The tree, or a dead monkey, is certain to live for ever." Indians of the continent and the people at Gibraltar have the same piece of folk lore about dead monkeys. With the elephants in Ceylon the same is to be observed: the Singhalese assert that the dead body of one is seldom or never to be discovered in the woods; and English and Singhalese who have frequented the forest agree in declaring that they have never found the remains of an elephant that had died a natural death. The natives account for this by declaring that the herd bury the bodies of their dead companions; and there seems some evidence that when dead bodies have been left in a corral, they are removed in a way which would appear to be attributable to no other agency than that of the herd entering the enclosure after it has been left by the hunters. The Singhalese have further the belief-a beautiful notion if nothing more, of which our author finds evidence in the story of Sinbad the Sailor-that there is some spot to which the elephants come to die. The spot, however, is so mysteriously concealed that no one has ever penetrated to it; one of the natives seems to have asserted it to be far away in the north, near the ruined city of Anarajapoora, another amongst the mountains to the east of Adam's Peak: in fact, nobody but Sinbad seems ever to have been there. We have all heard the saying about nobody's ever having seen a dead donkey, and the witty reason that is given for itbecause they live so long; but we never expected to see such a reason gravely adduced in such a book as that before us. But our author, after having spoken of the age to which elephants are supposed to live, goes on to say, "it is perhaps from this popular belief of their almost illimitable age that the natives generally assert that the body of a dead elephant is seldom or never to be discovered in the woods." This is too bad. The natives, as we have seen, give two very sufficient reasons for their belief; and why in the world should they have foisted upon them such an Irish reason which they themselves never hint at? and this, too, when no one even suggests that the Singhalese are emigrants from Miletus. Snake-charming has been apparently, ever since scriptural times, one of the peculiarities and one of the mysteries of the East. If there be any magical influence by which it is accomplished, it is perhaps only to be attained by the solemn and mystical nature of the oriental; but there is reason to believe that it merely consists, as our author supposes, in taking skilful advantage of the timidity of the snake. When he tells us, moreover, that the poisonous cobra di Vol. ii. p. 398. + Ibid. capello may be rendered so tame as to be used as watch-dogs are in this country, to protect property, without danger to its owner, we may almost infer that a process of taming may be all that is necessary for the purpose of the supposed charmer. Doubtless many of our readers remember the Arab snakecharmer, whose feats at the Zoological Gardens in the Regent's Park attracted some notice a few years ago; these, which were somewhat disappointing from their monotony and the calm grace with which they were performed (giving more the idea of a piece of elaborate clock-work than of the motions of living figures), seemed much like the result of mere taming; but perhaps this was scarcely a fair specimen of the art. The danger to be apprehended from snakes does not seem to be great in Ceylon; as Sir Emerson Tennent considers that there are but few poisonous reptiles in the country, and that even these are so fearful of man that by warning them of your approach, as the natives do, by means of a slight noise, the probability of receiving a wound from one of them is very small. Even this event, however, is not considered fatal by the Singhalese, who carry about their persons a "snake-stone," as it is called, to whose efficacy our author bears witness; though neither he nor Professor Faraday, to whose experiments he submitted it, can explain the way in which it is rendered so porous as instantly to absorb the infected blood, and thus draw it from the wound. It is said that the secret of the manufacture of these snake-stones is possessed by the monks of Manilla, whence they are imported to India. The substance of which they are made is light, black, and porous, and resembles charred bone. The great heat of Ceylon has enabled Sir Emerson Tennent to observe and contribute many facts which show that in tropical countries the sun burns frore, and that great heat produces both on animal and vegetable life similar effects to great cold. English fruit-trees have been introduced into Ceylon, but with a result which illustrates forcibly the need to the plants of our climate of the profound and deathlike repose of our winter; for the peaches, cherries, and other European fruit-trees, which grow freely in certain parts of the island, not only become evergreens, but, wanting the winter and exhausted by a perpetual summer, they refuse to ripen their fruit; the trees have, as our gardeners would say, no time to rest. In the case of the vine, however, this rest has been successfully supplied by Mr. Dyke, the government agent at Jaffna, by baring the roots and exposing them to the sun about the time of pruning in July. This exposure to the heat produced the beneficial effect of the cold of a European winter; it arrested the circulation of the sap, gave the * Vol. i. p. 89. vines the needful rest, and the grapes, which before dropped almost unformed, are now brought to thorough maturity.