which she carelessly marked with her infant foot-steps-even when she, in a sacred grove, with each hand in that of a tender parent, was paying her devotion to the great Orisa, who made all things, an armed band of white men, driving many of her countrymen in chains, rushed into the hallowed shades! Could the tears, the sighs, the supplications, bursting from the tortured parental affection, have blunted the keen edge of avarice, she might have been rescued from agony, which many of her country's children have felt, but which none have ever described. In vain she lifted her supplicating voice to an insulted father, and her guiltless hands to a dishonoured deity! She was ravished from the bosom of her country, from the arms of her friends, while the advanced age of her parents rendering them unfit for servitude, cruelly separated her from them for ever.

Scenes which her imagination had never conceived of, a floating world, the sporting monsters of the deep, and the familiar meeting of billows and clouds, strove, but in vain, to divert her attention from three hundred Africans in chains, suffering the most excruciating torment; and some of them rejoicing that the pangs of death came like a balm to their wounds.

Once more her eyes were blest with a continent: but alas! how unlike the land where she received her being! Here all things appeared unpropitious. She learned to catch the ideas, marked by the sounds of language, only to know that her doom was slavery, from which death alone was to emancipate her. What did it avail her, that the walls of her lord were hung with splendor, and that the dust trodden under foot in her native country, crouded his gates with sordid worshippers! The laws rendered her incapable of receiving property: and though she was a free moral agent, accountable for her own actions, yet never had she a moment at her own disposal! Fifty years her faithful hands have been compelled to ignoble servitude for the benefit of an Isaac Royall, until, as if nations must be agitated, and the world convulsed, for the preservation of that freedom, which the Almighty Father intended for all the human race, the present war commenced. The terrors of men, armed in the cause of freedom, compelled her master to fly, and to breathe away his life in a land, where lawless dominion sit enthroned, pouring blood and vengeance on all who dare to be free.

The face of your petitioner is now marked with the furrows of time, and her frame feebly bending under the oppression of years, while she, by the laws of the land, is denied the enjoyment of one morsel of that immense wealth, a part whereof hath been accumulated by her own industry, and the whole augmented by her servitude.

Wherefore, casting herself at the feet of your honours, as to a body of men, formed for the extirpation of vassalage, for the reward of virtue, and the just returns of honest industry-she prays that such allowance may be made her, out of the estate of colonel Royall, as will prevent her, and her more infirm daughter, from misery in the greatest extreme, and scatter comfort over the short and downward path of their lives: and she will ever pray.

BELINDA. POSTHUMOUS

THE

POSTHUMOUS WORKS OF MONTESQUIEU.

[Concluded from Page 78 of our last.]

HE kings of Rome possessed a kind of priesthood. There were certain ceremonies which could only be performed by themselves. When the Tarquins were expelled, it was feared the people might perceive some change in the religion, to prevent which, a magistrate was appointed, with the title of Rex sacrorum, who, in the sacrifices, discharged the functions of the ancient kings, and whose wife was stiled regina sacrorum. This was the only vestige of royalty which the Romans suffered to remain amongst them.

The Romans had this advantage, that their legislator was the wisest prince of whom profane history makes mention: the views of this great man, throughout the whole of his reign, were directed to the advancement of equity and justice, and his moderation was no less felt by his neighbours than by his own subjects. He esta blished the feciales, (or heralds) without whose ministry the Romans could neither make war nor peace. We still have the forms of the oaths made use of by the feciales when peace was concluded with any people. Livy informs us, that at the peace between Rome and Alba, a herald proclaimed, that "If the Roman people should be the first to depart from it, publico consilio dolove malo, he prayed Jupiter to strike them as he would the hog which he then held in his hands;" and he immediately felled it with a stroke of a flint stone.

