Halifax. But she twined round him only, so faithful was she; 'Twas winter I saw them, 'mid trouble and strife, The arms of the warrior were bared for the fight; For whirlwinds rush'd o'er him, and storms in their might; Tho' the whirlwind was sudden, and lengthen'd the blast. Then the frost, like a serpent, stole after the storm, But the ivy her mantle threw over his form; His branches the snow and the icicle bore, Yet the blight of the winter-wind touch'd not his core. Again I beheld them, the storm-cloud was nigh, The elm stands beside her in beauty and pride, Say, will she embrace him, once more be a bride? She has bloom'd, she will fade, she will perish with him ; But the bride and the bridegroom, alas ! where are they? CHATTERTON'S ELINOURE AND JUGA. ON Rudborn's bank two pining maidens sate, Each one lamenting for her absent mate, Who at St. Alban's shook the murdering spear: The nut-brown Elinoure to Juga fair Did speak awhile, with languishment of eyne, Like drops of pearly dew glisten'd the quivering brine. ELINOURE. O! gentle Juga, hear my last complaint ! To fight for York my love is deck'd in steel; W. C. JUGA. Sisters in sorrow, on this daisied bank, Whose ghastly ruins hold the train of fright, Where boding ravens croak, and owlets wake the night. No more the bag-pipe shall awake the morn, The minstrel-dance, good cheer, and morris-play, ELINOURE. Ah! woe lamenting words; what words can shew: To know or whether we must wail again, Or with our fallen knights be mingled on the plain. So saying, like two lightening-blasted trees, Or twain of clouds that holdeth stormy rain; They moved gently o'er the dewy mees; To where St. Alban's holy shrines remain : There did they find that both their knights were slain ; Shriek'd their death-boding knell, sunk in the waves and 'died. NOTE. We copy the above beautiful and pathetic Elegy from the "Town and Country Magazine, 1769." As it has not found a place in any of the popular collections of "Beauties or Specimens of the English Poets," it may be properly admitted into the Magazine of the I. O. Fs. for 1848. Knox, Hazlitt, and others, describe (the latter somewhat disparingly) several of his poems; but this has been passed over, although it breathes the true spirit of the olden minstrelsy. Surely there is more remaining of this "unfortunate boy," than the golden slippers of him, who did nothing remarkable but destroy himself, and leave only them behind him to tell his story. The volume before-mentioned contains several pieces from Chatterton, under various signatures, dated Bristol. R. FOUR DISTINCT CREATIONS OF ANIMALS. The application of the laws of comparative anatomy to the study of fossil bones, may be regarded as the grand discovery of Cuvier. As in the case of every remarkable accession to science, preceding authors had made some progress in the same field of research. Towards the end of the sixteenth century Bernard Pallissy had ventured, in opposition to the universal opinion, to maintain that fossil bones, impressions of plants, and fossil shells, were not freaks of nature, but the remains of real animals and plants. Scilla and Leibnitz maintained the same doctrine; but the first great step was taken by Pallas, who, in his memoir on the Fossil Bones of Siberia, published in 1769, established the important fact that the elephant, the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus, animals which inhabit only the torrid zone, must have formerly dwelt in the most northern regions of the world. The same illustrious naturalist subsequently described a rhinoceros which had been found entire in frozen ground, with its very skin and its flesh preserved; and at a later period, in 1806, an elephant was discovered on the shore of the icy sea, and in a state of such preservation that the very dogs and bears devoured its flesh. This last discovery overthrew the theory of Buffon, that the earth had cooled gradually, and that the animals upon its surface had emigrated from the north to the south. Pallas supposed that an irruption of the sea had come from the south-east, and transported the animals of India to the north of Europe; but this hypothesis also disappeared before the discoveries of Cuvier. At the first public sitting of the National Institute, in 1796, Cuvier read his memoir "On the Species of Fossil Elephants, compared with Living Species," in which he demonstrates that the fossil elephant differs from all living species, and that it is an extinct species, now lost. He adds, that he will soon establish the same truth in reference to the fossil species of the rhinoceros, the bear, and the deer; and in the following prophetic passage he foreshadows all his future discoveries :-"May we ask why we find so many remains of unknown animals, whilst we can find none which we can rank among the species which we know? We may see how probable it is that they have all belonged to the beings of a world anterior to ours-to beings destroyed by revolutions of the earth, and to beings which have been re-placed by existing species." How startling must have been the announcement of this probability, even to the most speculative geologists of the Institute! How alarming to the most liberal and free-thinking divines! How unintelligible to ordinary minds the process which was to be employed! And to Cuvier himself, who