extreme nationality of their auditors; though it is a striking remark of Mad. de Staël, that the Greeks, after all, were more national than republican-and were never actuated with that profound hatred and scorn of tyranny which exalted the Roman character. Almost all their tragic subjects, accordingly, are taken from the misfortunes of kings;-of kings descended from the Gods, and upon whose genealogy the nation still continued to value itself. The fate of the Tarquins could never have been regarded at Rome as a worthy occasion either of pity or of horror. Republican sentiments are occasionally introduced into the Greek Choruses;though we cannot agree with Mad. de Staël in considering these musical bodies as intended to represent the people.

It is in their comedy that the defects of the Greek literature are most conspicuous. The world was then too young to supply its materials. Society had not existed long enough, either to develop the finer shades of character in real life, or to generate the talent of observing, generalizing, and representing them. The national genius, and the form of government, led them to delight in detraction and popular abuse; for though they admired and applauded their great men, they had not in their hearts any great respect for them; and the degradation, or seclusion, in which they kept their women, took away, almost all interest or elegance from the intercourse of private life, and reduced its scenes of gayety to those of coarse debauch, or broad and humorous derision. The extreme coarseness and vulgarity of Aristophanes, is apt to excite our wonder, when we first consider him as the cotemporary of Euripides, and Socrates, and Plato; but the truth is, that the Athenians, after all, were but a common populace as to moral delicacy and social refinement. Enthusiasm, and especially the enthusiasm of superstition and nationality, is as much the passion of the vulgar, as a delight in ribaldry and low buffoonery. The one was gratified by their tragedy;—and the comedy of Aristophanes was exactly calculated to give delight to the other. In the end, however, their love of buffoonery and detraction unfortunately proved too strong for their nationality. When Philip was at their gates, all the eloquence of Demosthenes could not rouse them from their theatrical dissipations. The great danger which they always apprehended to their liberties, was from the excessive power and popularity of one of their own great men; and, by a singular fatality, they perished from a profligate indifference and insensibility to the charms of patriotism and greatness.

In philosophy, Mad. de Staël does not rank the Greeks very high. The greater part of them were orators and poets, rather than profound thinkers, or exact inquirers. They discoursed rhetorically upon vague and abstract ideas; and, up to the time of

Aristotle, proceeded upon the radical error of substituting hypothesis for observation. That eminent person first showed the use and the necessity of analysis; and did infinitely more for posterity than all the mystics that went before him. As their states were small, and their domestic life inelegant, men seem to have been considered almost exclusively in their relation to the public.There is, accordingly, a noble air of patriotism and devotedness to the common weal in all the morality of the ancients; and though Socrates set the example of fixing the principles of virtue for private life, the ethics of Plato, and Xenophon, and Zeno, and most of the other philosophers, are little else than treatises of political duties. In modern times, from the prevalence of monarchical government, and the great extent of societies, men are very generally quite loosened from their relations with the public, and are but too much engrossed with their private interests and affections. This may be venial, when they merely forget the state by which they are forgotten; but it is base and fatal, when they are guided by those interests in the few public functions they have still to perform. After all, the morality of the Greeks was very clumsy and imperfect. In political science, the variety of their governments, and the perpetual play of war and negotiation, had made them more expert. Their historians narrate with spirit and simplicity; and this is their merit. They make scarcely any reflections; and are marvellously indifferent as to vice or virtue. They record the most atrocious and most heroic actions-the most disgusting crimes and most exemplary generosity with the same tranquil accuracy with which they would describe, the succession of storms and sunshine. Thucydides is somewhat of a higher pitch; but the immense difference between him and Tacitus proves, better, perhaps, than any general reasoning, the progress which had been made in the interim in the powers of reflection and observation, and how near the Greeks, with all their boasted attainments, should be placed to the intellectual infancy of the species. In all their productions, indeed, the fewness of their ideas is remarkable; and their most impressive writings may be compared to the music of certain rude nations, which produces the most astonishing effects by the combination of not more than four or five simple notes.

ON THE SALT MINES OF WIELICSKA, IN POLAND.

[Partly extracted from the Memoirs of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris, for the year 1762.]

WHEN naturalists travel, they behave in a different manner from other travellers, particularly by diminishing the marvellous, which the latter, not duly informed, or for want of accuracy and attention in their observations, seem to take a pleasure in blending with a great number of points in natural history. This diminution, however, does not deprive any of the objects of their real value, being often more than compensated by important observations, which eyes accustomed to natural inquiries know how to substitute to the fables which descriptions of this sort have been loaded with.

The narrative of M. Guettard's journey into Poland will furnish us with examples of what is here advanced; but one of the most striking is the description of the famous salt mines of Wielicska, which he had an opportunity of examining. Few travellers have gone near these mines without visiting them; but, it seems, the chief view of all of them, in the accounts they have given, was to carry, as it were, the reader out of the world, and feed his curiosity with mere illusions. The imagination of poets never produced any thing so singular as what most travellers have said of these mines. Some have made abodes of them nearly resembling the hills of Homer and Virgil; others have seen there glittering palaces, with all sorts of precious stones, and worthy of being mansions for the gods of Olympus: others, in fine, have observed there rivers, towns, churches, and a numerous people all born in those subterraneous cavities, and of which several have died far advanced in years, without having ever seen the light of day. In a word, the love of the marvellous, together with the fertile or affrighted imagination of travellers, have made such dissimilar pictures of these mines, that one would never believe they designed to represent the same object. Several who had not the courage to go down into them, have given, for observations of their own, what was only a mere hearsay, which, perhaps, they afterwards embellished with some touches of their own creative fancy : so that we shall soon see what the sober senses of a naturalist had good reason to retrench in such brilliant or terrible descriptions.

