short, to the ethnographer a kind of labyrinthine confusion, out of which the patient labours of the missionary and the philologist will no doubt ultimately educe some systematic arrangement.

Within two days' westerly sail of the Society Islands lies the first Melanesian groupe, that of the FIJI or Feejee Islands (we adopt the continental orthography, to which English writers, not without a struggle, seem at last to have generally resigned themselves in foreign nomenclature), which, like the former, is a province of the Wesleyan missionaries. Of all the races of the Pacific hitherto known to Europeans the men of Fiji are the most sanguinary and ferocious in their practices; and at the same time nearly the highest in point of natural endowments. And, consequently, the beginning contest between light and darkness here assumes an intensity which marks it in no other quarter. It seems as if the very approach of dawn had added new horrors to the night: never were war and massacre, with their attendant atrocities, so rife among these savages as now. 'The progress of the battle' (says Mr. Lawry in one of the works cited in our former article) now going on in Feejee between the old murderer and his conqueror and lord is waxing hot, and

hastening