72

GEOGRAPHY AND NATURAL HISTORY.

[SEC. 1. -a struggle for life. With difficulty, by force of toil, he succeeds in providing for himself a miserable support, which saves him from dying of hunger and hardship during the tedious winters of that climate. High culture is not possible under such unfavourable conditions.

The man of the tropical regions is the son of a wealthy house.' In the midst of the abundance which surrounds him, labour too often seems to him useless; to abandon himself to his inclinations is more easy and agreeable. A slave of his passions, an unfaithful servant, he leaves uncultivated and unused the faculties with which God has endowed him.

The man of the polar regions is the beggar, overwhelmed with suffering, who, too happy if he but gain his daily bread, has no leisure to think of anything more exalted. The man of the temperate regions, finally, is the man born in ease, in the golden mean, which is the most favoured of all conditions. Invited to labour by everything around him, he soon finds, in the exercise of all his faculties, at once progress and well-being.

Thus, if the tropical continents have the wealth of nature, the temperate continents are the most perfectly organized for the development of man. They are opposed to each other, as the body and the soul, as the inferior races and the superior races, as savage man and civilized man, as nature and history. Of this contrast, so Inarked as it is, the history of human societies will give us the solution, or at least will enable us to obtain a glimpse of the truth.-GUYOT's' Earth and Man.'

1, House is here used in the sense of family.

THE reader of history may be compared to a traveller, who leaves his own country, to visit others which are far off, and very different from that in which he has been living. The manners and customs of the nations which he is going to see are either wholly new to him, or he is already in some measure acquainted with them, by the information and researches of others. So it is with the reader of history. He is either beginning a study, to which he was altogether a stranger, and meets for the first time with facts and circumstances of which he had never heard before, or he is partly retracing his own steps, and filling up the details of a plan which had been exhibited to him previously in outline. It is, perhaps, difficult to say in which of the two cases his gratification and amusement will be greatest; and the minds of different readers will be differently affected, according to the degree of knowledge already possessed upon the subject which they are reading.

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It must not, however, be forgotten, that gratification and amusement are not the only results which the history of past events produces on the mind. Many persons, it is true, are fond of history, and study it with avidity, without its enabling them to confer any direct practical benefit on mankind. Others, also, as is the case with children, are set to read the histories of different countries, though it is not expected that much moral improvement should be derived from such lessons.

But even in these cases, the study of history has its own peculiar benefits. The mere recollection of facts and dates is found to be of great service to the mind, as soil is improved by being frequently turned over with the spade, though it is not constantly bearing

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a fresh crop. History is thus an indispensable instrument in the culture of the memory; and though few persons retain, in after life, the minute details of history or chronology which they learned in their childhood, it might be difficult to point out any one of their mental faculties which had not been rendered more acute, and more fit for its peculiar application, by this early exercise of the memory.

Nor can history be said to be without its use, though it does not enable all its readers to confer any direct practical benefit on mankind. To measure the advantage of all knowledge by its practical utility, would be as absurd as to require all persons to be of the same height, or to expect every production of the animal and vegetable kingdoms to be useful for the same purpose. The great distinction between man in a savage and in a civilized state is, that the savage seeks for nothing but what is useful, whereas, the civilized member of society seeks for moral and intellectual enjoyment. The reader of history is therefore benefited, and is able to extend the benefit to others, if his reading supplies him with the means of making himself and others better and happier than they were. That the study of history will enable him to do this, requires no demonstration; and it would not be difficult to show that the great end and object of this study is to improve the moral condition, and to increase the happiness of mankind.

There is undoubtedly a nearer and more apparent utility which results from an acquaintance with the events of former ages. If history has been correctly described to be "philosophy teaching by example," it becomes at once the necessary study of all those who are concerned in the government of states. To disregard the examples of past times is imprudent in all persons, but in those who are engaged in governing others, it is positively culpable; and for a statesman to be ignorant of history which supplies him with practical experience in the department which he has chosen to follow, must be attended with the same consequences to himself and others, as if a tradesman or a mechanic should undertake to serve his employers without a knowledge of his goods or of his tools.

