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not merely one of degree, but of kind. The magnetism, and to add, if that were needed, magnetism of iron and other magnetics is confirmation to the researches of Faraday. characterized by polarity, that of diamag- He has found, that by placing a glass trough netics is devoid of any trace of polarity on the poles of a powerful magnet, and fillthe particles of two bodies of the latter ing it with any fluid from which a precipiclass, when jointly under the influence of tate is slowly forming, the precipitate arthe magnetic forces, manifesting towards ranges itself in the magnetic curves; cryseach other no action whatever, either of tallization, taking place under the same cirattraction or repulsion. It has long been cumstances, exhibits also the influence of known, moreover, that the magnetism of magnetism on the molecular arrangements, iron is impaired by heat, and it has been all the crystals bending and arranging generally believed that a certain degree of themselves in the order of the magnetic heat entirely destroys this property, and curves. The experiment is beautifully that magnetics under such conditions be- shown by filling the trough with a solution come, to ordinary test and observation, non- of nitrate of silver, and placing a globule of magnetic. Closer observation has, how- mercury on the glass, equidistant from the ever, shown to the author that they are still poles of the magnet; the revived silver very different to other bodies, and that shoots out in all directions, in a very pleasthough inactive when hot, on common mag-ing arborescent form; but it maintains, in nets or to common tests, they are not so ab- a striking manner, the curvilinear tendency, solutely, but retain a certain amount of and distinctly marks out the lines of magmagnetic power whatever their tempera- netic direction. ture; and also that this power is the same in character with that which they ordinarily possess. With regard to air and gases, as yet, magnetism appears to exert no perceptible influence on them, examined and experimented on in every way-rarefied, condensed, or in their ordinary state, these bodies appear to be utterly unaffected; but the instant that vapors are reduced to the liquid or solid form, they became either magnetic or diamagnetic. But there is another curious fact as connected with air, which is, that it appears to be either magnetic or diamagnetic according to the medium in which it is suspended. Thus, if a glass tube containing air be suspended in water between the poles of the magnet, it acts as a magnetic, the water itself being a diamagnetic; if, on the contrary, the medium in which the tube is placed be a solution of sulphate of iron, of itself magnetic, the air is at once active as a diamagnetic. Thus it would appear that air and vapors hold a sort of neutral or zero point, from which branch on the one side the magnetics, on the other the diamagnetics. Thus too do these two modes of action stand in the same general antithetical relation to one another as the positive and negative conditions of electricity, the northern and southern polarities of ordinary magnetism, or the lines of electric and of magnetic force in magneto-electricity.

Before entirely quitting this subject, we cannot omit noticing a discovery recently made by Mr. Robert Hunt, which tends still further to show the universal influence of

Upon mature consideration of the remarkable difference in the action of magnetism upon bodies of the magnetic and diamag netic class, it has struck Dr. Faraday, and it appears equally probable to us, that this must be referred to an action on the molecules of the mass of the substances acted upon, by which they are thrown into different conditions and affected accordingly. In this point of view, the results, when compared with those which are presented to us by a polarized ray, are very striking; for then a remarkable difference is apparent. For there appears to be no difference between the action of magnetics or diamagnetics on a polarized ray; as, if transparent bodies be taken from the two classes,-as, for instance, heavy glass or water from the diamagnetic, and a piece of green glass or a solution of green vitriol from the magnetic class,-then a given line of magnetic force will cause the repulsion of the one and the attraction of the other; but this same line of force, which thus affects particles so differently, affects the polarized ray, when passing through them, precisely in the same manner in both cases; for the two bodies cause its rotation in the same direction.

And here we cannot avoid adverting to the remarks made upon this part of the subject by M. Pouillet, who, as we have already said, was one of the earliest on the Continent to test and verify the experiments by which the important facts we have described were established. M. Pouillet appears to object to the existence of

any connexion between the magnetic and diamagnetic action, and the influence ex-ments of the diamagnetic bodies, and all the

erted by the magnet on a polarized ray.

traverses them."

