interludes, that happen to come between the more solemn passages (whether businesses or recreations) of humane life, are wont to be lost by most men, for want of a value for them, and even by good men for want of skill to preserve them; for though they do not properly despise them, yet they neglect or lose them, for want of knowing how to rescue them, or what to do with them. But although grains of sand and ashes be apart, but of a despicable smallness, and very easy and liable to be scattered and blown away; yet the skilled artificer, by a vehement fire, brings numbers of these to afford him that noble substance, glass, by whose help we may both see ourselves and our blemishes lively represented, (as in looking-glasses,) and discern celestial objects, (as with telescopes) and with the sunbeams, kindle disposed materials, (as with burningglasses,) so when these little fragments or parcels of time, which, if not carefully look'd to, would be dissipated, and lost, come to be managed by a skilful contemplator, and to be improved by the celestial fire of devotion, they may be so ordered, as to afford us both looking-glasses to dress our souls by, and perspectives to discover heavenly wonders, and incentives to inflame our hearts with charity and zeal; and since goldsmiths and refiners are wont all the year long carefully to save the very sweepings of their shops, because they may contain in them some filings or dust of those richer metals, gold and silver, I see not why a Christian may not be as careful not to lose the fragments and lesser intervals of a thing incomparably more precious than any metaltime especially when the improvement of them may not only redeem so many portions of our life, but turn them to pious uses, and particularly to the great advantage of devotion.-Hon. Robert Boyle's Occasional Reflections, Oxford edit. 1848.

CURIOUS STATISTICAL RESULTS.

Researches in the modern science of Statistics have proved that the effects of the free-will of individuals composing large societies completely neutralize each other; and that such communities taken collectively act as if the whole body had by common consent agreed to follow a certain prescribed course of conduct, not only in matters which might be imagined to be more or less of common interest, but even in those in which no feeling could be imagined to be engaged, save the will, taste, personal inclination, or even caprice of the individual.

Not only, however, are voluntary acts subject to this numerical regularity. Collectively speaking, persons remember and forget certain things with as much regularity as if memory and attention were the result of wheelwork. A very common instance of forgetfulness is presented by persons posting letters without any address written upon them. The number of times this act of oblivious

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ness annually happens is known with the greatest precision, inasmuch as such letters are specially recorded in each post-office. Now, it is found by the Post-office returns in England and France, that the number of these unaddressed letters in each country is almost exactly the same from year to year. In London, the number of such letters is about 2,000, being at the rate of above six per day. But, connected with this is another circumstance equally remarkable. A certain proportion of these letters is found to contain money, and other valuable enclosures; and like the whole number, this proportion is also invariable.

The conclusion at which we arrive then is, that the great principle in virtue of which the Author of nature carries out His purposes by the operation of general laws is not, as it would first appear, incompatible with the freedom of human agency, and therefore, with man's moral responsibility. The same character of generality attaches to the laws which govern the moral and intellectual phenomena of human actions, considered collectively, as those which attach to mere physical phenomena. But these laws not being applicable to human actions, considered individually, leave free-will and moral responsibility inviolate.

LIFE ASSURANCE.

One of the most remarkable examples of the value of general laws is to be found in Life Assurances; for what, apparently, can be more precarious and uncertain than the duration of human life in any individual? Yet, in the aggregate, mortality is so regular that it has been said, by an eminent mathematician, that there is no investment so certain as that of a prudently conducted Assurance Society. If we take 5,000 persons in the prime of life, 600 die in the first ten years, 700 in the second ten years, 850 in the third. The experience under different circumstances varies but little, as Jenkin Jones, Neisson, and Farren have shown; and it is a curious fact, that lives which might be called first-class lives are as prone to disease as those which appear to belong to hardly so high a class. Alfred Smee, F.R.S.

SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON ON PHRENOLOGY.

Sir W. Hamilton was a stalwart opponent of this new science. Gall had taken credit for the discovery that the cerebellum is the organ of the sexual passion, and supported the doctrine by asserting that it bears a much larger proportion to the brain proper in adults than in the young. By "an induction from an average of thirty-six brains and skulls of children, compared with an average of several hundred brains and skulls of adults," Sir W. Hamilton satisfied himself that the brain reaches its full size

D

about seven years of age. "If it be not so, then am I a deliberate deceiver." After this we can ask but one question :-Why does the man need a larger hat than the child? The answer is, that "the greater development of bones, muscles, and hair renders the adult head considerably larger than that of the child at seven." Another inquirer tried to refute this by another induction and table of brains. But the Professor detected that the difference of sex had been overlooked, or, as he phrases it, in triumphant scorn of his adversary-and, for once, in round Saxon -"he lumps the male and female brains together!"

As another instance of the value of independent observation, he notices that, whereas he found a common fowl's brain to be to its body as 1 to 500, some twenty physiologists, including Cuvier, had followed each other in making it as 1 to 25, owing to an original mismeasurement by one-half, and a subsequent loss of a cypher. Such is the "sequacity" of anatomical authors. Yet, on the agreeable subject of maggots breeding in the frontal sinus, or cavity of the human forehead, Sir W. Hamilton thought it worth while, after an affected apology for his medical ignorance, to give a list of seventy-five writers who have discussed the matter, including "Olaus Wormius, who himself ejected a worm from the nose, Smetius, who relates his own case," &c. The import of this passage, which it would be unpleasant to quote, is to show the absurdity of phrenologists in ranging seventeen of the smallest organs, "like peas in a pod," along that part of the head where there is an empty space within, such that "no one can predict from external observation, whether it shall be a lodging scanty for a fly, or roomy for a mouse."

