with them. It deserves inquiry whether these remaining portions have been preserved, or whether the French editor has wrongly interpreted the words of Mr. Stanley.

From the succeeding Fragments of Literary Travels in Italy, we shall transcribe a few passages:

• In the Belvedere, the statue of Apollo presents itself to admiration. The left arm from the elbow is modern, but has four fingers antique. The legs, which were broken, are well restored. The right hand is modern. On the side of the left thigh, the remains of a holdfast are visible. Parts of the drapery are modern, and also of the great toes. There are no eyeballs. On the head of the serpent, an excrescence may be perceived, resembling a beetle. It is perhaps the symbol or mark of the statuary.

• The Laocoon, also, has no eyeballs: it has been more injured than the Apollo. The child on the right was carved from the same original block: that on the left could not have been attached without the serpents. Part of the lower serpent which enfolds the child, and which meets a fold from the thigh of Laocoon, does not exactly join. The connection is made out with broken fragments, but is not well indicated; and it seems an extremity of a hewn serpent supported behind on a part of that which is attached to the thigh of Laocoon. The upper part is full of breaks and modern accommodations. All the three figures have been finished with the mallet, and the strokes of the chizel are still apparent. The right arm, part of the main serpent, the toes of the left foot, the head of the serpent which is biting Laocoon, the toes of the right foot, the hand and part of the arm of the left child, the caps of both the children, their noses, and the whole pediment or support, except in front, are modern, and have been restored. Under the right shoulder of the Laocoon is a mark, apparently intended for that of the bite of the serpent. It is thicker than it ought to have been to prop the tail, and (as is singular) the head, which has the same dimensions as this wound, is placed on the other side: yet it seems strange that the two heads should have been intended for the same side.

• On the 8th October 1756 I had an opportunity of examining, contiguously, the Transfiguration, which was copying in mosaic for Saint Peter's. The two figures above, besides the mystery, represent Saint Lorenzo and Saint Julio; and as this picture was bought by the Medici, after the death of Rafael, and given by them to the church where it now hangs, it may be suspected that Lorenzo and Julio dei Medici got their patron-saints added by Julio Romano or some other of Rafael's pupils. The painter, who was copying it, told me that he perceived some difference in the touches.'

These itinerary-fragments are succeeded by a dissertation on Mexican paintings; by instructions to M. Dombey on his setting out for Peru; by a memoir on the preservation of public monuments; by an attack on the early history of Rome, conducted with Lucianic pleasantry; by various skilful disquisitions in numismatics, which form the most valuable part of

the whole collection; and by several private letters, of a literary cast. A separate edition of his Memoirs, published by the Academy of Inscriptions, may be expected.

ART. XI. Essai sur P Histoire de l'Espèce humaine; i. e. Essay on the History of the Human Species. By C. A. WALCKENAER. 8vo. pp. 422. Paris, 1798. Imported by De Boffe, London. Price 6s.

S INCE the philosophers of the continent have agreed to regard the Chaldaic cosmogony rather as mythic allegory than as historic document, attempts have been frequent among them, by comparing the manners of rude nations and tracing the progress of infant societies, to infer by analogy a probable early history of the human race; and to erect, on the basis of deduction from observation and experience, a new cosmogony of reason, and a probable theory of the incipient condition of man. Some writers have supposed four originally distinct races of men, a white, a yellow, a black, and a red, to have been severally placed by the Creator on Caucasus, Imaus, Atlas, and Andes, the nucleus-mountains of those great continents, which have slowly grown out of the ocean. Others suppose the human animal to have been less the product of a plastic force exerted at some specific period, than a late result of very gradual modification, a slow transformation by time and circumstance of some sea-monkey, first amphibious and then terrestrial. To these unsupported speculations concerning primæval population, M. WALCKENAER scarcely ascends; he takes the unfeathered biped in a state of scanty dispersion among the other beasts of the field, and traces his progress from savagism to barbarism, to civilization and to corruption He ranks the human species among the gregarious animals; and he attributes to an innate, instinctive, or occult propensity, (p. 18,) the sentiment of pleasure which man experiences on approaching a being similar to himself. This inclination to breathe in company, to conspire, which in the human animal is by no means self-evident, is advanced by our author to the rank of an axiom, and is assumed as the essential cause of gregarious manners or social living. Sympathy, as defined by Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, is also con

* There is no convenient name for that stage in the life of nations, which succeeds to the acme of refinement; when a selfish profligacy supersedes the liberal virtues, when purity of taste ceases, and the bloom of art withers; a stage sometimes spent in the heedless tranquillity of superstition and cowardice, sometimes in the convulsive agonies of civil discord.

sidered as an instinctive quality by our author, and is apphed to account for the phenomena of progressive civilization. These are divided into six principal periods.

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The first comprehends those times in which human societies find, in the spontaneous productions of the soil, a sufficient supply, and subsist without labour.

• The second comprehends those times in which human societies, either from their own multiplication or from the occasional sterility of the surrounding region, do not find sufficient means of subsistence, but begin to recur to hunting and fishing, and to reciprocal hostility, for the satisfaction of their hunger..

• The third comprehends those times in which the art of taming certain animals has been discovered; and when the rearing of flocks and herds becomes a certain source of plentiful nourishment.

The fourth comprehends those times in which the labour of subject-animals is applied to the culture of the soil, and to the transport of rude commodities: but in which, division or distribution of labour is as yet unknown.

• In the fifth period of human societies, the division, distribution, or appropriation of labour is established, and the consequent separation of professions: the arts and sciences improve; commerce extends; manufactures multiply; luxury arises; and soon a nation, arrived at a high degree of prosperity, finds in the very circumstances which elevated it the causes of its decline and fall.

• In the sixth and last period of the history of nations, those causes are at work which modify, accelerate, or retard their declension.'