"Theoretically, an explanation of the movedynamic phenomena consequent upon the actions of magnets on them, might be offered in the supposition that magnetic induction caused "Admitting," he observes, "with this phi-in them a contrary state to that which it prolosopher [Faraday] that all substances not duced in magnetic matter; i. e.-that if a parmagnetic in the manner of iron are diamag-ticle of each kind of matter were placed in the netic in the manner of bismuth, we are led to magnetic field, both would become magnetic, the immediate conclusion that, the optical ac- and each would have its axis parallel to the tion being concurrent with a certain mechani-resultant of magnetic force passing through it; cal action, it may at least be presumed that but that the particle of magnetic matter would this action takes place on the bodies, and not have its north and south poles opposite, or fadirectly and immediately on the light whichcing towards the contrary poles of the inducing magnet, whereas with the diamagnetic particles the reverse would be the case; and Now, it so happens that Dr. Faraday has hence would result approximation in the one never even attempted to assert that mag-case, recession in the other. Upon Ampère's netism acted directly on light. "Neither theory, this view would be equivalent to the accepting or rejecting," he says, "the hy-iron and magnetics parallel to those existing supposition that, as currents are induced in pothesis of an ether, or the corpuscular or in the inducing magnet or battery wire, so, in any other view that may be entertained of bismuth, heavy glass, and diamagnetic bodies, the nature of light; and, as far as I can see, the currents induced are in the contrary direc nothing being really known of a ray of light tion. This would make the currents in diamore than of a line of magnetic or electric magnetics the same in direction as those which force, or even of a line of gravitating force, are induced in diamagnetic conductors at the except as it and they are manifested in and those in magnetic bodies the same as those commencement of the inducing current, and by substances; f believe that in the experi-produced at the cessation of the same inducing ments I describe in the paper, light has current. No difficulty would occur as respects been magnetically affected, i. e. that that non-conducting magnetic and diamagnetic subwhich is magnetic in the forces of matter stances, because the hypothetical currents are has been affected, and in turn has affected supposed to exist, not in the mass, but round that which is truly magnetic in the force of the particles of the matter." light."

It now only remains for us to consider Such, then, are the facts connected with the theory of this diamagnetic action. Con- this newly-discovered power of magnetism clusively as are the facts themselves estab-over all matter,—a power which doubtless lished by the experiments which we have has its appointed office, and that, one that detailed, it is at the same time difficult and relates to the whole mass of the globe. almost dangerous to endeavor to form a The amount of this power in diamagnetic theory with our present imperfect know- substances seems to be very small, when ledge. For it is probable that, when its estimated by its dynamic effect; but, small nature is more intimately known to us, as it is, how vastly greater is this force, other effects produced by it, and other indi- even in dynamic results, than the mighty cators and measures of its powers, will come power of gravitation, which binds the to our knowledge; and, perhaps, even new whole universe together, when manifested classes of phenomena will serve not only to by masses of matter of equal magnitude! make it manifest and indicate its operation, And let it not be forgotten, that it is to the but even to alter or enlarge our views con- persevering labors and vast genius of an cerning it. And yet, on the discovery of English philosopher that we are indebted any new class of facts such as those which for the development of these facts, and that are recorded in this paper, we conceive that these brilliant discoveries were not the offsome theory which shall satisfactorily ex-spring of accidental or fortuitous circumplain them is absolutely necessary to give stances, but the result of well-founded and precision to our ideas. That which has well-verified inductions and deductions. It been advanced by the author himself—the only one, by the way, which has been of fered-appears to us the sole one by which we may account for this effect; and we, consequently, quote it in the discoverer's own words:

is true that, in this practical age, practical men may make the inquiry- Where is the practical utility of it? To this, as yet, we can give no reply; but it must also be remembered that but a few years back, had the same question been put in reference to

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From the Foreign Quarterly Review.

FIELD.

