inviting, in the most obliging manner, the Captain and other officers t partake of their own dinner with them. These gentlemen, however, find. ing their authority and their property at stake, thought it prudent to make application to the government of Batavia for a few German troops to instruct their crew in the rights of discipline, and in the duties of obedience and subordination.”

The bay of Batavia is sufficiently capacious to contain the whole navy of England, and could afford a perfect security in all seasons. It is very feebly protected, but the climate is so dreadful, as almost to exempt the possessors of the place from all danger of attack; its ravages are horribly destructive. It seems, that the French Revolutionists stole their Republican Calendar from the Dutch inhabitants at Batavia.

"The usual way of dividing the year, as in most tropical climates, is into the rainy and the dry seasons, the first setting in about November and continuing through April; but the Dutch, absurdly enough, both in speaking and writing, give names to the months as having some reference to their productions, or other circumstances which distinguish them, in Europe: thus, they have their Hay month, their Wine month, their Flower month; and, unluckily for their nomenclature, as used in this place, their Winter month happens when the sun is nearly vertical. Who would have suspected that the Brumaire, the Germinal, the Floreal, and almost the whole of the French republican calendar, were stolen from their Dutch friends, who have been in the constant use of it for centuries past? It is doubtful if the French will retain it so long, and whether, in their thirst for novelty, they may not propose to compliment the present august family on the throne by a transfer of their names to the calendar months, or, which would be more convenient for themselves and the rest of Europe, revert to the old ones which have stood the test of so many ages.'

It is not at all improbable that the vanity of the French will be so hurt at the detection of this theft, as to make them resign the fruits of it. Mr. Barrow gives a pretty full description of the natural produc tions of the Island of Java, and, of course, does not omit to notice the deadly Upas, which the poetical pen of Darwin has laboured to immortalize; but he notices it only to correct an error which generally prevails respecting it, and to do that, which unfortunately is the reverse of the conduct of some modern travellers, to substitute. truth for fiction.

"After the notoriety which the baneful Upas has obtained from the republication, in a popular work, of a most extraordinary account of this poisonous tree that first appeared several years ago in the Gentleman's Magazine, it would have been an unpardonable neglect in us not to make very particular inquiry into the degree of credibility which is attached by the inhabitants of the island to its existence; and, if such tree did exist, to endeavour to learn how far its deleterious qualities might correspond with those which had been ascribed to it. Accordingly we seldom enter ed a garden or plantation without interrogating the people employed in them as to the Upas. The result of our inquiries was little favourable to

the.

the truth of Foersch's relation, which carries with it, indeed, internal marks of absurdity. It required some ingenuity to conceive the existence of a single tree, the sole individual of its species, standing on the middle of a naked plain, of a nature so baneful that not only birds, beasts, and every living creature which come within the circle of the atmosphere contaminated by its poisonous effluvia, instantly perish, but so deleterious as to wither up and destroy all other plants, and to devour, like Saturn, its own offspring as they pullulate from its roots. Such a monster in nature, with its thousand tongues steeped in fell poison,' is almost too much for the page of romance, or the wildest fiction of poetry. Yet the relation was not wholly discredited. That which is strange,' says Dr. Johnson, is delightful, and a pleasing error is not willingly detected.' The magic pen of Dr. Darwin, by celebrating the wonders of this wonderful tree

In sweet tetrandrian monogynian strains,

made the error still more pleasing, and consecrated, as it were, the fiction of the Upas.

"As fabulous stories have sometimes, however, their origin in truth, so that of the Upas may probably not be wholly groundless, but admit of some explanation. In tropical climates, plants possessing noxious quali ties are very common. Java is considered to abound with them. The first of this kind that was discovered might probably have the name of Upas conferred on it, which name, being afterwards adjunctively applied to all other plants possessing the same qualities, became the appellative for every poisonous tree. That this was the common acceptation of the word Upas, I inferred from its being connected with the trivial name of all such plants as were either known, or supposed, to contain poisonous qualities. Thus, for instance, the Dioscorea Deleteria was called the Ubi Upas, which may be translated the poisonous potatoe. The seed of a tree bearing a papilionaceous flower, and apparently a species of Sophora, was called the Upas Bidjie, the poisonous seed. Thus, also, a triangular-stemmed Euphorbia, a species of Solanum, a Datura, and several other plants of real or supposed noxious qualities, had all of them the word Upas joined to their proper names. In this sense, the Boban or Boon Upas of Foersch would imply neither more nor less than a poisonous tree, and not any particular species of tree, much less an unconnected individual sui generis, bearing the name of Upas."

