curiosity, or stimulated by the love of science and a desire to increase' the stores of knowledge and the resources of philanthropy, will find his labour rewarded and his wishes fulfilled.

Our space will at present only allow us to refer the reader for fuller information to works published on this subject. Whilst France and Germany possessed works of magnitude and importance on the science of Hygiène, England, until very recently, had not produced the smallest essay on this interesting and useful branch of knowledge. Lately however has appeared, on one division of the subject, Statistics, the useful little work of Dr. Hawkins, the tables of mortality and census, &c. published by authority of Government. Yet more recently, a medical gentleman, Mr. Belinaye, has undertaken an epitome of Hygiène.* Contrary to the saying, "Que l'auteur se tue à allonger, ce que le lecteur se tue à abréger," this gentleman has brought a most comprehensive elementary view of Hygiène within the limits of a very small volume. In truth, the chief fault we can find is its brevity, although he compensates for it in some degree by the condensation of facts, and by numerous references to foreign authorities.

As this little work is amusing-the author having seemed to opine that now-a-days philosophy no longer requires the recommendation of obscure technicalities and tedious verbosity, any more than the physician does those of a long face, bag wig and gold-headed canewe trust it will recommend to general notice the science in question. Certainly no events could be more calculated than the present to awaken us to the full value of the study of public health, a study hitherto so unaccountably neglected here. A most serious plague seems destined to overrun the whole of Europe, and perhaps to establish itself permanently among us. It has baffled the efforts of individual knowledge, and has even assumed a degree of political importance, not only by its influence on population, but by presenting an impediment to commercial speculations, warlike enterprises and the projects of cabinets and kings, as well as by affecting public credit and exciting discontent and insurrection among the ignorant classes of society. Against this pestilence and its melancholy consequences, and to counteract other evils of a similar kind that habitually prey upon the land, the arms afforded by Hygiène should be wielded. A heavy responsibility rests with those who are invested with authority in the state, and paid for its proper exercise, if sanatory measures are neglected. Nor is Hygiène less important or less applicable in domestic privacy than in public regulations: every family, in every class of society throughout the land, may adopt its principles and be benefited by its discoveries; and a short experience will demonstrate to all the practical blessings secured by this offspring of an improved state of civilization.

The Sources of Health and Disease in Communities; or Elementary Views of Hygiène, illustrating its Importance to Legislators, Heads of Families, &c. 12mo. London. 1832.

MISCELLANEOUS LITERARY NOTICES.

No. XIX.

FRANCE.

M. Schnitzler, author of the Essai d'une Statistique Générale de l'Empire de Russie, has in the press a new work under the title of La Pologne et la Russie; Coup d'Eil sur l'Histoire de ces deux Puissances, leur longue Rivalité, leur dernière Lutte, leurs Forces respectives et la Situation politique et morale de chacune d'elles.

A translation of More's Utopia has recently appeared at Paris, with the Latin text opposite. The translation (by M. J. Vincent) may also be had

without the text.

In our next Number we hope to be able to give a list of the MSS. left by the late M. Champollion. Measures are already taken to secure their publication.

A copy of Cicero, with large margins, has been found in a library at Orleans, with more than 4000 MS. emendations by the celebrated Henry Stephens, and by another philologist, whose handwriting cannot be identified. This copy of Cicero was very probably intended to serve as the basis of the new edition of the complete works of Cicero, of which Stephens speaks in the preface to his book intitled Castigationes in quamplurimos locos Ciceronis, but which never saw the light. Fifteen hundred francs have been offered for the copy, but the proprietor asks 2400, of which he intends to present 200 to the hospital of Lyons, where Stephens ended his days.

A new penny journal, intitled Le Bon Sens, has been commenced at Paris, under the auspices of Messrs. Laffitte, Odilon Barrot, and Arago, and will be continued every Sunday. The pens, as well as the purses, of these distinguished individuals, will be employed in its support. Good sense, above all

other qualities of the intellect, appears to be that which at present is least common and most wanted in France, both by rulers and ruled, and no means are so proper for dispelling the delusions of the latter, as the diffusion of cheap knowledge among them by men of such acknowledged talent and experience as those we have just enumerated.

The Protestants of Paris have just lost M. Marron, President of the Consistory of the Reformed Church of Paris, and for fifty years a pastor of that city. His death will be severely felt by the Protestants of Paris, as well as by the inhabitants in general, who have long venerated the virtues and the character of this venerable man. In him religion has lost a truly evangelical minister; and the Protestants of the capital will never forget the services, for a long time gratuitous, of the founder of the church in Paris. In the stormiest times of the Revolution, and in various circumstances, he represented, with honour, the church confided to him. Literature, and particularly classical literature, has lost in him a writer of cultivated taste, a graceful and elegant poet, and a scholar of varied and profound attainments. His conversational powers

will long be missed by an extensive literary circle, but his friends alone can estimate the loss they have sustained as regards the virtues of private life and the affectionate intercourse of the heart.