Der Legitime und die Republikaner (The Legitimate and the Republicans). 2 vols. Zurich. 1833.

Transatlantische Reiseskizzen und Christophorus Bärenhäuter (TransatlanZutic Travelling Sketches). 2 vols. rich. 1834.

Der Virey und die Aristocraten (The Viceroy and the Aristocracy, or Mexico in the year 1812). 3 vols. Zurich. 1835. Lebensbilder aus beiden Hemisphären (Pictures of Life in both Hemispheres). 1st and 2d Vols. Zurich. 1835.

The same. Volumes 4 to 6, being the continuation of Transatlantic Travelling Sketches. Zurich. 1-35-37.

electro-magnetic phenomena, there would have been a similar inability to make answer. THE WRITINGS OF CHARLES SEALSAnd yet, now, this power is used as the swift messenger of thought, and the undeviating measurer of time. In the electric telegraph of Wheatstone we have one of the most wonderful inventions of modern days, realizing to their fullest extent the wildest dreams of the Arabian romances. In the electrical clock, we have another instance of human ingenuity, in binding the ethereal principle, gathered from the earth itself, to note upon a dial the revolutions it performs. In the one case, by its excitement, time and space are annihilated; in another, it slowly and silently guides the seconds-beating pendulum. But, even supposing that the knowledge thus obtained will never be of practical utility, surely it will not be argued by any one that therefore it is useless. is the step we have thus advanced in our knowledge of the laws which govern the universe. A direct relation and dependence between light and the magnetic and electric forces is closely established; and thus a great addition made to the facts and 7. considerations which tend to prove that all natural forces are linked together, and have one common origin. And, moreover, we have been made acquainted with a force exerted on all matter, hitherto unknown and unsuspected. This property of diamagnetism, inherent in so many bodies —the sea, lakes, rivers, trees, rocks, &c.cannot be without its importance in the regulation of the system of the universe, although it yet remains for further experimentalists to point out the great part it plays.

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Neue Land und See Bilder (New Pictures by Land and by Sea, being the continuation of the 1st and 2d Volumes of Lebensbilder aus beiden Hemisphären. 4 vols. Zurich. 1839-40.

Das Cajüten Buch (The Cabin Book, 2 vols. or National Characterstics). 1841.

Süden und Norden (South and North). 3 vols. Stuttgart. 1842-3.

Ir does not occur to the great Coromantee monarch to whom a cunning slave-dealer presents a pinchbeck watch in exchange for a string of his sable subjects, to stickle at the material or mechanism of the trinket. His highness, although ignorant of Dent and Geneva, may have some vague suspicion that better time-pieces are producible, and that he is 'selling off' his ebony at an 'enormous sacrifice;' but other buyers offer no better, and he, therefore, wisely, though unwittingly, follows Sancho's advice, takes what he can get, and is thankful. Verily the good English public represent King Sambo, whilst the authors who attempt, through the SCRAPS FOR THE CURIOUS.--If a tallow candle medium of fiction, to portray the peculiarbe placed in a gun, and shot at a door, it will go ities of American life and character, resemthrough without sustaining any injury; and if a musket ball be fired into water, it will not only ble not a little the wily slave-dealer. rebound, but be flattened as if fired against a solid him, our crafty scribes present their counsubstance. A musket may be fired through a terfeits to purchasers who have no means of pane of glass, making the hole the size of the ball, detecting their value or testing their alloy; without cracking the glass; if suspended by a like him they receive a fancy price for metal that is not sterling, although, fortunately for them, accepted as sterling, for want of the real material wherewith to compare it.

thread, it will make no difference, and the thread will not even vibrate. Cork, if sunk 200 feet in the ocean, will not rise on account of the pressure of the water. In the arctic regions, when the thermometer is below zero, persons can converse more than a mile distant. Dr. Jamieson asserts

that he heard every word of a seaman at the dis

tance of two miles.