Before the commencement of any war one of the heralds was sent to make the complaints of the Republic to any people that injured it. A certain time was given them to consult and consider of the means of restoring a good understanding. But if they neglected to come to an accommodation, the herald returned, and, on quitting the territories of those unjust people, invoked the vengeance of the celestial and infernal gods against them: then the senate decreed what was considered to be a just and pious war, Thus wars were never precipitately undertaken, and could only be the result of long and mature deliberation.

The policy which reigned in the religion of the Romans was still more developed in their victories. Had they listened to the voice of superstition, the vanquished would have been obliged to receive the gods of the conquerors; their temples would have been demolished; and, in the establishment of a new worship, a servitude would have been imposed upon them more grievous than that under which they before laboured. The Romans did better, for Rome herself submitted to the divinities of strangers; she received them into her bosom; and by that bond, the strongest that exists amongst men, she attached the various people who regarded her more as the sanctuary of religion, than as the mistress of the world, But to avoid multiplying the divine beings, the Romans, after the example of the Greeks, dexterously confounded the foreign divinities with their own: if, in their conquests, they discovered a god who bore similitude to any of those adored at

Rome,

Rome, they adopted him, as it were, by conferring on him the name of the Roman divinity, and presented him, if I may so use the expression, with the freedom of their city. So, when they met with any famous hero, who had purged the earth of a monster, or subjected a barbarous people, they immediately gave him the name of Hercules. "We have penetrated to the ocean, says Tacitus,* and there we found the pillars of Hercules; whether it be, that Hercules had really been there, or that we attribute to that hero all such exploits as are worthy of his glory."

Varro reckons up forty of these subduers of monsters: others count but six, twenty-two muses, five suns, four Vulcans, five Mercuries, four Apollos, and three Jupiters.

Eusebius goes farther, and counts almost as many Jupiters as there were different people. The Romans, who, properly speaking, had no other divinity but the genius of the Republic, paid no attention to the disorder and confusion they introduced into mythology: every thing was supplied by the credulity of the people, which is never shocked by what is ridiculous or extravagant.

ON THE CULTURE OF POTATOES.

POTATOES delight most in a rich loam, but not too moist. Wet land produces too much top, and watery fruit, which will not keep through the winter, and is always strong and unpleasant to the taste. Very dry land produces a small crop, and knotty fruit. Land that is apt to bake (as we commonly phrase it) should also be avoided.

For this crop, the earth should be well ploughed, and kept clear of weeds, and not shaded, as in an orchard, &c. But the principal error in tending a field of potatoes is the enormous hilling.+ I have found, by many years experience, that if potatoes are planted in a mellow soil, they need scarcely any hilling. They will bed themselves at that distance from the surface of the ground, which gives them the greatest advantage to procure nourishment. This depth, I have observed, is generally about four inches: and this depth the plant finds by something which I will venture to call instinct.

If the earth in which you plant potatoes, should be hard and not yield to the pressure of the roots, it will then be necessary to hill them; but great care should be taken not to hill them too much: never let them be covered above four inches; and this hilling must be given with discretion: for if they have bedded themselves (as they will in mellow land) four inches, and you add four inches more of earth, you suffocate the fruit. Therefore, to procure an early crop of potatoes, be sure to give

Ipsum oceanum tentavimus; et superesse adhuc Herenles columnas fama vulgavit, sive adiit Hercules, sive quicquid ubique magnificum est in claritatem ejus referre consensimus.—De moribus Germanorum. Chap. 34.

† In New England, potatocs are usually planted not in continued rows, but in squares, like Indian corn, the plants being set from three to four feet asunder, so as to admit of cross-ploughing; after which the dressing is completed by the hoe, with which the earth is drawn up round the plants, which being repeated at cach ploughing, at last forms the hills here objected to.

them your last earth as soon as the plant is big enough to receive it. When they know (excuse the expression) that you have left your earthing, they will begin to vegetate, and increase with great rapidity, but will make no progress while you keep burdening and stifling them.

Thus much as to the culture. A word relative to the time of gathering this crop must conclude this essay.