The preliminary matter occupies one book, and the discussion of each of these six periods employs one book also; so that the whole work is divided into seven books, which are again subdivided into sections or chapters. So much has been written concerning nations in the hunter-state, and in the grazier-state, that nothing very new or very interesting was to be expected from a repetition of the leading facts collected concerning the manners of the Nigritians and Canadans, of the Tartars and Chiliese. A relapse into these primitive conditions threatens no European society. If fixed property has been attacked by modern philosophers, it is for the purpose of confiscating rentals to the profit of the state, or of distribut ing more equally the produce of the soil; not for the purpose of abolishing the occupations of agriculture, and of favouring the resumption of wandering habits. Our farms may be parcelled, like those of China, into occupancies for gardeners, but they will not be consolidated into pasturages for a horde. It is in the antient laws of Hindostan that we must study our future fortunes; not in the laws of the Visigoths, nor in the con stitution of the Oneida-nation. Destiny prohibits retrogressiom The Palmyrenes do not grow wilder, and become wandering Arabs.

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Arabs. Nature annihilates the people, whose country she intends for her undegenerate offspring.

It was more natural to seek for interesting suggestions, and for practically applicable observations, in those parts of this essay that discuss the stages of civil society which we have but recently passed, which we are actually passing, or which we are immediately approaching.

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• The progress of commerce, manufactures, and art, (says our author, p. 293,) is more fatal to aristocratic forms of government than to any other. If a country be large, rich, and populous, there will arise, in the very midst of those who share the sovereign power, factions of men who, from being entrusted with the management of the public force and revenue, will arrogate an oligarchic right clusive possession, and disdain to divide the sway with their colleagues. If a country be small, poor, and ill-peopled, the public force and revenue will not form a sufficient power for the nobles, by its means, to retain in obedience or servitude the industrious class of a nation. The richer and leading persons of this class, whose influence on the whole mass of the people augments every day with the general prosperity, will at length subvert the authority of the nobles, and introduce a more democratic form of constitution, which is most favourable to the influence of personal opulence. Even if a country be of moderate extent, and therefore favourable to government by the few; yet, as the authority of nobles ever diminishes with the progress of luxury, while the wealth and consequently the effective independence of the industrious classes increase in the same proportion, the former will find it necessary, by degrees, to resign their exclusive privileges in order to avoid being stripped of them; and thus to bend their government daily more and more towards democracy. In this period, therefore, aristocracy can only be maintained by violent means; or by innovations which open, to all those who are powerful among the people, a liberal access to the public dignities and the seat of power."

The xixth chapter of the vith book characterises the probable state of science in the fifth period or stage of society:

• The sciences now march with giant strides, and lend mutual aid : -but men are often seen to permit their imaginations to reduce the sciences to system, and thus to distance them from their proper orbit. The mathematical sciences alone are not exposed to this aberration. The men who cultivate all the others, forsaking the rugged paths of observation and experience, strike out into the labyrinthic paths of hypothesis and fiction. Proud of their vain reveries, forgetful of the limits of their intellect, they will attempt to rend the impenetrable veil which covers first causes. Every man of genius will have his own system: each system will have its set of abettors: there will be as many sects as there are opinions concerning the creation of the world, the nature of man, and the sources of happiness.

• Disputes will, especially, arise about the fundamental principles of law, and of government. Philosophers will be seen incessantly to differ, yet to dispute with zeal:-some enslaved by interest or fear, APP. REV. VOL. XXVII.

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some fired by enthusiasm or ambition. Others, bewildered by aà sa vage misanthropy, will aspire to regulate all things by their own uncontroulable desires; forgetting the objects of society and the expediency of authority, they will reason from doubtful facts and false abstrac tions; and they will propagate their wild theories with the more success and rapidity, as these will be found to flatter the most invincible of the bad passions of human nature, envy and pride. The brilliant chimæras of delirious genius will then supply to unscrupulous ambition the means of subverting established politics, of troubling the repose of empires, and of employing the energies of fanaticism in the service of anarchy.

• But on the fall of so many dissident sects, which tear each other's entrails, that of the sceptics will be seen to thrive.

• Scepticism is the result of hostile opinions, and of philosophic systems equally affirmative. It is the dawn of true philosophy. It attaches itself to the overthrow of all systems without substituting any. It teaches man to rely, in moral and physical science, only on fact and observation. It recalls to earth philosophy from the clouds. It substitutes reasoning for the exorbitances of imagination, doubt for credulity, experience for hypothesis, and truth for error."

The author thus concludes his speculation :

• Though it be true that each state, like each individual, carties within itself the seed of dissolution, yet there is between the duration of personal and national life this radical difference: Nature has fixed the limits of the one and not of the other. Medicine has no power over the body weighed down by old age: but there is no State, however near to its annihilation, which cannot be brought back to the highest degree of vigour, prosperity, and glory, by perseverance, wisdom, valour, and knowlege; and by a deep insight into man and the causes of the rise and fall of nations. This science can best be acquired by a profound study of history, the lessons of which overstep the bounds of our personal experience, and teach us to profit by the experience of others. Every thing should engage governors to recur especially to this great fountain-head, of wisdom, never to forget that the proper study of mankind is man and that the art of rendering our fellow-creatures happy is the first, or principal, of all arts.'

This whole essay will be read with philosophic amusement and with profit: it displays, however, more information than intellect, and more soundness of judgment than originality of view.

ART. XII. Flora Atlantica. Authore RENATO DES FONTAINES 4to. Paris. 1798.

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THIS author has followed the Linnean system, in the exposition of his numerous discoveries. Four fasciculi, which are already published, and form nearly half of the work, contain 783 species; 169 of which are new; and figures of 116 of

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these