* So, again, with regard to the animals of Ceylon, many of them exhibit the phenomenon known to naturalists as æstivation, being the torpor of summer as hybernation is the torpor of winter; and, as our author has shown, strikingly confirm the opinion of Dr. John Hunter, that hybernation is not an immediate consequence of cold, but is attributable to that want of food and other essentials caused by cold, and against which nature makes a provision by the suspension of her functions, and thus of the need for these otherwise essential conditions of life. The crocodiles of the Mississippi are imprisoned by frost; those of Ceylon and South America by force of the heat betake themselves to the clay beneath the subsiding waters, and there pass their time, no doubt in torpid sleep, till the rains return and arouse them to activity. The English snail retires from the winter's cold into the earth or hollows; the snails of Ceylon cover themselves in and retire to inactivity during the summer. The fish of northern regions are capable of being frozen and of again returning to life; and similarly, the fishes of Ceylon are able to bury themselves in the indurated mud, and revive to life when the rains of the monsoons again fill the tanks and pools with water. The capacity of several fish thus to bury themselves during periods of drought is well known to naturalists; but the confirmatory facts which our author has collected are both curious and valuable. In the portions of the country where small tanks are numerous, the fish are so abundant as to induce the natives to fish by the strange method of digging in the mud, "non cum hamis sed cum dolabra ire piscatum;" and Sir Emerson Tennent has figured in the present work an anabas which he procured through the agency of the Modliar of Matura, and which was taken, along with several others, from the depth of a foot and a half in the mud of a tank from which the water had dried up. Whether this capacity of certain fish to bury themselves and maintain a suspended vitality is sufficient to account for the fact of the reappearance in the tanks of full-grown fish a few days after the rains set in, or whether we must look for some other or additional explanation, seems open to question. Whatever be the cause or causes, the fact seems beyond doubt that the great reservoirs and tanks of the island are twice in every year liable to be dried up, till the mud at the bottom is turned into dust, and the clay cleft into gaping apertures; yet that within a very few days after the change in the monsoon, the waters are again peopled with full-grown fishes, and the naVol. i. p. 89; ii. p. 539. tives are busily at work catching them in their funnel-shaped baskets. The book before us often suggests the reflection, that if enlarged travel and the researches of modern science make us reject many of the tales that once found acceptance, they have, in other directions, enlarged our powers of credence; so that now we unhesitatingly take as facts many things which a few generations back would have held merely as travellers' tales, told only to enhance the interest of their narratives, or to magnify their own experiences in the eyes of stay-at-home readers. The pretty little lizards that climb about the walls of Ceylon houses, which, if seized, have the power of retreating safely home, only, like the sheep of the nursery rhyme, "leaving their tails behind them," and gradually producing a duplicate of the captured member; the musical fish (if fish they be) that make soft melody like a mermaid's singing, when the moon is at the full, in Batticaloa Bay; those that migrate over land in flocks in search of water, or stranger still, those that have been known to fall from the sky in showers; the skilful weaver-bird, which supplies his singular nest with night-lights in the shape of fire-flies jammed up against his walls in mud sconces, these, and numerous other wonders, savour so much of the marvellous that in former times they would hardly have gained credence. In these pages we have only considered Sir Emerson Tennent's work so far as it relates to the natural history of the interesting island with which, fortunately for literature and science, he was placed in official connection. But this valuable work is not less interesting in the other departments which it embraces; and we cordially recommend it to all who are anxious or willing to learn something more than is generally known of the past history and present condition of the far-famed Taprobane. ART. VII.-FRENCH FICTION: THE LOWEST DEEP. Les Mystères de Paris; Atar-Gul. Par Eugène Sue. La Dame aux Camélias; Le Demi-Monde, un drame; Le Roman d'une Femme. Par Alex. Dumas, fils. Monte-Christo. Par Alex. Dumas, père. Confessions d'un Enfant du Siècle. Par Alfred de Musset. Elle et Lui, par George Sand. Lui et Elle, par Paul de Musset. IT is hard to say whether the current politics or the current literature of France conveys the more vivid impression of utter and profound demoralisation ;-the willing servitude, the craven fear, the thirsty materialism, the absence of all liberal sentiment or noble aspiration, indicated by the one,—the abandonment of all self-control or self-respect, the surrender of all manliness, dignity, or reticence, the hunger after the most diseased, unholy, and extravagant excitement,-or the intense and unrebuked selfishness, the passionate and slavish worship of wealth and power, which is the basis and the soul of both alike. Of course there are exceptions in literature as in life. But we speak of the prevalent, the almost universal tone; we speak of the acting, voting, deciding, characterising mass in the one case, and of the books of the widest circulation, and the writers of the most popular repute and the most signal success, in the other. In politics there still exist a few men-fewer, alas, each day, as their numbers are thinned by death or by despair-the salt of the earth, but far too scanty to give it savour, the five righteous men, but not enough to save the city,-who mourn over their degradation and resent their shame, who, "rowing hard against the stream," strive manfully, and strive to the last, to warn their countrymen and to purify and rouse their country. But the national life, the political aspect of France, is undeniably what we have described it: the vast majority of the people in nearly every class, lost to all sense of personal dignity or public justice, is devoted to the pursuit of wealth and luxury, and ready to acquiesce in any régime and to worship any ruler that fosters this pursuit; and questions or kicks against despotism only when, in a momentary aberration of far-sightedness, it touches their immediate purse ;-while even the constitutionalists, as |