dence. Innocent III., the greatest of the popes. | that his "hits" produce an effect which no was the despot of Christendom at thirty-seven, one who reads the speeches can form an John de Medici was a cardinal at fifteen, and idea of; and this because there is more Guicciardini tells us, baffled with his statecraft Ferdinand of Arragon himself. He was pope, as manner than wit. The wittiest thing, to our Leo X., at thirty-seven. Luther robbed even him apprehension, he ever uttered, was his speakof his richest province at thirty-five. Take Igna- ing of the "American language." His fatius Loyola and John Wesley, they worked with mous joke about Peel having caught the young brains. Ignatius was only thirty when he Whigs bathing, and stolen their clothes, is made his pilgrimage, and wrote the Spiritual really a very feeble effort; though it amused Exercises. Pascal wrote a great work at six- the house more perhaps than a better joke teen, the greatest of Frenchmen, and died at would have amused it. From his forgotten thirty-seven!' pamphlet, "The Crisis Examined," we extract an illustration which created great mirth at the time, and is really humorous: "Ah! that fatal thirty-seven, which reminds me of Byron, greater even as a man than a writer. Was it experience that guided the pencil of Raphael when he painted the palaces of Rome ? He died, too at thirty-seven. Richelieu was secretary of state at thirty-one. Well, then, there are Bolingbroke and Pitt, both ministers before other men leave off cricket. Grotius was in great practice at seventeen, and attorney-general at twenty-four. And Acquaviva-Acquaviva was general of the Jesuits, ruled every cabinet in Europe, and colonized America, before he was thirty-seven. What a career! exclaimed the stranger, rising from his chair, and walking up and down the room; the secret sway of Europe! That was indeed a position? But it is needless to multiply instances. The history of heroes is the history of youth." Youth is then a great qualification for a political leader. True, "Vivian Grey is no longer at that divine period; but if not youthful himself he has youthful followershe leads the New Generation! Besides, Genius is always young. Let the "old fogies" sneer at me, and call me an adventurer if they will; I am of an unmixed race, I am a genius, I am the leader of youthful ardent spirits who believe me to be a profound and imaginative (oh! above all imaginative!) statesman; I will show the humdrums that it is not Reason but Imagination which rules the world! We have been speaking hitherto in general terms because it is rather embarrassing to descend to particulars in a case where the particulars do not in any way seem to bear out the general result. Notoriety has been gained a position has been gained. The general causes of this are not recondite; but if you look closely to examine the basis of success you are astonished at its apparent discrepancy. If there is one quality which every one would at once award D'Israeli, it is, perhaps, wit; yet we defy the most ardent admirers to bring good specimens. In his writings and in his speeches there is great vivacity, occasional felicity of expression, and some happy illustrations; but wit there is scarcely any. In the house it is notorious 6 "The truth is, that this famous reform ministry, this great united' cabinet had generated into a grotesque and Hudibrastic faction, the very life. They were a ragged regiment compared lees of ministerial existence, the offal of official with which Falstaff's crew was a band of regu lars. The reform The king would not march with them through Coventry-that was flat. ministry, indeed! Why scarcely an original member of that celebrated cabinet remained. I dare say now some of you have heard of Mr. Dusix horses. What a prodigious achievement! crow, that celebrated gentleman who rides upon It seems impossible, but you have confidence in Ducrow! You fly to witness it. Unfortunately one of the horses is ill, and a donkey is substituted in its place. But Ducrow is still admirable; there he is, bounding along in spangled jacket and cork slippers. The whole town is mad to see Ducrow riding at the same time on six horses. But now two more of the steeds are seized with the staggers, and lo! three jackasses in their stead! Still Ducrow persists, and still announces to the public that he will ride round his circus every night on six horses. At last all the horses are knocked up, and now there are half a dozen donkeys, while Mr. Merryman, who like the Chancellor (Brougham,) was once the very life of the ring, now lies in despairing length in the middle of the stage with his jokes exhausted and his bottle empty.' As to his literary pretensions we have before intimated that we think them frivolous. He has a certain artistic tendency, which makes him give to everything he handles whether literary or political, a symmetry and artistic effect; but he has none of the deeper qualities of an artist. We express his deficiency in one phrase when we say that his eloquence is grandiloquence. He does not work from inwards, but contents himself with externals; and as splendid words are the externals of eloquence, they suffice him. This gives a disagreeable hollowness to all his serious and more particularly to his impassioned passages; and it not unfrequently leads him into bathos. Of this bathos the reader may see samples in the passages previously "At school, friendship is a passion. It entrances the being; it tears the soul. All loves of after life can never bring its rapture, or its wretchedness; no bliss so absorbing, no pangs of jealousy or despair so crushing so keen! What tenderness and