morning, and express a desire to drink before she goes to work. The first young man who then offers her to drink, is the person destined by heaven to marry her; and from that moment all the little tricks of rustic coquetry are set in motion to bring about the execution of the celestial decree, and often with success. When a person hears the cuckoo sing for the first time, and asks him if he shall enjoy long life, the bird's next note being long or short, is considered as a reply to the important question. The ignes fatui are, among the Grisons, less an object of terror than of pity, as they suppose them to be the souls of infants who have died without baptism. They never see one without endeavoring to soothe the pain of the supposed sufferer by the recital of a few pater. INDIAN CORN. The cultivation of maize is likely to become general in France. At the sitting of the Academy of Sciences in Paris on the 31st ult., it was proposed to give a prize of 1500 francs value to the author of the best essay on the cultivation of Indian corn in the four departments surrounding Paris, with a view to render this grain useful for the nourishment of the human species, particularly for children. Hitherto it has been grown chiefly in the south of France, as food for cattle and fowls. It is a singular fact, that fowls fed exclusively upon this food have a yellow appearance. SCOTS WHA HAE WI' WALLACE BLED. This dithyrambic, we learn from the Edinburgh Review, was composed on horseback, in riding in the middle of tempests, over the wildest Galloway moor, in company with a Mr. Syme, who, observing the poet's looks, forbore to speak-judiciously enough -for a man composing Bruce's Address, might be unsafe to trifle with. Doubtless, this stern hymn was singing itself, as he formed it, through the soul of Burns; but to the external ear it should be sung with the throat of the whirlwind. So long as there is warm blood in the heart of Scotchman or man, it will move in fierce thrills under this war-ode, the best, we believe, that ever was written by any pen. MUSIC. The German, who makes a science of everything, treats music learnedly; the voluptuous Italian seeks from it vivid but transient enjoyment; the Frenchman, more vain than sensitive, speaks of it with effect; the Englishman pays for it, but interferes no farther. NEW WORKS. A work of unusual interest is announced, under the title of Letters from Turkey, Egypt, Nubia, and Palestine, &c., by R. R. Madden, Esq. The Author, who it appears is a physician, and has been sojourning for four years in these countries, was enabled, by virtue of his profession, to ascertain the actual state of Turkish society, manners, and customs, and to furnish more accurate information than has ever appeared on the subject. During his travels in the East, he visited the sites of Troy, Memphis, Thebes, and Jerusalem, and other interesting ruins. The Chelsea Pensioners, by the Author of "The Subaltern," will appear, in the course of the present month. To military readers, we have no doubt, it will prove particularly attractive. A new Work, by the admired author of Blue Stocking Hall," is preparing for publication, called Tales of my Time, in 3 vols. At the same time will appear a new edition of Blue Stocking Hall. Gabrielle, a Tale of Swizerland, is nearly ready for publication. "It is an attempt to deviate somewhat from the fashionable path of sentimental poetry, and to delineate mental aberration of the mildest kind in unison with singular and romantic scenery. A new Novel, entitled Jesuitism and Methodism, will appear early in the ensuing month. IN witnessing the operation of a steamengine, as it sets and sustains in motion, by its wonderful piston, it may be a whole tenement of machinery, or, in opposition to wind and tide, carries forward the ponderous ship on its easy and majestic way, we behold the most stupendous effects produced merely by the scientific employment of an element which, for nearly six thousand years, during which it was in our possession, had been allowed to run universally to waste. It is an instance of the way in which man manufactures power. We can create nothing; we need to create nothing. Our most bountiful Maker has given us all things richly; and it is for us only to find out their uses, and enjoy them wisely. The best of his gifts is the power he has bestowed upon us of doing this. All civilization is nothing more than the advancing conquests made by this power-from the hour when an accidental spark lighted the first fire of dry leaves by which man warmed and comforted himself, to that in which, in our own day, smoke was converted into light, and impalpable vapor into the mightiest of all our ministers of strength. The fusibility and malleability of the iron existed before it had been turned either into swords or pruning-hooks, or the ore had been made to give up its treasure; and the vibratory air was full of unawakened music ere "Jubal struck the chorded shell." And in like manner might it be said 31 ATHENEUM, VOL. 2, 3d series. of every new invention, that it is, as the word implies, not merely a finding out-but a revealing of something that has at all times been in nature—or an arousing of some power that only slept because there was no one to call it up into activity—or a bringing of it under dominion and law after it had long been suffered to run wild, and to spend its energies in unheeded and unprofitable idleness. Some of the most boisterous and destructive agencies in nature have been tamed in this way, not only into obedience and tranquillity, but into useful instruments and servants. Social life owes many of its best accommodations to the fire, the winds, the waters, and animals that in their original condition were the