alone understood it, how arduous must have seemed the physical labour, and how exhausting the mental toil, by which such grand conceptions were to be realised, and their reality impressed upon a prejudiced and a sceptical age ! Those who have seen the fossil deposits themselves the accumulated or scattered fragments of the bones of various species-may form some estimate of the difficulty of the process by which a single bone was to be formed out of its parts, by which two bones were to be determined to be of the same species, and a complete skeleton of each separate species re-constructed out of pieces which belonged to no other animal. Before the genius of Cuvier, however, all these difficulties vanished. Fragment sprung into union with fragment-bone claimed kindred with bone-and, as if by the wand of an enchanter, new species of animals rose up like sudden creations-exhibiting to the astonished sage the forms and the attributes of once living beings, which the eye of man had never seen, and which his wildest fancies could never have conceived. The phoenix emerging from its ashes was scarcely less a miracle than a mammoth starting from its bones, a megatherium replaced upon its legs, or a gigantic megolosaurus resuscitated from its antideluvian bed. After mentioning how the various exuviæ of a former age were accumulated in the cabinets of Paris, Cuvier thus describes his occupation in restoring them :--"I at length found myself, as if placed in a charnel-house, surrounded by mutilated fragments of many hundred skeletons of more than twenty kinds of animals, piled confusedly around me. The task assigned to me was to restore them all to their origina positions. At the voice of comparative anatomy, every bone and fragment of a bone resumed its place. I cannot find words to express the pleasure I experienced in see • VOL. 10-No. 1-L. ing, as I discovered one character, how all the consequences I predicted from it were successively confirmed: the feet were found in accordance with the characters announced by the teeth; the teeth in harmony with those indicated beforehand by the feet. The bones of the legs and thighs, and every connecting portion of the extremities, were found set together precisely as I had arranged them before my conjectures were verified by the discovery of the parts entire. In short, each species was, as it were, re-constructed from a single one of its component elements." In this manner did Cuvier re-establish 168 vertebrated animals, which form fifty distinct genera, of which fifteen are entirely new; and, reckoning the additions which have since been made, there is reason to believe that the species of extinct animals are more numerous than the living ones. But Cuvier carried his generalization still farther. He found that the differences of structure between fossil and recent animals increase with the age of the deposit in which the former are found, and that these differences mark the age of the deposits themselves. As the primitive rocks exibit no traces of plants or animals, he concluded that there was a time when no living beings existed upon the earth; and that, before the creation of man, the world had been inhabited by at least three different generations of animals, which had been successively created, and successively destroyed. In the earliest age of the creation, plants and animals are found in the same strata; and it can scarcely be doubted that vegetable bodies had preceded the creation of the animals that were to devour them. The stately pine, the gigantic equisetaceæ, and the lofty palm waved in the primeval forests, and the sea and the land were inhabited only by a small number of the marine mammalia, and scarcely any of the terrestrial mammalia. The principal inhabitants of the globe were fishes, molluscous animals, and a race of reptiles not less extraordinary by the singularity of their structure than by their gigantic proportions. These reptiles were the Megalosaurus, upwards of seventy feet long; the Ichthyosaurus, above thirty feet in length; the Plesiosaurus, an animal combining the trunk of an ordinary quadruped, with a neck like the body of a serpent, the head of a lizard, the teeth of a crocodile, and the paddles of a whale; and the Pterodactyle, the most extraordinary of extinct animals, uniting the characters of a bird, a bat, a reptile, and a quadruped. In the second period the terrestrial mammalia increase in number, and we have along with them numerous Pachydermata, or animals with thick skins, such as the Paleotherium and Anoplotherium, and other genera of aquatic animals, which dwelt on the margin of lakes and rivers. In the first of these extinct genera the species vary in size, from the rhinoceros to the hog. In the second, one of the species resembles a dwarf ass, with a broad tail like that of the otter; another has the light and elegant aspect of the gazel; and a fourth is only the size of the hare. These and other species, nearly fifty in number, were discovered by Cuvier in the fresh water formations of Montmartre, near Paris. In the third period lived the Mammoth, the Mastodon, the Hippopotamus, and those hugh Sloths, the Megatherium and the Megalonyx, the giants of the natural world, the grandest and the last specimens of that extraordinary population over which man never swayed the sceptre. Among