The salt mines of Wielicska are under a mountain on which is built the city which gives them its name. There is a descent to those mines by nine wells; and here the salt is drawn out, and the labourers ascend and descend by the help of cable, about which is twisted a rope, forming a sort of stirrup-girth, whereon they sit. One may also go down by ladders placed along the

sides of the wells. Those who have not a mind to expose themselves to the danger of going down in this manner, may make use of stairs, very well built, of stone and brick, and about 300 toises from one of the wells. These stairs have 470 steps, and it was by that M. Guettard descended. These mines are nothing different from those commonly met with, except that the air is much wholesomer in them. The banks of salt lie at a pretty considerable depth, and, after piercing a considerable thickness of ground, the first lay or stratum is entirely of the same sand whereof a great part of the soil of Poland is composed; underneath are several strata of clay, somewhat different in colour, and more or less mixed with sand and gravel; some of them have none, and the miners call them halda-midlarka, or soapy earth. Some of these strata of earth are disseminated with marine bodies, particularly shells, which are almost all of a small size. Being come to a certain depth, the strata of earth are separated by lamina, or plates of stone, which their little thickness has made to be considered as slates, but which are real calcareous stones, having nothing common with slate, but by being thin and in plates. From space to space are also found blocks of stone of an iron gray colour. The Count de Schober, who wrote minutely of those mines, assures us of having seen some strata of earth separated by a kind of alabaster; but M. Guettard did not see any of this sort. The last beds of clay are also separated by a still more singular substance, which is a kind of plaster. This stone, at first sight, represents a collection of teeth of some animal, converted, as it were, into plaster; but the extent of those strata does not allow of such a conjecture to be adopted. An idea may be had of this substance by imagining a soft paste, drawn out and twisted into long handles, holding to, and sometimes several of them lying upon, one another. soon as the miners have perceived this stone, they are sure of soon finding the banks of salt, which they do effectually. All the materials that form the different strata just mentioned are not always ranged horizontally; those strata rise and sink frequently, but it is not till they have been all pierced that the miners arrive at the real banks of salt, which lie commonly at the depth of 300 feet. Some salt, however, is met with in the last strata of clay, and formerly this clay was washed to extract it by evaporation; but the scarcity of wood has occasioned this work to be discontinued; yet the pieces that are found large and transparent enough are employed for some small works in imitation of crystal. Immediately under the strata of clay are found banks of salt, but of little extent and thickness, and even frequently blocks of salt standing alone, and placed obliquely in the clay; but immediately after the real banks of salt are met with. The extent of those banks is absolutely unknown. Galleries have been pierced therein of 800 or

So

900 feet, without finding the end. The same uncertainty takes place in regard to their thickness, for it greatly varies; but it is certain that excavations thirty or forty feet high are found in these mines, which had been dug into one and the same mass of salt, without reaching out of it. This enormous mass has an inclination of about 45 degrees, but does not everywhere follow this direction, being sometimes horizontal, and sometimes according to the contours of different mountains under which it extends. The substance of this salt is pretty hard, and its colour of a clear gray, or pretty fair white; it is commonly opaque; but some pieces are found more or less transparent, and when examined attentively by a good glass, are seen entirely composed of small cubes, the figure as it is known which is affected by sea salt in its crystallization: it therefore resumes the same figure when, after being dissolved in water, it is crystallized anew; and the waters which sometimes appear in rooms or places that have been neglected or abandoned, form there, at length, masses of salt, wherein is found the same texture. Sometimes, in the midst of masses of the whitest salt, are found considerable parts of a more or less blackish substance, which appears to be rotten wood. This wood, exposed to the flame of a candle, catches fire easily, and is as easily extinguished, leaving a smell of rancid oil. M. Guettard has been assured, that the pyrites has been sometimes in this salt, which is not surprising, the clays found in and about the salt being sufficient to produce it. The inclination of the banks of salt to the horizon, which, according to M. Guettard's observations, proceeds to about 45 degrees, obliges the miners to form different stages in the excavations of the mines; the galleries even stoop towards the bottom of the mines, terminating in pretty spacious yards, crossways, or cham bers, in which are now left some pillars for securing the vault, and preventing any falling in, which the want of this precaution, and the enormous weight those vaults are loaded with, sometimes occasion. It is in some of the more distant chambers that the wells are pierced which have a communication from one stage of the mine to another; and it is through these wells, by the means of axle-trees, wound round with cables and drawn by horses, that enormous masses of salt are raised from the lower stages, and, after being rolled into the galleries, are lifted up, through the wells, to the surface of the ground. These horses, of which now, within these few years, a numerous breed has been kept up, in order to spare the men in the hardest and most laborious parts of the work, never go out of the mines, at least as long as they are in a condition for service; and commodious stables have been dug for them in the mass of salt. The water oozing from the earth, and found commonly at the beginning of the mine, is taken care of, and conveyed properly to serve them for drink. In or near the same yards, or crossways, VOL. II. New Series

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