factory nature of every physiological or metaphysical argument res pecting the essence of mind, arising. entirely from the attempt to reason the subject in a manner of which it is not susceptible. It admits not of any ordinary process of logic; for the facts on which it rests are the objects of consciousness only; and the argument must consist in an appeal to the consciousness of every man, that he feels a power within totally distinct from any function of the body. What other conception than this can he form of that power by which he recalls the past, and provides for the future-by which he ranges uncontrolled from world to world, and from system to system-surveys the works of all-creating power, and rises to the contemplation of the Eternal Cause? To what function of matter shall he liken that principle by which he loves and fears, and joys and sorrows-by which he is elevated with hope, excited by enthusiasm, or sunk in the horrors of despair? These changes also he feels, in many instances, to be equally independent of impressions from without, and of the condition of his bodily frame. In the most peaceful state of every corporeal function, passion, remorse, or anguish, may rage within; and, while the body is racked by the most frightful diseases, the mind may repose in tranquillity and hope. He is taught by physiology, that every part of his body is in a constant state of change, and that, within a certain period, every particle of it is renewed. But, amid these changes, he feels that the being whom he calls himself remains essentially the same. In particular, his remembrance of the occurrences of his early days, he feels to be totally in

consistent with the idea of an im pression made upon a material or gan, except he has recourse to the absurdity of supposing that one series of particles, as they departed, transferred the picture to those which came to occupy their room. If the being, then, which we call mind or soul, be, to the utmost extent of our knowledge, thus dissimilar to, and distinct from, anything that we know to be a result of bodily organisation, what reason have we to believe that it should be affected by any change in the arrangement of material organs, except in so far as relates to its intercourse with this external world. The effects of that change which we call the death of an animal body, are nothing more than a change in the arrangement of its constituent elements; for it can be demonstrated, on the strictest principles of chemistry, that not one particle of these elements ceases to exist. We have, in fact, no conception of annihilation; and our whole experience is opposed to the belief of one atom that ever existed having ceased to exist. There is, therefore, as Dr. Brown has well remarked, in the very decay of the body, an analogy which would seem to indicate the continued existence of the thinking principle, since that which we term decay is itself only another name for continued existence. To conceive, then, that anything mental ceases to exist after death, when we know that everything corporeal continues to exist, is a gratuitous assumption, contrary to every rule of philosophical inquiry, and in direct opposition, not only to all the facts relating to mind itself, but even to the analogy which is furnished by the dissolution of the bodily frame.

WATER,"

ble attributes of health, toast and water, barley water, and warm wa ter. Allied with something else, it is barely tolerable sugar and watér is an elegant French drink, and brandy and water may be a palatable English beverage; but nothing can be more anti-social than water. You have but to think of Parnell's hermit

«his drink the crystal well,” and you may fancy yourself insolated from all that is good in life. You feel an unpleasant vacuum in your imaginative enjoyments, and inclined to leave the man of the cell to his monastic nunnery, and to betake yourself to better things.

Perhaps, however, no subject is more intimately connected with our existence and well-being than water, and a knowledge of its properties. It constitutes our food and physic. It is our best friend, and not unfrequently enables us to prevail over stronger enemies.

Before us. is a thin half-crown Treatise on Water. The subject is patriarchal; the author is Abraham Booth, and the volume is dedicated "to his revered father, Isaac Booth." Here the natural and chemical properties of water are briefly treated of, and the British mineral waters duly considered. There is little new in the work, but considerable industry has been used in collecting its materials. We looked for more on the Thames water; though our expectations were those of a Londoner attaching all importance to his great city.

Mr. Booth's Treatise is too thin to allow us to say we have waded through it. Here and there we pick out some amusing facts. Thus, what tricks our forefathers were enabled to play off on the ignorant, through the wells round London, several of which were impregnated with carbonic acid gas. The monks of the Holy-well, near Shoreditch, turned this property to good account by selling the water as spiritus mundi, or a kind of spiritual nec

tar-Oh! the "glassy essence ” that enabled them to

Play such fantastic tricks before high heaven As made the angels weep."

The mystery-mongers of our day are those who adulterate our drink with water they affect the same consideration for our bodies that the monks did for our souls; and both made and make the study an equal source of profit.

At page 47, there is mentioned a frightful fact, that "Dr. Lambe has lately revived the idea of arsenic being present in all natural waters, and particularly in the waters of the Thames." This is as alarming as a drop of the same water seen through Carpenter's microscope, with its myriads of animalculæ. For a month after we had seen this, we drank nothing weaker than Spanish wine, and took care not to sit next to a water-drinker.