Had Darwin lived to read this passage, he would, we suspect, have been as much vexed at being exposed as the propagator of vulgar errors, as the philosophists of St. Cloud at the detection of their theft in respect of their calendar. Of the fatal effects of this terrible climate some notion may be formed from the following account.

The prick of a pin or a needle will sometimes occasion a lock-jaw. The Dutch doctors are also of opinion, that certain cases of hydrophobia which have occurred, notwithstanding no instance of canine madness was ever known on the island, may be attributed to climate, and the state of the constitution as effected by it. The bite of the large Indian rat, commonly called the Bandicoot, is supposed to occasion. hydrophobia and certain death; an opinion which, I understand, is also entertained on the coast of Malabar. The bite of an enraged man is said to be as certain of producing

producing hydrophobia as that of a mad dog, two cases of which had happened not long before our arrival. One of them being stated by Dr. Le Dulx, in the 5th volume of the Transactions of the Batavian Society, a work little known in Europe, I shall use no apology for inserting a translation of it.

"On the 17th March, 1789, information was laid before the Court of Justice that the Writer, Balthazar Van Vliet, in a fit of madness, had plunged a knife into his bowels. The Court proceeded to the place without delay, attended by the town surgeon, Limbart, where they found the patient, by direction of the surgeon attending him, bound and in strong convulsions, particularly of the eyes. The family being interrogated as to the origin of his complaint, related that, four or five days previous to the act, the patient had a quarrel with a friend, which proceeded to a furious scuffle, when his antagonist, finding himself not a match for the patient, in the moment of rage bit him in the arm. The wound was bound up in the usual way, without the least idea being entertained of the dreadful consequences which a bite thus made in the heat of passion was capable of producing. Three days after this happened the patient was attacked with fever, but still no particular regard was had to the wound. The surgeon who attended him observed that he was in a state of continued delirium; that he had a great antipathy to every kind of medicine and, in particular, a strong aversion to water. On the fourth day the surgeon, on entering the apartment, found him stabbing himself repeatedly with a knife. With some difficulty they seized and bound him down on a sofa. On the town surgeon being sent for, he offered him a spoonful of water which he refused, but, on being told it was gin, he endeavoured with great difficulty to swallow it. When a glass of water was presented to him, the most ghastly spasmodic convulsions were observable in his face, and over his whole body, accompanied with such a degree of terror that be exclaimed, Water! Oh Jesus, have mercy on me! His terror increased on wiping his bloody hands with a wet napkin, when, in convulsive agonies, he called out, Oh God, water! Perceiving clearly that hydrophobia had supervened from the bite received in anger, we resolved to treat him ac. cordingly, but he died in the afternoon of the same day.'

"That the bite of a man is attended with very malignant symptoms, was a doctrine which prevailed in ancient times. Pliny classes it among the very worst of wounds given in this manner. Morsus hominum inter

asperrimos quoque numeratur. And it appears to be a well authenticated fact, that many animals, beside dogs, when highly enraged, become mor. bid and acquire the power of communicating the infection by their bite. Dr. Le Dulx mentions in the same paper several instances of hydrophobia succeeding to the bite of enraged animals, as the case of a boy bit by a duck which he had disturbed in its amours, and of a feeder of cocks who, being pecked in the hand by one of these animals in separating it from its antagonist, died under every symptom of hydrophobia and madness. The. bite of the common domestic cat, rendered furious by provocation, is well known to produce hydrophobia. In what manner this extraordinary state of morbidity in the animal body is generated, remains yet an arcanum in animal pathology; but it is pretty evident that the poison is secreted by the salivary glands, and conveyed into the circulation with the spittle of the morbid animal.”

We

We have had occasion, more than once, to combat a favourite prejudice, which ascribes peculiar benevolence to the Hindoos, and traces the source of that benevolence to their abstinence from animal food; while others, however, make that abstinence the effect and not cause of their benevolence. Our author thus speaks of it, in his account of the Javanese.