Courtin's Encyclopédie Moderne, or Dictionnaire Abrégé des Sciences, des Lettres et des Arts, &c. is now completed in 24 vols. 8vo. The last volume contains a systematic view of human knowledge, and the celebrated Klaproth has communicated a curious essay on General Grammar, accompanied with plates of various alphabets. The publisher intends to publish occasional supplements, in order that the work may be a constant source of reference as to the actual state of knowledge.

An interesting picture of the present state of Greece and of Greek literature has recently appeared, by à M. Fenger, a Dane, who travelled through Greece in 1831.

Victor Hugo has just finished a new drama, but the subject, and even the title, are still unknown.

M. Biot is well known to have written the elaborate and valuable Life of Sir Isaac Newton, which appeared in the Biographie Universelle. The derangement of mind under which M. Biot thinks he has discovered that Sir Isaac laboured at one period of his life, and the view taken of this by some foreign philosophers, is well known to have excited a good deal of controversy, and has been refuted at some length by Dr. Brewster in his Life of Sir Isaac, From a new number of the Journal des Savans, which we have just received, we perceive that M. Biot has inserted in it the first part of a Review of Dr. Brewster's work: when the whole is finished we may probably return to the subject, and to the result of M. Biot's criticisms.

Necrology.-CUVIER, the great naturalist, has himself paid the debt of nature since our last, after a life devoted to science with an unwearied application and a success exceeded by none in modern times. He was born at Montbelliard in 1769, a year which gave birth to so many remarkable men-a Napoleon-a Chateaubriand-a Wellington-a Humboldt, &c. and his first discoveries were on the Mollusca, and shook to its base the Zoological classification which then universally prevailed. Invited to Paris to fill the place of Professor of Comparative Anatomy at the Jardin des Plantes, his lectures speedily drew crowds around him, attracted by his popular eloquence and lucid arrangement. His next work, Leçons d'Anatomie Comparée, published in 5 vols. 8vo. 1805, was rewarded by the Institute with the decennial prize for the work which had contributed the most to our knowledge of the Natural Sciences during that period. At the same period he published a series of Memoirs on the Anatomy of the Mollusca, and devoted his attention to a detailed examination of the fossil remains of the bones of mammiferous animals; he particularly examined the numerous fossils in the environs of Paris, assisted in the geological part of his task by his friend M. A. Brongniart. The sagacity and accuracy which M. Cuvier displayed in the examination of fossil bones, raised this branch of inquiry to the dignity of a perfectly new science, which has thrown a powerful light on geology, and directed it into a more philosophical route. A number of works and of elaborate memoirs published since by various naturalists, have shown the prodigious influence which the labours of Cuvier have exercised on the study of Geology, of the Animal Kingdom, and even of Fossil Botany. M. Cuvier amused himself during these laborious works by particular