ferocious and dreaded prowlers of the forest. We have begun to lay our grasp even upon the nimble lightning itself; already we can command it forth from its hiding-places, whether in earth or air, and point it whither we will, or seal it up in bottles; and the time, we doubt not, is coming when it too shall do us valuable service. The superstition of old times was wont to look upon conquests such as these as impious even in the conception; but they are obviously one great department of our allotted task-work here on earth. In making them we but fulfil the end of our being, and obey the ordinations of that Almighty Deity who hath given us the wants, the susceptibilities and the faculties we have, and placed us in a world so abundant ly stored with excitements for our curiosity, and subjects for our observation, and materials to be fashioned, transformed, or otherwise turned to use by our experimenting ingenuity. The "vetitum nefas" of Horace is the very path we are bidden to go the thing it is both our destiny and our duty to be continually seeking after "Nil mortalibus arduum est; Cœlum ipsum petimus"but there is no folly in the endeavor, as the poet adds; for thus shall we go on through all time, and probably through all eternity, progression being apparently the characteristic and necessary condition of our being, as well as of all intelligence that is not essentially infinite, in so far as our reasonings and conceptions are able to instruct us. Are there not mysteries into which even "The Angels desire to look ?" and is this desire a sin in them? or is it not rather one of the most exalted manifestations of their bright and exalted nature? Of There is one power that, above all others, has hitherto been allowed to remain unemployed, and yet it is by far the greatest of all those of which society can avail itself. We mean the power of the popular mind. the many millions of intellectual beings who have been born, lived and died on our globe since it first became "a breathing world," how few comparatively have had the intellectual principle within them awakened to its natural exercise? What a waste of capacity has gone on in every age and country, whether it was the abode of barbarism or of civilization! History, it is true, as commonly written, throws everything of this sort into the shade. With it a small handful of the higher classes constitute the nation; and the people are never mentioned, except, perchance, when a fragment of the man is rolled, in the shape of an armed host, against a similar conglomeration of the refuse and rubbish of another land, to be fused together like two lumps in a chemist's crucible; and then they are spoken of as of much the same account with the powder and lead that may have been expended in the conflict. But it is impossible to take a true or philosophical survey of what humanity has hitherto been and done, all the world over, without having the reflection we have stated forced upon us. Mind seems to have everywhere abounded in vain-to have budded only to be nipped and perish-or like seed that has shot up only to be choked before it could come into ear. Here and there a few stalks have es caped from the entangling and suffocating weeds, and lift up their heads in something like full-grown luxuriance; but the general field is a mere spread of withering immaturity—fit only for the dunghill. The earth might almost have been peopled by any one of the more respectable orders of quadrupeds instead of men,— provided there had existed only a few of the latter species of animals to act as keepers, or whippers-in of the herd, -for any advantage that has been taken of the superior intellectual capabilities of the erect and two-legged race. If we turn even to Greece and Rome, the countries in the ancient world where, above all others, "Men were proud to be, Not without cause," how little of the sovereignty of intellect do we discern in the boasted democracy of either! The popular control of the state was merely that of the waves over the ship that rides on them-the swell and agitation of brute passion serving merely to sustain and give buoyancy to the power by which it was kept down and trodden upon. These are called the enlightened nations of antiquity; but the whole of their claim to this character consists in the circumstance of each of them having produced a few dozens of individuals who, like so many stars scattered over a cloudy night-sky, make bright the few spots where they are fixed, only to cast over the rest of the expanse a thicker and blacker gloom. The nation itself was not enlightened the body of the people was in a state of barbarism. Nor has it been much better in modern times, except that, whereas in that old world a monstrous and degrading superstition, secretly and sometimes half-openly laughed at by the cultivated class, separated from them the great mass of their countrymen even in heart and conscience, Christianity has now bound all in the same creed and the same hopes, and thus united, here at least, the high and the low, the learned and the ignorant. But it is not the less true, for all that, that the intellect of the people has, as we have said, been allowed everywhere to run wofully to waste, and that, in this respect, matters have proceeded much as they would have done in " a world without souls" altogether. The great law of creation seems to be that nothing is created in vain. It is the law of mind, doubtless, as well as of matter. The vast aggregate of intellectual capacity, therefore, that every year gives birth to in those regions of the world's population to which hitherto, in every country, so little of the light of intellectual culture has been sent, is not produced, we may be assured, merely to show itself and to