Like

Who are the American writers under whose guidance we have humbly adopted such views as we have of Transatlantic life?

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Cooper has established in the circulating libraries. Mr. Cooper knows that they are not. He acknowledges as much when he subjects his raw material to the discipline he has been accustomed to exercise on shipboard. Without that discipline the dramatis persone would have been too shocking and offensive for the public gaze. But the quarter-deck goes somewhat too far into the backwoods, when respect for rank, and for the distinctions of society, is attributed to men who never recognized but to despise such fictitious superiority. What thoughtful reader following Natty Bumpo, Mr. Coop

phases of hunter, pioneer, and trapper, can escape the recurring suspicion that Natty, interesting though he be, had no existence beyond the mind and creative fancy of the artist? Either we have been strangely misled by what we have hitherto deemed authentic accounts, or the Leatherstocking is no type of a class, no reality, but a mere creature of the imagination; more manly and agreeable, but not less spurious than the maudlin savages of Chateaubriand. Nurtured in the woods, the very child of freedom, with the wide forest before him, and his unerring rifle for his companion, what American hunter ever submitted with the laudible patience of friend Bumpo, to imprisonment, the stocks, and fifty similar in

Passing over at once the amiable and accomplished Washington Irving, whose delightful pen has been busier with the Old World than with the New, whose sympathies, social as well as literary, are strongly European, and whose sketches, graceful and touching as they are, can hardly be said to illustrate the character of his countrymenthe foremost worthy that occurs to us-unquestionably the first that would present himself is Mr. Fenimore Cooper, the author of the 'Pilot,' the American Sir Walter. Now we have have never begrudged Mr. Cooper the flattering designation claimed for him by his nation, so long as the nov-er's favorite hero, through all his various elist has kept us afloat. As a writer of nautical romance, Mr. Cooper demands our highest respect. He was the founder of the style he has rarely been equalled in it, certainly never surpassed. We cannot say that his sea manœuvres are approved by Napier-we believe they are ridiculed by the marines we care not a rope's end for his misnaming of sails and cables; we will even suffer him to steer his frigates in defiance of precedent and possibility. All that is essential for the landsman is found, and in abundance, in his books of the sea: the nautical character which cannot be mistakenthe romance of ocean life which cannot fail to charm. His sailors are alive with vigor. You do not doubt for a moment that such men have been and are, and that they live,dignities? What native of the half-horse, speak, and act, as the master teaches you. half-alligator state of Kentucky so admirably But strange as it may sound to the good be- disciplined as Paul the Beehunter, that welllievers in the Wept of the Wish-ton-wish,' drilled sergeant of marines, anxiously antito the gentle and tender mourners of the fate cipating every beck and nod of the captain? of the Last of the Mohicans,' Mr. Cooper But we cannot afford to dwell further upon resigns all right to the mantle of the Great the discrepancies of Mr. Cooper; we have Magician of the North, the moment he for- said enough to show that, although he may sakes the tarry jacket to wander with rifle be read with amusement, he must be followand moccasined feet beneath the shade of ed with caution, and listened to without imthe forest and through the waving herbage plicit faith. Another successful writer, Dr. of the prairie. Not that he ever did wander Bird, uses a broad rough pencil, and his de-save in print-not that he ever did study lineations have both nature and truth. The the denizens of the backwoods whom he un-productions of Dr. Bird are not generally dertakes to depict, save in the seclusion of known in this country, although one of his study, and under the influence of poetic them, almost universally read-we mean dreams and sweet hallucinations. The In-Nick of the Woods'-will not easily be fordians of these American novels, sentiment- gotten. It contains two characters which, al and well-behaved as the Indians of the to our thinking, have never been approached theatre, are not the savages of nature which travellers have found and faithfully described. Trappers and hunters, notoriously the wildest and most reckless of white Americans, rivalling and often surpassing their red associates in ferocity and a spirit of hatred and rebellion to the laws, are not the mild, heroic, docile creatures whom Mr.