researches which would alone have been sufficient to have distinguished any other man, such as his five Memoirs on the Voice of Birds, on Crocodiles, and on numerous subjects of Zoology; such also as his descriptions of the Living Animals in the Menagerie, &c. In all his works, even to the minutest details, we discover the same luminous, clear, and methodical mind, and the sagacity which characterized him. Feeling the want of a work which should present a general view of his ideas on Zoological classification, he published in 1817 his work entitled Le Règne Animal distribué d'après son Organisation, in 4 vols. 8vo. which speedily became the text-book of all Zoological students. When employed on this work he felt how far in arrear of the other branches of Zoology was that which respects the class of fish, and saw how much difficulty had accumulated in it, as well from our ignorance of the anatomy of these animals, and the impossibily of determining with precision the laws of their comparative organisation, as from the want of large collections, and perhaps also from the too artificial spirit which had hitherto prevailed in Ichthyology. He employed his influence to form a collection in the Paris Museum of specimens of fish from all parts of the world, and was so successful in his endeavours that the number of specimens, which at first scarcely amounted to 1000, in a few years amounted to 6000. Of these he dissected a large portion with a care hitherto unknown, having the advantage of an able associate in the study of the details in M. Valenciennes; he was thus enabled in a period of time that may be called short, looking to the extent of the results, to collect the materials of his great Histoire Naturelle des Poissons, of which eight volumes have appeared, with their appropriate plates, and for the continuation of which we have to look to his laborious assistant. The recent embarrassment among the Paris publishers having occasioned a stoppage in the progress of this work, M. Cuvier availed himself of this (as the part prepared for the press was already in advance of the printer) to make preparations for republishing his Leçons d'Anatomie Comparée, of which a second edition had been long anxiously called for. This design, however, he was not permitted to complete; but it is to be hoped that we shall not be long deprived of the edition he had contemplated, and that it will be accompanied with those beautiful and accurate plates on which he had bestowed so much pains, and in the execution of which he himself excelled; for he was a skilful draftsman, and seized external forms with rapidity and accuracy, and possessed the art of representing in his drawings the forms of organic tissues in a style peculiar to himself. His last course of lectures, on the History of the Natural Sciences, and on the Philosophy of Natural History, delivered at the College of France, is now publishing in livraisons, and will extend to three or four vols. 8vo. This work, however, we believe, has been published without his consent or revision. His memory was prodigious, and he scarcely knew what it was to forget anything. Although his great powers were more particularly devoted to Natural History, no part of science was a stranger to him, and his taste for literature and works of imagination was particularly refined and elegant. In his Eloges of Illustrious Men, delivered in his capacity of Perpetual Secretary of the Academy of Sciences, he always displays the utmost impartiality and love of truth; he never debased the dignity of science by any love of intrigue, and displayed the utmost disinterestedness in his efforts to promote science. The qualities of his heart were not less estimable than those of his head, and he possessed the happy art of inspiring his friends with an unalterable attachment. His conversation was varied and animated, adapted by turns to every subject, and he may truly be said to have been the grace and ornament of society. We must not forget the great services he rendered to public education as head of the University; his Report on the State of Primary Education in Holland

is a lasting monument of his solicitude for the education of the people, and all those who have observed his conduct with regard to the higher branches of education, know how constantly his influence was directed to favour their progress and to remove obstacles. In other departments of the civil service into which he was successively called, as Master of Requests, Counsellor of State, President of the Section of the Interior, Director of Protestant Worship, (for he was an enlightened and liberal Protestant, and watched over the interests of his co-religionists with constant solicitude,) and at last as a Peer of France-in all these he displayed the same superiority of talent. The office of Censor of the Press, which was offered to him, he, to his eternal honour, refused. Such was the man whose loss the world has now to deplore; but the mind that traced her age and history-in the wrecks of ages dug from her bosom-will live for ever in his works to enlighten and instruct mankind.

Count Chaptal, the celebrated writer on Chemistry and on various other practical branches of the Arts and Sciences, died at Paris in the beginning of August. He was born at Nosaret in 1756. We subjoin a list of the most important of his valuable and numerous works:-Elémens de Chimie. 3 vols. 8vo. The first edition appeared in 1790, and the fourth in 1803.-Traité sur le Salpètre. 8vo. 1796.-Essai sur le perfectionnement des Arts chimiques en France. 8vo. 1800.-Art de faire, de gouverner et de perfectionner les Vins. 1 vol. 8vo. First edition 1801, second edition 1819.-Traité théorique et pratique sur la culture de la Vigne, avec l'Art de faire le Vin, les Eaux de vie, Esprit de vins et Vinargres. 2 vols. 8vo. First edition 1801, second edition 1811.-Essai sur le Blanchiment. 1801.-Chimie appliquée aux Arts. 4 vols. 8vo. 1807.-Art de la Teinture du Coton en rouge. 8vo. 1807.-Art du Teinturier et du Dégraisseur. 8vo. 1800.-De l'Industrie Française. 2 vols. 8vo. 1819.-Memoire sur le Sucre de Betteraves. 8vo. Third edition 1819.Chimie appliquée à l'Agriculture. 2 vols. 8vo. 1823.

one.

Portal, the celebrated physician, died in July at the advanced age of ninetyHis Histoire de l'Anatomie et de la Chirurgie will always be regarded as a valuable work, and his Cours d'Anatomie Medicale may still be consulted with advantage; but his chief merit in the eyes of posterity will be his efforts for rendering the study of anatomy popular in France.

Brué, Geographer to the King, and Member of the Geographical Societies of Paris and London, died of the cholera on July 16, at the age of forty-six. His maps are the most esteemed of those by modern French artists. He spared neither pains nor expense to perfect himself in his profession, having made many voyages to Africa and other parts. His plan of an Universal Atlas, which should constantly keep pace with the progress of discovery, by the successive appearance of new maps to replace the old ones, was a truly disinterested scheme; the speculation, as was feared, turned out a bad one; but the Atlas, as a whole, is the best now to be had in France, and the fittest for the purposes of education. It was his intention to publish a new Map of Africa, with all the latest discoveries. The Map which accompanied Douville's Voyage is the last production of the deceased and lamented geographer.