Nor were his experiments confined to probing the foreheads of the dead, or "weighing the brain of a young and healthy convict, who was hanged, and afterwards weighing the sand which his prepared cranium contained." His own person was not spared. To test the association of ideas, he made his friends repeatedly wake him when dozing off in an arm-chair-a self-sacrifice which those who indulge that habit will appreciate. To try whether the mind is always active, he caused himself to be roused at different seasons of the night, and had the satisfaction of finding that he was always in the middle of a dream. To determine how many objects at once the mind can distinctly survey, he set himself to attend to marbles on the floor, and by an effort took in seven at most, beating Abraham Tucker by three, Degerando by two, and Bonnet and Destutt Tracy by one. Perhaps his most remarkable discovery of this kind is a law of mind which he has thus enunciated :

"Knowledge and feeling, perception and sensation, though always co-existent, are always in the inverse ratio of each other. Thus, in sight there is more perception, less sensation; in smell there

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is more sensation, less perception. In the finger-points, tactile perception is at its height; but there is hardly another part of the body in which sensation is not more acute."

Sir W. Hamilton was not aware that this law had been announced and referred to its cause (the passive nature of sensation and active nature of perception) by De Biran, now nearly half a century ago. With what qualifications it is true of the sense of touch, is examined in the notes to Reid. Here again, with his usual zeal, Sir W. Hamilton seems to have tried upon various parts of his own body the effect of "pressure with a subacute point" and of "puncture." The latter, in seeming contradiction to the law, produced most pain in the tongue and finger, where perception is also the highest. But an explanation was soon ready. Either nerves of feeling lie beneath the nerves of touch, or the same nerves commence their energy as feeling only at the pitch where their energy as touch concludes." At any rate, he was reassured by finding that, in proportion to the soreness of the tongue or the finger under such treatment, it is incapacitated for the time as an organ of external touch.*

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CONSUMPTION AND LONGEVITY.

Sir Edward Wilmot the physician, was when a youth, so far gone in a consumption, that Dr. Radcliffe, whom he consulted, gave his friends no hopes of his recovery, yet he lived to the age of 93; and Dr. Heberden notes-"this has been the case with some others who had many symptoms of consumption in youth."

MAN'S PROPER PLACE IN CREATION.

Professor Daubeny has observed, with equal force and beauty:

When we reflect within what a narrow area our researches are necessarily circumscribed; when we perceive that we are bounded in space almost to the surface of the planet in which we reside, itself merely a speck in the universe, one of innumerable worlds invisible from the nearest of the fixed stars; when we recollect, too, that we are limited in point of time to a few short years of life and activity,-that our records of the past history of the globe and of its inhabitants are comprised within a minute portion of the latest of the many epochs which the world has gone through; and that, with regard to the future, the most durable monuments we can raise to hand down our names to posterity are liable at any time to be overthrown by an earthquake, and would be obliterated as if they had never been by any of those processes of metamorphic action which geology tells us form a part of the cycle of changes which the globe is destined to undergo,-the more lost in wonder we may be at the vast fecundity of nature, which within so narrow a sphere can crowd together phenomena so various and so imposing, the more sensible shall we become of the small proportion which our highest powers and their happiest results bear, not only to the cause of all causation, but even to other created beings, higher in the scale than ourselves, which we may conceive to exist.

* Selected and abridged from the Saturday Review.

Nature of the Soul.

It was a dictum of Aristotle's that "in infancy the soul of man differs in nothing from that of the brutes." But then he also says that one animal alone, man, can reflect and deliberate; " and the latter statement has found most favour with modern philosophers. Thus we are now informed that "the brute is sensitive but not self-conscious;" and powers and faculties are continually pointed to in man, which it is positively asserted can be found in none lower than himself. May we not ask the assertors how they know these things? Have they ever visited the chambers of thought within the penetralia of the brute? They are hardly likely to be right, if Sir Benjamin Brodie apprehends correctly that the mental principle in animals is of the same essence as that of human beings; so that even in the humbler classes we may trace the rudiments of those faculties to which, in their state of more complete development, we are indebted for the grandest results of human genius."—(Psychological Inquiries, p. 164.) Again: "I am inclined to believe that the minds of the inferior animals are essentially of the same nature with that of the human race."-(Ibid. p. 166.)

The Rev. John Wesley's conclusion as to the nature of "the living soul" imparted to Adam, was that "God gave him such life as other animals enjoy."(Notes to the New Testament, p. 497.)

Dr. Cromwell, in "the Philosophic Argument" of his work, The Soul and the Future Life, introduces, in a note, the following definitions of "spirit," or, as he terms it, "abstract self-subsistence."

Substances, said Dr. Watts, speaking after the Schoolmen (Philosophical Essays, p. 51) are "such things, or beings, which we conceive as the subjects or supporters of distinct qualities, and which subsist of themselves, without dependence upon any creature." This notion of substance is commonly accepted by Immaterialists as applying to mans' soul. Coleridge, in his Theory of Life, (p. 94,) admits that he regards the soul as "a thing, a self-subsistent hypostasis.' Belsham, much less consistently, either with Priestley, whom he professed to follow, or himself, defined Spirit as "thinking substance." Elements of the Philosophy of the Mind, prefixed to a Compendium of Logic.) Stewart saw an objection to the word "substance," but it was only " 'as implying a greater degree of knowledge of the nature of mind than our faculties are fitted to attain" (Dissertation, Sir William Hamilton's, ed. p. 116); and his proposed substitute, "thinking being," can be admitted to offer no material alteration. Reid also preferred, throughout his