But though the past history of his own or other countries may supply the statesman with many useful lessons, and he may thus be better able to carry on the government, he has gained but a small portion of experience, if he has merely treasured up a certain number of facts which may serve as a guide to his own conduct under similar circumstances. The lesson which he is to read in the page of history is the art of making men happy by making them good. He must observe in the events of past ages how

"righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people :" and he who reads history without constantly remembering, that the persons of whom he has been reading will be judged hereafter for those very actions which he has been admiring or condemning, is likely to mislead both himself and others, when he comes to apply his historical experience to practice.-BURTON'S 'Christian Church.'

1. Anything to remark about the use of the superlative in such a case as this? 2. Ought the verb to be singular here?

If I were to have the choice of a fairy gift, it should be like none of the many things I fixed upon in my childhood, in readiness for such an occasion. It should be for a great winnowing fan, such as would, without injury to human eyes and lungs, blow away the sand which buries the monuments of Egypt. What a scene would be laid open then! One statue and sarcophagus, brought from Memphis,1 was buried one hundred and thirty feet below the mound surface. Who knows but that the greater part of old Memphis, and of other glorious cities, lies almost unharmed under the sand! Who can say what armies of sphinxes, what sentinels of colossi, might start up on the banks of the river, or come forth from the hill sides of the interior, when the cloud of sand had been wafted away!

The ruins which we now go to study might then appear occupying only eminences, while below might be ranges of pylons, miles of colonnade, temples intact, and gods and goddesses safe in their sanctuaries. What quays along the Nile, and the banks of forgotten canals! What terraces, and flights of wide shallow steps! What architectural stages might we not find for a thousand miles along the river where now the orange sands lie so smooth and light as to show the track,-the clear foot-print-of every beetle that comes out to bask in the sun! But it is better as it is. If we could once blow away the sand, to discover the temples and palaces, we should next want to rend the rocks, to lay open the tombs; and heaven knows what this would set us wishing further. It is best as it is; for the time has not come for the full discovery of the treasures of Egypt.

It is best as it is. The sand is a fine means of preservation;

and the present inhabitants perpetuate enough of the names to serve for guidance when the day for exploration shall come. The minds of scholars are preparing for an intelligent interpretation of what a future age may find; and science, chemical and mechanical, will probably supply such means hereafter as we have not now, for treating and removing the sand, when its conservative office has lasted long enough. We are not worthy yet of this great unveiling; and the inhabitants are not, from their ignorance, trustworthy as spectators.

It is better that the world should wait, if only care be taken that the memory of no site now known be lost. True as I feel it to be that we had better wait, I was for ever catching myself in a speculation, not only on the buried treasures of the mounds on shore, but on means for managing this obstinate sand.

And yet, vexatious as is its presence in many a daily scene, this sand has a bright side to its character,-like everything else. Besides its great office of preserving unharmed for a future age the records of the oldest times known to man, the sand of the desert has, for many thousand years, shared equally with the Nile the function of determining the character and the destiny of a whole people, who have again operated powerfully on the characters and destiny of other nations.

Everywhere, the minds and fortunes of human races are mainly determined by the_characteristics of the soil on which they are born and reared. In our own small island, there are, as it were, three tribes of people, whose lives are much determined still, in spite of all modern facilities for intercourse, by the circumstance of their being born and reared on the mineral strip to the west,-the pastoral strip in the middle,- -or the eastern agricultural portion. The Welsh and Cornwall miners are as widely different from the Lincolnshire or Kentish husbandmen, and the Leicestershire herdsmen, as Englishmen can be from Englishmen. Not only their physical training is different; their intellectual faculties are differently exercised, and their moral ideas and habits vary accordingly.3

So it is in every country where there is a diversity of geological formation: and nowhere is the original constitution of their earth so strikingly influential on the character of its inhabitants as in Egypt. There everything depends—life itself, and all that it includes on the state of the unintermitting conflict between the Nile and the Desert. The world has seen many struggles; but no other so pertinacious, so perdurable, and so sublime as the conflict of these two great powers. The Nile, ever young, because perpetually renewing its youth, appears to the inexperienced eye to have no chance with its stripling force, against the great old