A page of pleasant romance succeeds. Thus, says Mr. Booth :—

"Various remarkable accounts of particular waters are on record, which, although they must be deemed fabulous, we shall just enumerate. The Stygian water, said to be the death of Alexander the Great, is supposed to have contained fluoric acid gas. A spring of this kind is said to have been discovered in Prussia, and closed by order of the government. A river is named at Epirus that puts out any lighted torch, and kindles any torch that was never lighted. Some waters, being drunk, cause madness, some drunkenness, and some death. The river Selarus was said in a few hours to turn a root or wand into stone. There is also a river in Arabia where all the sheep that drink thereof have their hair turned to a vermilion color; and one, of no less credit than Aristotle, names a merry river, the river Elusina, that dances at the sound of music; 'for with music it bubbles, dances, and grows sandy, and so continues till the music ceases; but then it presently returns to its wonted clear

ness and calmness.' Josephus likewise names a river in Judea that runs swiftly all the six days of the week, and stands still and rests all the Sabbath.”

Rain water is next in purity to distilled water; but its drinkers have a chance of their insides being plastered and white-washed. "Rain, collected in towns, acquires a small quantity of sulphate of lime, and carbonate of lime, obtained from the roof and the plaster of houses." Hippocrates knew this, although Mr. Booth tells us some chemists do not; for the father of physic states that rain water should always be boiled and strained when collected near large

towns.

Dr. Perceval observes that bricks harden the softest water, and give it an aluminous impregnation. Mr. Booth adds, "the common practice of lining wells with them is therefore very improper, unless they be covered with cement:" would not the cement have a similar hardening property?

Hard water introduces Burton ale, the excellence of which has been found by chemistry and law to be owing to a gypsum rock over which the Trent water flows. We have therefore to thank Nature for this delicious sophistication, and the drinker may double his nips or tankard accordingly for, what nature and the law sanction, let no man eschew.

Mr Booth tells us, "At Paris, where the water is hard, the same baker cannot make so good bread as at Gormes. The purity of the waters at Beaume, in Burgundy, is the cause why this bread was long celebrated as the whitest and best bread in France." We always thought the Paris bread excellent; but the French bakers have more varieties than we have. The crisp-crusted roll, napkin, silver, and china of the Restaurateur, will never fade away from our recollection.

Bleaching is another important

use. At page 86, Mr. Booth says: "Pure waters are found most valuable in bleaching wax, and in the manufacture of white paper; in consequence that such waters re quire the less alkali and soap in cleansing and whitening the rags, and the paper made with soft water is thus found firmer and to require less sizing than that made with hard water. This circumstance is said to give the French paper a preference to the English or Dutch, whose waters being harder, require more soap and lime, become more tender, and require more sizing than the French." We fall in with these observations; for nothing can be more vexatious to fast writers than some English floccy paper, where the pen becomes furred every twenty minutes.

The chapter on mineral waters is interesting; but that on the dietetic properties of water exceeds it. Notwithstanding all we have said against the stream, we must give place to the following

"Water drinkers are in general longer livers, are less subject to decay of their faculties, have better teeth, more regular appetites, and less acrid evacuations, than those who indulge in a more stimulating diluent as their common drink. This liquid is undoubtedly not only the most fitted for quenching the thirst and promoting true and healthy digestion, but the best adjutant to a long and comfortable life. Its properties are thus summed up by Hoffman: 'Pure water is the fittest drink for all ages and temperaments: and, of all the productions of nature or art, comes the nearest to that universal remedy so much sought after by mankind, and never hitherto discovered an opinion in which he is supported by most scientific and intelligent men."

The reader will pardon our prolixity: the subject is of current interest, and one which all who thirst after useful knowledge must enjoy.

THERE is a slight frost in the air, in the sky, on the lake, and midday is as still as midnight. But, though still, it is cheerful; for close at hand Robin Red-breast, God bless him, is warbling on the cope-stone of that old barn gabel; and though Millar-Ground Bay is half a mile off, how distinct the clank of the two oars, like one, accompanying that large wood-boat on its slow voyage from Ambleside to Bowness, the metropolitan port of the Queen of the Lakes. The water has lost, you see, its summer sunniness, yet it is as transparent as ever it was in summer; and how close together seem, with their almost meeting shadows, the two opposite shores! But we wish you to look at BELLE ISLE, though we ourselves are almost afraid to do so, so transcendantly glorious is the sight that we know will disturb us with an emotion too deep to be endured. Could you not think that a splendid sunset had fallen down in fragments on the Isle called Beautiful, and set it all a-blaze! The woods are on fire, yet they burn not; beauty subdues while it fosters the flame; and there, as in a manytented tabernacle, has Color pitched his royal residence, and reigns in glory beyond that of any Oriental king. What are all the canopies, and balconies, and galleries of human state, all hung with the richest drapery that ever the skill of Art, that Wizard, drew forth in gorgeous folds from his enchanted loom, if ideally suspended in the air of imagination, beside the sun-and-stormstained furniture of these palaces of Autumn, framed by the Spirit of the Season, of her own living umbrage, for his own last delight, ere he move in annual migration, with all his Court, to some foreign clime, far beyond the seas! No names of trees are remembered-a glorious