what devotion; what illimitable con Nor quoted from his two prefaces. We have | tences, not staggering under two bottles of just opened "Coningsby," and this strikes champagne, must be pronounced either dead our eye: to all sense of the true meaning of words, or reckless and shameless in his use of them; either he has no just sense of expression, or he thinks that any fine words will serve his turn if they gull the indolent reader. is this by any means an exceptional passage. His writings abound with similar instances of tawdry falsehood. They are thrown in probably out of that love of ornament, which is characteristic of his race; they are the mosaic chains and rings with which the young gentlemen of the Hebrew persuasion" adorn their persons, to give a faux air de gentilhomme to that which no adornment can disguise. We may seem to insist upon a trifle in thus insisting on such false eloquence; but trifles like these reveal a trivial mind, and when characteristic of a serious defect should not escape criticism. It shows that his eloquence like his imagination, like his poetry, like his philosophy, like his statesmanship, is the Prospectus not the Work! fidence; infinite revelations of inmost thoughts; what ecstatic present and romantic future; what bitter estrangements and what melting reconciliations; what scenes of wild recrimination, agitating explanations, passionate correspondence; what insane sensitiveness and what frantic sensibility; what earthquakes of the heart and whirlwinds of the soul are confined in that simple phrase-a school-boy's friendship!" Does the Minerva press groan under the weight of trash more intolerable than these "earthquakes of the heart and whirlwinds of the soul?" Is this the sort of language which we are to hear from a minister, the serious reflections which are to adorn a work? The man who could write such sen PRAYER. Is thine heart by the world, or its sorrows, oppress'd Then prayer is the balm that will sooth every sorrow, Faithless is he, the dear friend once so cherish'd, What though the young hope of life's morning has perish'd Yet, mourner, forsaken and friendless, in prayer From the Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review. BOTANY. 1. The Plant: a Biography. In a Series of Popular Lectures. By M. J. SCHLEIDEN, M. D., Professor of Botany to the University of Jena. Translated by ARTHUR HENFREY, F. L. S., &c. London: Ballière, Regent street. 1848. 2. The Poetry of Science, or Studies of the Physical Phenomena of Nature. By ROBERT HUNT. London: Reeve, Benham and Reeve, King William street, Strand. 1848. 3. A Century of Orchidaceous Plants; with Descriptions by SIR W. J. HOOKER; and An Introduction on their Culture and Management, by J. C. LYONS, ESQ. London: Reeve, Benham and Reeve. 1849. In the "Westminster Review" for Octo- | ber, 1848, we adduced a few of the more striking examples of insect economy, by way of illustrating the claims to attention possessed by the members of an exceedingly interesting portion of the kingdom of nature; in the present paper we hope to show that the vegetable world is in no respect inferior to the animal, in the amount of pleasure it is capable of yielding to the enlightened investigator of the curious phenomena connected with the increase, distribution, and general habits of the organisms of which it is composed. "the In one respect, indeed, plants possess a decided advantage over insects. Most persons have certain insect antipathies which it is all but impossible to eradicate. We, ourselves, must confess to a slight-a very slight-dislike of spiders; and among green myriads of the peopled grass" there are few, whether creeping or flying, which are not to many individuals the objects of an unconquerable aversion. With plants, however, the case is widely different; they are almost universal favorites. The lady who would shriek in unfeigned terror at the unexpected appearance of a spider or an earwig, is sure to have certain floral pets, which she will cherish and tend with the fondest solicitude; the keen man of business, perpetually oscillating between his country-house and counting-house, with scarcely a thought for anything beyond stocks and per-centages, may be seen entering town in the morning, with a flower, culled perchance from his own well-stored conservatory, jauntily worn in his button-hole; while the more humble member of the trading community, whose possession of the luxury of a garden is forbidden by his position in life, is fain to be content with the purchase of a blossom from the basket of some itinerant flower-vendor. Moreover, the various devices resorted to by numerous dwellers in "the stifling bosom of the town," those who "Never pass their brick-wall bounds, Το range the fields, and treat their lungs with air," in order that they may gratify what Cowper styles "the burning instinct," are only so many proofs that the love of flowers is an inherent feeling, equally gratified by the "creeping herbs," dragging on a bare existence in the crazy box, the fragmentary pitcher, or the spoutless teapot, which forms the windowgarden of the humble votary of Flora, and by the "buds and blossoms of a thousand hues," collected from all climes, and growing in all their native luxuriance, within the protecting walls of the well-regulated conservatory appended to the aristocratic man sion. In his pleasant book "The Town," Leigh Hunt has an apposite passage, quite confirmatory of the above remarks, upon a Londoner's love of flowers. He says, "A tree, or even a flower, put in a window in the streets of a great city (and the London citithe eye something in the same way as the handzens, to their credit, are fond of flowers), affects organs, which bring unexpected music to the ear. They refresh the common-places of life, shed a harmony through the busy discord, and appeal to those first sources of emotion, which are associ ated with the remembrance of all that is young and innocent. They seem also to present to us a portion of the tranquillity we think we are laboring for, and the desire of which is felt as an earnest that we shall realize it somewhere, either in this world or in the next. Above all, they render | us more cheerful for the performance of present duties; and the smallest seed of this kind, dropped into the heart of man, is worth more, and may terminate in better fruit, than anybody but a great poet could tell us.”