"Not only the features, the manners, and the remains of the civil and religious institutions of the Hindoos are still apparent among the Javanese, but they have preserved the fragments of a history, according to which they derive their origin from Vishnoo. This history terminates with the account of a dreadful deluge, which swept away the great bulk of mankind. In the inland parts of the island they still observe a scrupulous abstinence from every kind of animal food, under the notion of a transmigration of souls. However amiable that religion may seem which forbids the taking away of animal life, it may fairly be doubted whether an aversion to the shedding of blood, or a tender feeling for animal suffering, had any share in the origin of such an institution. A supposition to this effect would involve with it a multitude of contradictions and inconsistencies. The same people who, in their precepts strenuously incul cate and in practice encourage, by assisting and gazing at, the inhuman and unnatural sacrifice of a beautiful and innocent woman expiring in the flames of a funeral pile, cannot consistently be supposed to feel any horror at the slaughtering of an ox. The same remark will with equal force apply to the Javanese. What pretensions can these people have to delicate feeling and sensations of horror for animal suffering, whose great delight is to witness, like the barbarous Romans, a miserable criminal, perhaps for a very slight offence, torn in pieces by tygers and buffalos ? Neither is it more likely that, in a country where animal existence is so abundantly produced and abundantly destroyed, the forbearance should have originated in any peculiar degree of respect and value for animal life. It is scarcity that in general constitutes value.

"The torrid zone indeed is probably not the country in which such a system had its origin-where all nature is in a state of visible animationwhere the naked earth, the woods, the waters, and even the rocks under the waters, are teeming with animal life--where every step that a man takes, every time that he opens his mouth, whether to inhale the atmospheric air, to quench his thirst with pure water, or to eat his lifeless vegetables (as he is willing to suppose them), he necessarily destroys myriads of living and sentient beings. With as little propriety can such a system, so misplaced, be referred to any refined notions of mercy and benevolence, but may, perhaps, more properly be considered as one of those unaccount. able institutions which are sometimes found to militate against local consistency, and which afford no slight argument in favour of their foreign origin. On the same ground of reasoning we might venture, perhaps, to infer that the consecration of the cow is more likely to have had its origin on the bleak and barren heights of Tartary than on the warm and fertile plains of Hindostan."

Mr. Barrow manifests the soundness of his principles and the correctness of his judgment, wherever an opportunity occurs for their

display.

display. In the following passage, the nonsensical jargon, and impious ribaldry of the poetical philosophist of Derby, are very properly reprobated.

"Whether the Hindoos framed the strange doctrine of transmigration of the vital principle into different animals, or borrowed it from other countries where animal life was less abundant, and therefore of more value, than in India, their absurdities are, in either case, fully as defen sible as those of some of our modern philosophers who, in a glare of fine phrases, have assiduously endeavoured to propagate the unfounded doctrine of a fortuitous and spontaneous vivification of inanimate matter. If, in any single instance, it could be shewn that animal life had been produced under a fortuitous concurrence of favourable cifcumstances, one would be the less surprized at the adoption of such preposterous notions as 'faculties being obtained simply by wishing for them'-that from or ganic particles accumulated, originate animal appetencies'—that

Hence without parent, by spontaneous birth,

Rise the first specks of animated earth.'

And that this earthy matter of spontaneous animation has been aggre gated into all the shapes and sizes of living creatures on the face of the globe, merely by volition, by forming

A potent wish in the productive hour."

Such sublime nonsense, though in contradiction to every known fact, is yet plausible enough to mislead the judgment of many of those to whom it is particularly addressed; though, like the transmigration of souls, it is ushered into the western world in an age too enlightened to suffer it to pass into a religious creed. When the object of talents, so miserably misapplied, appears to be that of degrading man to a level with the lowest reptile that crawls on the earth, and of allowing him no other pre-eminence in the scale of creation than the accidental conception of a more 'potent wish in the productive hour;'-when the most disgusting comparisons are drawn, with an obvious design to debase the noblest work of God' down to

His brother-emmets and his sister worms;'

one cannot avoid feeling the mingled sentiments of pity, contempt, and indignation, which even the seducing garb of harmonious verse has not the power of suppressing. In comparing the writings of Paley with those of Darwin, how simple, how noble, how consolatory, are the design and contrivance of a benevolent Being demonstrated in the one; how wretchedly obscure, how mean, how hopeless, is the doctrine of a fortuitous concurrence of fortunate circumstances so pompously and perversely displayed in the fascinating verse of the other!"

After a longer stay than was originally intended, on this pestilential coast, our voyager proceeded to Cochin-China, a part of the Asiatic Continent at present but little known.

"In the latest and perhaps the best arranged system of geography which has been offered to the public, a considerable portion of Asia, containing full twenty millions of people, and from three to four hundred

NO. C. VOL. XXV.

K..

thousand