confusion comprehends in one the whole leafy race-orange, and purple, and scarlet, and crimson, are all seen to be there, and interfused through the silent splendor is aye felt the presence of that terrestrial green, native and unextinguishable in earth's bosom, as that celestial blue is in that of the sky. That trance goes by, and the spirit, gradually filled with a stiller delight, takes down all those tents into pieces, and contemplates the encampment with less of imagination, and with more of love. It knows and blesses each one of those many glorious groves, each becoming, as it gazes, less and less glorious, more and more beautiful; till memory revives all the happiest and holiest hours of the Summer and the Spring, and repeoples the melancholy umbrage with a thousand visions of joy, that may return never more! Images, it may be, of forms and faces now mouldering in the dust! For all human hearts have feltand all human lips have declared— melancholy making poets of us all

aye, even prophets, till the pensive air of Autumn has been filled with the music of elegiac and foreboding hymns-that, as is the Race of Leaves-now old Homer speaks -so is the Race of Men! Nor, till time shall have an end, insensate will be any soul endowed "with discourse of reason" to those mysterious misgivings, alternating with triumphant aspirations more mysterious still, when the Religion of Nature leans in awe on the Religion of God, and we hear the voice of both in such strains as these— the earthly, in its sadness, momentarily deadening the divine :

"But when shall Spring visit the mouldering urn ?

O! when shall it dawn on the night of the grave!"

PEOPLE are proud of talking of solitude. It redounds, they opine, to the honor of their great-mindedness, to be thought capable of living, for an hour or two, by themselves, at a considerable distance from knots or skeins of their fellow-creatures. Byron, again, thought he showed his superiority, by swearing as solemnly as a man can do in the Spenserian stanza, that

"To sit alone, and muse o'er flood and fell,"

has nothing whatever to do with solitude and that if you wish to know and feel what solitude really is, you must go to Almack's.

"This-this is solitude-this is to be alone!"

His Lordship's opinions were often peculiar but the passage has been much admired, therefore we are willing to believe, that what is call ed the Great Desart is, in point of loneliness, unable to stand a philosophical, much less a poetical comparison, with a well-frequented Fancy-ball. But we shrewdly suspect that the statement of Byron is not borne out by facts. Zoology is against it-more especially those two of its most interesting branches, Entomology and Ornithology, while they are equally at variance with the natural history of man.

Go to the desart and clap your back against a cliff. Do you think yourself alone? What a ninny! Your great clumsy splay feet are bruising to death a batch of beetles. See that spider whom you have widowed, running up and down your elegant leg, in distraction and despair, bewailing the loss of a husband, who, however savage to the ephemerals, had always smiled sweetly upon her! Meanwhile your shoulders have crushed a colony of small red ants settled in a moss city beautifully roofed with lichens

and that accounts for the sharp tickling behind your ear, which you keep scratching, no Solomon, in

shameful ignorance of the cause of that effect. Should you sit downyou extinguish a fearful amount of animal life-creation may be said to groan under you; and insect as you are yourself, you are defrauding millions of insects of their little day. All the while you are supposing yourself alone! Now, are you not, as we hinted, a prodigious ninny? For the whole wilderness -as you choose to call it—is crawling with various life. London, with its million and a half of inhabitants-including of course the suburbs-is, compared with it, an empty joke. Die-and you will soon be picked to the bones. The air swarms with sharpers-and an insurrection of radicals will attack your corpse from the worm-holes of the earth. Corbies, ravens, hawks, eagles, all the feathered furies of beak and bill, will come flying ere sunset to anticipate the maggots, and carry your remains-if you will allow us to call them so-over the whole of Argylshire in many living sepulchres. We confess ourselves unable to see the solitude of thisand begin to agree with Byron, that a man is less crowded at a masquerade.

But the same subject may be illustrated less tragically, and even with some slight comic effect. A man among mountains is often surrounded on all sides with mice and moles. What cozy nests do the former construct at the roots of heather, among tufts of grass in the rashes, and the moss on the greensward! As for the latter, though you think you know a mountain from a molehill, you are much mistaken; for what is a mountain, in many cases, but a collection of molehills-and of fairy knolls? which again introduce a new element into the composition, and show, in still more glaring colors, your absurdity in supposing yourself to be in soli