perish. This consideration alone is with us argument enough to demonstrate that the universal diffusion of education is the ordination of heaven itself, and a consummation not only "devoutly to be wished," but which will inevitably take place in spite of all the efforts that may be made to resist it. Moralists and writers on natural religion have been wont to draw a proof of a future world from the mere hopes and desires of the human spirit after a continuance of its being, its "Longing after immortality;" but such a deduction as this is weak and unconvincing, compared to that which we have just advanced. Providence the richest of all sources of power and bounty-is as economical as it is affluent-bestowing everything liberally and generously, but nothing unprofitably and in vain. It gives to every man that is born, even means. Men are manifestly at last beginning everywhere to feel the importance, considered in reference to their intellectual powers, of that large class of their brethren who have hitherto, even in the best regulated states of society, been almost entirely debarred from the advantages of any other than the most elementary education. In our own country until very lately, (and it was no better in others,) almost the only inquiry in regard to this subject which statistical investigators were wont to make, was, what portion of the population could read and write? The possession of these accomplishments, in however imperfect and we may say unserviceable a degree, was looked upon as constituting the only distinction that was to be expected to exist in favor of the more cultivated class of the people; and the most sanguine dream of philanthropists amounted merely to a hope that, at some distant day, what was now the attainment of a part of the nation, would be the possession of not operate beyond a certain pointthe whole. In other words, they looked forward to a time when every man and woman should be able to spell through a printed English book, and to scrawl somewhat more distinctive than a cross by way of signature. Unhappily, we are not yet in condition to congratulate ourselves on the perfect accomplishment even of this humble anticipation, notwithstanding, that we have now become accustomed to stretch our ultimate expectations far beyond it. But the chief reason of this is the rapidity of growth with which our later hopes have sprung up, which has been so great as not to have left time for what we may call the intermediate scheme to develope itself, and to sweep away completely that utter illiteracy which it aimed at destroying, before being itself, as it were, superseded by another of a far more comprehensive and aspiring character, which the progress of events has brought forth, and forced us to adopt and act upon. We may now, however, without impropriety, assume that the phrase, Popular Education, has acquired quite a different meaning from what it had in the days when nothing more than instruction in the elements of reading and writing was contemplated as desirable for the general body of the people. We should not now consider these acquisitions as deserving the name of education at all. It is most important to remark, that in no way can we so powerfully contribute to the universal diffusion even of the knowledge of reading and writing, as by setting distinctly before the people the ulterior advantages to which these attainments are fitted to conduct them. It is all very well to establish schools throughout the country for instructing both the young and such of the adult population as may require it in these beginnings of all literature; and parents may be expected undoubtedly to be powerfully impelled to seek for their children the benefits of such seminaries by the mere force of general example and opinion. But still it will be found that these incentives will and that one really marking but a very insignificant advancement towards the attainment of any important or desirable object. They will have the effect of putting the generality of the population in possession of an acquaintance with the alphabettypographical and scriptory; and of so rendering the art of reading and writing not quite so great a mystery to them as the art of magic; but in regard to the great majority of its élèves we cannot expect such a system to produce much beyond this. It will not make the people lovers of reading: it will not make books their delight and favorite relaxation. The cases will be comparatively few in which it will send its pupils forth capable of even readily understanding what they read. It will be little more than the mere name of the accomplishment, in short, that they will have-from which truly we do not see that much good can ever arise. Something more must be done in order to awaken to profitable exertion the intellect of the community. We must teach men not only the way, but the worth of reading and writing. Show them the real value of the art, and you may almost trust to themselves for the acquiring of it. Make them understand the benefit which the attainment will procure for them—and the temptation of that reward will be their best schoolmaster. This will not only make them learn to read, it will make them read. As intimately connected with the subject of popular education, we cannot refrain from adverting to the important exertions of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, which has now been for two or three years in operation. That most influential association has not only been proceeding with unabated spirit and effect in the career in which it first set out, but has recently entered upon an altogether new field of usefulness. But first we must speak of the original series of publications-the Library of Useful Knowledge. Of this work the |