—The Town, i. 28. Although, in regard to species and individuals, plants are outnumbered by insects, yet do they by no means yield the palm in regard to the number and variety of interesting particulars connected with their mode of life, their choice of locality, their power of adaptation to external circumstances. All these are overlooked by the man of whom Wordsworth says, "The primrose by the river's brim, but how much more than a yellow primrose is that fair herald of spring to the scientific botanist to him who delights to trace the progress of each herb and flower, from the earliest indication of the action of the vital principle up to the full development of the vegetable form and structure, in all their beauty and perfection! Such a one will recognize in the "yellow primrose" a wonderful apparatus of cells, and fibres, and vessels, each occupying its appropriate position, each performing its appointed duty, and all harmoniously contributing to the well-being of the individual plant, and the perpetuation of the species. And from the primrose, his mental vision will range through the wide circle of vegetable life-from the "green mantle on the standing pool," to the lofty denizens of the tropical forest-and will connect the lowly flower" upon the river's brim" with the almost infinitely varied forms and conditions of vegetation so eloquently described in the following extract from Lindley's great work, the "Vegetable Kingdom :' "Wherever the eye is directed, it encounters an infinite multitude of the most dissimilar forms of vegetation. Some are cast ashore by the ocean in the form of leathery straps or thongs, or are collected into pelagic meadows of vast extent; others crawl over mines, and illuminate them with phosphorescent gleams. Rivers and tranquil waters teem with green filaments; mud throws up its gelatinous scum; the human lungs, ulcers, and sordes of all sorts, bring forth a living brood; timber crumbles to dust beneath insidious spawn; corn-crops change to fetid soot; all matter in de cay is seen to teem with mouldy life; and those filaments, that scum-bred spawn and mould, alike acknowledge a vegetable origin. The bark of ancient trees is carpeted with velvet, their branches are hung with a grey-beard tapestry, and microscopical scales overspread their leaves; the face of rocks is stained with ancient colors, coeval with their own exposure to air; and those, too, are citizens of the great world of plants. Heaths and moors wave with a tough and wiry herbage; meadows are clothed with an emerald mantle, amidst which spring flowers of all hues and forms; bushes throw abroad their many-fashioned foliage; twiners scramble over and choke them; above all wave the arms of the ancient forest, and these, too, acknowledge the sovereignty of Flora. Their individual forms, too, change at every step. With every altered condition and circumstance new plants start up. The mountain side has its own races of vegetable inhabitants, and the valleys have theirs; the tribes of the sand, the granite, and the limestone, are all different; and the sun does not shine upon two degrees on the surface of this globe, the vegetation of which is identical: for every latitude has a Flora of its own. In short, the forms of seas, lakes, and rivers, islands and peninsulas, hills, valleys, plains and mountains, are not so diversified as that of the vegetation which adorns them."-Vegetable Kingdom, Introduction, p. xxi. It will readily be conceived that the constitutional peculiarities of plants must be infinitely varied in order that they may both exist and flourish under circumstances so opposed, and in localities so numerous as those described in the foregoing extract; and such, in fact, is the case. But the vegetable kingdom, in an equal degree with the other "works of an Almighty hand," affords unnumbered proofs that throughout creation the grandest and most complicated ends are attained by the employment of the simplest means. In a recently published and very able translation of Schleiden's latest work on botany,* this is especially shown in an eloquent passage which we cannot forbear quoting. The boasted works of man, even when he is aided by all the means and appliances placed at his disposal by science, are comparatively trifling in proportion to the exertions required for their completion; not so the works of Nature. And Schleiden, after adverting to this inconsistency, thus contin ues: "Nature offers a direct contrast to this. Ac customed, from our youth upward, to see her riches, we commonly pass them coldly by. The works outspread before us in eternally renewing "The Plant;" a Biography. Baill re. contemplative mind is attracted by her, and begins to divine, with a kind of softened terror, the mysterious powers in action round us. With what wondrous means, we think, must not this great artist be provided! What wondrous chains of powers, yet unknown, must there