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by Cooper; Ralph Stackpole, the horsestealer, and Nick himself, a Quaker, who, having witnessed the massacre of his wife and children by a party of savages, doffs his coat, abjures his creed, and becomes the Indians' most inveterate persecutor. The majority of Neale's novels are mere heavy rhapsodies; Mrs. Clavers' sketches of settlers'

life are pleasing and probably correct as far as they go, Haliburton has handled with admirable skill that transatlantic cockney, the Yankee; but Yankees, although often erroneously considered by Englishmen to be the staple human produce of America, constitute in fact but a small fraction of the population of the United States, which are inhabited by races of men exhibiting differences of character, feelings, and interests as great as any that exist between Scotchman and Irishman, Yorkshireman and Londoner. As to the English authors who have laid the scene of their novels in America, they are but feeble imitators of Cooper, comic caricaturists, or unfair assailants of a country and people whom they have approached with prejudice or with insufficient opportunities for observation and judgment. We confess that, as a class, we do but slightly esteem them.

we have never, although we have looked out for them, met with any of the American translations, and we incline to believe that none of them have come to this country, unless casually, in a traveller's portmanteau, or in a file of newspapers.

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The intimate knowledge of American manners, feelings, and tone of conversation, the frequent use of English words and phrases, invariably well applied, although sometimes misspelt by German printers, and the author's occasional and happy adoption of an English or American idiom, have apparently, and not unnaturally, led some to suppose and assert that these books were originally written in English, and that the German version was a translation. This we find expressly denied in the preface already quoted, which commences with the author's thanks to the public of Germany for their hospitable reception of a stranger It is our present object to introduce to who came amongst them, as he says, in our readers an author little known in this veritable Yankee fashion, seeking a new country, and whose vivid pictures of Amer- market for his produce. With the excep ica and the Americans are, as we believe, tion, he proceeds to say, of a portion of the most successful that have yet been the Legitimate and the Republican,' penned. During the last dozen years there published in English some twenty years have appeared in Germany a series of tales ago in Philadelphia-but totally altered and sketches of striking character, and ex- and reconstructed in its German dresshibiting genius of a high order. Strange and of one short chapter of the Travelto say, at a period when German, Swedish, ling Sketches" that first saw the light in and even Russian literature are so gener- an American newspaper, the whole of his ally ransacked, by our diligent translators, books are original German works. The of their more choice productions, no por-Travelling Sketches' were all first writtion of this series, with the exception of a ten in English, but published in German few brief but well-selected fragments in the pages of a leading monthly periodical, have been as yet done into English, at least in England. The Americans, it would appear, have long since discovered and worked the rich vein. With the German public,' says the author referred to, in the Rare accomplishment, thus to handle preface to a second, and, in some instances, with equal facility two of the most difficult a third edition of his works, now publish-languages current in Europe, and to write ing, my books have made their way but indifferently in one or the other books of gradually. In America their success has first-rate ability; and satisfactory would it been very great, and they have been pub- be to trace the career and intellectual edulished in every form; in volumes, numbers, cation of one thus highly gifted. This we newspapers. I have now before me whole regret our inability to do. Two years ago basketsful of American periodicals, all more we could not have told even the name of or less filled with criticisms of my writings, this clever author; it was dimly guessed at some loading me with praise as boundless in Germany, but probably was unknown to as undeserved, others indulging in censure, any but his publishers and, perhaps, his and even in malicious abuse, equally exaggerated and unmerited.' We ourselves have long been well acquainted with these works in their original German garb, but

*"Blackwood's Magazine."

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alone; the Viceroy and the Aristocracy,' perhaps the most thoroughly and essentially German, in idiom and construction, of all his works, was composed, we are told, in English, but printed in the German language only.

own immediate circle. It is to-day only that he discards the shield of anonymous anthorship. I could wish,' he says, in the preface above cited, to continue, in humble imitation of the great Walter Scott, Washington Irving, and others, anonymous

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