these various races of living beings, no quadrumanous animal, no ape, has been found; and, what is more instructive still, no traces of man-no fragment, either of his works or of his bones, has yet been discovered. Hence we arrive at the remarkable result, that these three periods have been succeeded by a fourth, in which the Almighty planted man upon the earth, and created, as his subjects and his servants, those races of living beings which occupy the surface of our globe, and inhabit the depths of its oceans. The period of the mammoth and the mastodon was succeeded by that of the lion and the tiger. But not only has Cuvier referred these various animals to different periods of time, deduced from the strata in which their bones have been deposited, he has proved, by an accurate comparison of the bones of one period with those of another, that the animals of any given period were not descended by natural birth from those of the preceding period, but were new creations, fresh from the hand of their Maker. Hence he deduced the extraordinary result, that the creatures of each successive period had been destroyed by some sudden catastrophe; and that the earth, thus FOUR DISTINCT CREATIONS OF ANIMALS. 43 swept of its animal life, was again re-peopled by new races of beings, rising in the scale of creation, and terminating in intellectual and immortal man. The brief history of animal life is pregnant with the deepest and most varied instruction. In his ignorance of the real phenomena of the subterranean world, the philosopher had concluded, and concluded justly, that in the physical aspect of the globe there was "no appearance of a beginning and no prospect of an end;" but this gloomy dogma, tipped with atheism at each of its extremities, is, like all its kindred propositions, now exploded for ever. The records of faith now stand on the same level with the records of reason. Truth, brought down from on high, harmonizes with truth excavated from below; and the humble Christian who refused to surrender his cherished volume to the taunts of reason, now holds it with a firmer grasp, and scans the series of creations which science has revealed, but as the harbinger of that latest exercise of divine power which gave birth to man, and placed him over a new animal world. But the confirmation of the Mosaic account of the creation is not the only, or even the chief, result of geological discovery. The commencement of organic life in plants and animals of the first period, and its higher and progressive development in different orders of beings leads us back to that beginning which was so long veiled from human reason; while the successive destruction of successive creations carries us forward to the terminus of our own period-to that "day of the Lord, when the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, and the earth also, and the works which are therein, shall be burned up." Although the same inspired writer, who thus predicts the final destruction of the existing world, has assured us that this dread catastrophe shall be followed by a new heaven, and a new earth; yet it has been left to our reason alone to draw the conclusion, that new forms of animal life will adorn the valleys of our renovated globe; that the lion, which lies down with the lamb, will not be the offspring of our forest king; and that the sainted race, among whom there is to be no more weeping, and no more death, will not share the tenancy of their sinless abodes with those ferocious natures, which, in a state of trial, God requires for his agents, and man for his slaves. Should this, the apparently last period of animal life, be one in which man is to exercise his faculties in the investigation of his Maker's works, the fossil geology of the world we now inhabit will exhibit deposits not less interesting than those which embosom the gigantic framework of mammoths and mastodons. How interesting will be the excavations in which the buried cities of modern Europe will re-appear in their ruined grandeur; how strange the discovery of submerged navies embalmed in their ocean beds; or the foundered ship, with its imprisoned skeletons; or the battlefield, with its prostrate warriors; or the hallowed cemetery, crowded with the relics of youth and age, and crushed beneath their tablets of marble, and their monuments of bronze.-North British Review. PROVERBS. Although proverbs are saws, I think it will be admitted that they ought not to be see-saws, or saws which cut both ways, and (as far as they are rules of human life) lay down clashing principles, and lead to conflicting lines of conduct. Although all men are not stuffed with proverbs like Panza the First, King of Barataria, most men have a few favourite ones, and are considerably, though sometimes unconsciously, influenced by them. Care should therefore be taken in framing a code of morality or prudence out of these antique materials, that its laws should be rather more distinct and consistent with each other than the laws of England. Saws that cut both ways are not wise saws; at least some understanding ought to be come to as to which side of the maxim the truth is to be found at. Let us begin our illustrations with "Out of the frying-pan into the fire," which originated, we must suppose, in certain foolish eels, who, with all their experience of |