not lie hidden in her bosom! Science seeks the solution of this enigma, and in trembling assumes its task, fearful lest, perhaps, human intelligence be unequal to comprehend and grasp a complexity so marvellously interwoven; and the farther we penetrate, the greater waxes our amazement. Every step brings us to a simple solution of an entangled question; every compound phenomenon directs us back to simple causes and forces; and our astonishment becomes at last converted into devout adoration, when we behold with what small means Nature attains the most stupendous results By the simple relation, that bodies in motion have a mutual attraction, Nature arches over us the whole starry heavens, and prescribes to the sun and its planets their undeviating courses. we need not ascend to the stars to recognize how little Nature requires to the unfolding of wonders. But | warmth of a summer night gave an existence which the morning closed-what differences of duration! From the firm wood of the New Holland oak, from which the wild aboriginal carves his war-club, to the green slime upon our tombswhat multiformity, what gradations of texture, composition, and consistence! Can one really believe it possible to find order in this embarrassing wealth, regularity in this seemingly disorderly dance of forms, a single type in these thousandfold varieties of habit? Till within a few years of the present time, indeed, the possibility was not yet conceived; for as I have before remarked, we may never expect to spy into the mysteries of nature, until we are guided by our researches to very simple relations. Thus could we never attain to scientific results respecting the plant, till we had found the simple element, the regular basis of all the various forms, and investigated and defined its vital peculiarities."-The Plant, p. 42. This simple element is a little closed sac or vesicle of transparent colorless membrane; round ar oblong in shape when existing sepa "Let us tarry a moment with the vegetable world. From the slender palm, waving its ele-rately, but capable of assuming various forms, gant crown in the refreshing breezes, high aloft over the hot vapors of the Brazilian forests, to the delicate moss, barely an inch in length, which clothes our damp grottoes with its phosphorescent verdure; from the splendid flower of Victoriaregina, with its rosy leaves cradled in the silent floods of the lakes of Guiana, to the inconspicuous yellow blossom of the duck-weed on our own ponds what a wonderful play of fashioning, what wealth of forms! "From the six thousand years' old Baobab, on the shores of Senegal, the seeds of which, perhaps, vegetated before the foot of man trod the earth, to the fungus, to which the fertilizing *This absurd notion of the extraordinary age of some of the Baobabs (Adansonia digitata) of Senegal, arose from a misunderstood passage in Adanson's "Voyage." Botanists know that in temperate climates, where the seasons are distinctly marked, a new zone of wood is every year added to the stem of exogenous trees, such as oaks, elms, and other forest trees. Now, in order to ascertain the age of such trees, nothing more is required than to count the number of zones or annual layers of wood, exhibited in a transverse section of the stem near the grouud. In temperate climes leaves are shed every year, and a zone of wood is deposited no oftener; but in tropical regions, many trees, including the Baobab, have two, three, or more successions -of leaves in a year, from each of which would a zone of wood be deposited: such trees, are in fact, almost, if not entirely, evergreens. So that if in a a transverse section of the stem of such a tree we find, say three hundred annular layers of wood, we are not to infer that the tree is three hundred years old, as it would really be in temperate climes; but, taking for the basis of our calculation the deposition of three such layers annually, we get one hundred years as the age of the tree. That the Baobab trees of Senegal are truly of great antiquity there can be no question; but we need not, on false data, depending upon the degree of pressure mutually exercised by such cells when in apposition, as well as upon the position they occupy in the structure of the plant, and the function they are destined to perform in vegetable economy. An acquaintance with the cell in its normal condition, must necessarily precede all investigations into the different forms it is capable of taking. Schleiden introduces to his readers the cell in its simplest state, as it exists in the beautiful under the name of the "snowberry tree,' fruit of a shrub cultivated in most gardens, tainable for examination. The beauty of the and, from its frequency, the more readily atcells in this fruit will amply reward the student for any trouble he may take to obtain a view of them under the microscope. Schleiden also mentions another source in which cells may be detected in great numbers; and says: "If we remove the outer compact membrane of the snowberry (Symphoricarpos racemosa,) a plant common enough in our gardens, we come to a mass of substance composed of small, slippery, shining, white granules. Each of these is a separate perfect cell. If we strip off the outer membrane of the leaf of the common pink, we find a velvety green tissue, a portion of which may easily be scraped off. In water this separates into little green points; these, too, are perfect cells, which only differ from the foregoing in containing a quantity of green granules in addition assign their birth to a period when it is probable plants with so high a degree of organization had not made their appearance upon our globe. |