Every production of the earth has its maturity. If you harvest potatoes before they are ripe, the juice will be crude, they will be unpleasant to the taste, and will not keep so well as if suffered to grow longer. The sign of ripeness in this fruit is the fading of the leaf and shrinking of the stalk. 'Tis remarkable in almost all bulbous roots, especially the onion and potatoe, that they receive their first nourishment from the root, and finish their growth by what they receive from the top.

THE FIRST RISE OF

THE LAWS OF HYDROSTATICS.

HIERO, king of Syracuse, having delivered to an artificer a certain quantity of gold, in order to make a crown, he had intelligence that the workman had clandestinely embezzled great part of the gold, and in the room thereof substituted a quantity of silver, sufficient to make up for the deficiency of weight.

The king, when the artificer delivered the crown to him, found it so excellently well executed, that he was unwilling to have it defaced in order to detect the villainy of the man; but still having a curiosity to know how much gold he had been cheated of, he applied to Archimedes, the celebrated mathematician, and ordered him, if possible, to discover, without injuring the work, how much gold was deficient.

To effect which, Archimedes took two quantities of metal, the one gold and the other silver, each equal in weight to the crown; these he separately immersed in a vessel of water, and remarked what room they both took up by the rising of the water.

Then finding that they each took up the room of different quantities of water, he concluded that their specific gravities must be different. Their specific gravities he then compared to their absolute gravities, with their relation to the gravity of the water.

Having then immersed the crown itself in the water in the same manner, he compared his different observations together, and by that means assigned the quantities of gold and silver respectively which the crown contained, and thereby detected the cheat the artificer had put upon the king.

VOL. 2.-No. 9.

Y

MODES

MODES OF SUPPLYING LONDON WITH WATER

IN 1237.

AMONG the other advantages of her situation, London derives unspeakable blessings from the ample and inexhaustible supplies of fresh water, which distil upon her from the clouds of heaven, which flow in her rivers and rivulets, and which issue from her innumerable fountains and springs. As her magnitude and population increased, it was found expedient, nevertheless, to assist the benevolence of nature, by the ingenuity and exertions of art; and this year of our history is rendered conspicuous from the first great attempt of this kind. Before we proceed to detail it, the inhabitants of modern London, supplied with water forced out of the Thames, and from a copious stream, constrained, by the hand of man, to meander through a track of thirty beautiful miles, to fill millions of craving thirsty urns; the inhabitant of modern London will undoubtedly wish to know through what channels his ancestors were provided with this great necessary of

life.

Previous to the period which we are now endeavouring to delineate, the western parts of the city, and the villages adjacent, were supplied with water from a general reservoir, called the River of Wells; from its forming a current, maintained by the united flux of various springs, conducted thither from the vicinity, and which found a common level toward the bottom of Holborn-hill. One of the streamlets which composed the River of Wells, went by the name of Turnmill-brook, from the use to which it was applied, in working certain mills belonging to the knights of St. John of Jerusalem, which gradually incroached on the stream, and obstructed its course. It communicated its name to a street thro' which it passed, and which is known to this day by the name of Turnmill, or, by vulgar corruption, Tumball-street, Cow-cross, West Smithfield. Winding its way down the declivity of Cowlane and Snow-hill, it discharged itself at Holborn-bridge, into Fleet-ditch, and thence into the Thames.

The next contributor to the River of Wells was the Old-bourne, burn, or brook, metamorphosed, by the lapse of time and change of circumstances, from a stream, now flowing unseen, unobserved, into a noble and spacious street called Holborn. This rivulet has its spring a little to the west of Middle-row, and formerly rolled a transparent fluid to the general receptacle; till it too was swallowed up of the Thames, through the channel of Fleet-ditch.

Wallbrook derives that name from its entering the city through the wall on the north, near what is now called Little Moor-gate, to the east of Bethlehem hospital. Passing through the very heart

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