would get into it and make themselves as com- I just explained to me, one may be quite sure that fortable as possible. At least they would have she will be the first to go' the satisfaction of warming themselves; but 'Well, old one!' replied the first, 'she will whilst the body was deriving a temporary satis-only show the way; we should soon follow her. faction from the genial warmth, alas! the mind True, we have a year's provisions on board, but would be icy in despair; that very fire was con- we have no firing, and here there is not wood suming their last hope-that fire was destroying to light a pipe, whilst in winter the wind must the greatest force that Heaven has given to blow pretty sharp, to judge by the dogdays!' man. What remained would be the last strug- "And what a woman! joined in another, in gle of the instinct of preservation against death, a tone of contempt; 'une femme pâlotte, death being always victorious; one by one the menue, maigrette, with feet like finger-cakes, little crew would diminish in numbers, and each and hands that could not lift up an oar; a of these obscure martyrs would be laid down in woman whom one could break on one's knee, his turn in the icy cemetery where I found them. and put the bits into one's pocket. If even she All, thus, to the last: he, more robust and more had been a woman from our parts. (He was a unfortunate than the others, would have no Breton.) At Ponant we have some commères friendly hand to tend him in his last hour and who think nothing of hoisting a sail or rowing to preserve his remains by pious precautions; a boat; our women are nearly as good as the he would become the prey of bears as soon as men; but this one, with her peaky Parisian he had breathed the last sigh, or even indeed so face, she is as chilly as a Senegal parrot. If we soon as he could no longer defend himself." are caught by the ice, she will die of the first frost, that is quite certain.' Pleasant contemplations these among the sublimities of Spitzbergen! The only excuse is, that they were of a nature fully calculated to awaken such. Every thing was alike austere and repulsive: the climate was severe, the heavens were overcast, the land buried in snow and fog, the mountains were crumbling, the ice was breaking up, and sea and air were either sullenly or rudely agitated. Then as to what remained of life, it was naught but relics. Bones of the slain walrus and seal, and the tombs of the benighted slayers! The thought of a possible detention during a winter in Spitzbergen filled our fair traveler's mind, according to her own confession, for several days after these meditations among the tombs, and she soon discovered that she was not the only one who indulged in such gloomy anticipations, but which had really no foundation whatsoever, except in the timid ap; prehensions of those who entertained them. It was not likely that a French scientific expedition was going to winter in the Arctic regions. One morning she was seated on a gun, buried in a vast fur cloak, looking now at the heavens, and then at the sea and the strange forms that floated on its surface, when she heard her name pronounced by one among a group of melancholy French tars. Listening, she made out the following sentences: each man relit his pipe; then the one who had "Well, at the best, it does not concern us; it is for those who were stupid enough to bring her here to get anxious. If we do winter here she must do as she can-she will have to do as all the rest do.' "An old quarter-master now broke in upon the conversation, in which he had not hitherto taken part. 66 6 'Boys,' said he, 'I am sorry for you, but there is no common-sense in what you say; what you, four of the best and eldest sailors on board, you have no more nous, can't see further than that? Upon one point I agree with you, they were perhaps wrong in bringing this little rather than for us; for us it is, on the contrary lady along with us, but the misfortune is for her most fortunate, and it will even be still more fortunate if we have to winter in this cursed country than if we get out of it' "How is that?' exclaimed the sailors. "It is very simple, and I will explain it to not? Well, so much the better. It would be you. She is very weak, very delicate, is she she who would go first if we were caught on the ice? Well, so much the better. These are only so many reasons for making her precious to us. The most dangerous things, you see, in wintering in the ice, the most difficult thing to avoid, is the demoralization of the crew. Captain Parry relates that it was especially against the discouragement of his men that he much more he dreaded the effects of panic than had to struggle; he describes in his narrative how the rigors of the climate. Well, we shall have nothing to apprehend from such demoralization if we succeed in preserving the life of this young lady; it will be said to those who exhibit signs of weakness: "Come, are you not ashamed? the cold is not so intense since a woman can bear it." So I tell you we must do every thing in our power to preserve the life of this little lady; her presence in the midst of us will in- | sure alike the courage and the health of the crew; and I know that the captain thinks just like me on that subject; he said as much to the first lieutenant the other day when walking with him.' "Oh! if the captain has said so,' unanimously joined in the group, 'then it must be right."" animals would be next to impossible in such a climate. One of the most interesting points that presented itself to her which she describes as being at times of contemplation was the colored snow, a pale green, or a pale roseate color. This coloration, which is produced by the presence of minute cryptogamous plants, is the most striking vegetation in Spitzbergen, and it is vegetation in truly its most elementary state, even more so than in the form of lichens, because nature in her prolificacy develops it even on a transient surface. A few lichens were also to be met with on bare rocks, and a tuft of black moss occurred here and there in the valleys, like bits of dark moist sponge. There were also to be found, by dint of careful search in certain sheltered crevices, a few spare, blanched, struggling plants, their flowers bending sorrowfully to the soil. These were the saxifrage, the yellow ranunculus, and a white poppy. They grew to about the size of lucifer Our fair adventurer was consoled after overhearing this conversation by the feeling that the egotism of her companions in travel would insure such attentions as would retard her death as long as possible. Yet did she nevertheless look upon such a catastrophe as certain in case they were caught by the ice, in consequence of the indisposition which she felt, notwithstanding all the anxious care that was bestowed upon her. She was allowed the captain's berth, and, when giving it up to her, he had done every thing to insure its being warm and comfortable;, all the holes had been hermetically sealed, the ceiling had been covered with reindeerskins, the bed had been heaped with eider-matches. down; it was really more of a nest than a cabin, and yet, notwithstanding all these considerate attentions, she suffered from cold and could not sleep. The latter she, however, attributed not so much to the cold as to the peculiar circumstances under which she was placed, and more especially to what she designates as an ultra-tonic diet!" Our fair adventurer, it is also to be noticed, wore a garb which she declares to have been très-commode et perfaitement disgracieux-men's trowsers, a middy's shirt of thick blue stuff, a neckerchief of red wool, a black leather belt, boots lined with felt, and a sailor's cap, with no end of flannel underneath all. She had cut her hair, which she had found it impossible to keep in order during the passage, and when she went on deck she added to the mountain of flannel and other garments a heavy mantle with a hood, so as to reduce her altogether into a great packet without form or shape, except, perhaps, its rotundity: "additions and subtractions concurred," she intimates, "to render her very ugly; but in such a place one only thinks of how to suffer the least possible from the cold, and all coquetting is misplaced." The recreation to be derived from researches in natural history at Spitzbergen were naturally very limited, and still more so to a lady to whom a search for marine Polar bears and reindeer are said to abound in Spitzbergen, but whether it was not the season, or our lady traveler did not venture far enough away from the ship, she did not see any. Seals, however, were in great numbers; their quiet, confiding manners soon awoke an interest, and their look, so like that of rational beings, made it seem a crime to slay them. Only one walrus was seen, but they were said to be common on the southern shores. A few blue foxes were killed by the sportsmen: they were small, spare, and ugly. Their fur was massed and entangled, and their flesh was not relished. A considerable number of sea-birds tenanted both the rocks and ice around, but our lady traveler asserts that, instead of enlivening the scene, they only made it more melancholy. These plumed denizens of the Arctic regions were, in her eyes, voracious, ferocious, quarrelsome, and noisy. Their cries were offensive, varying from a croak to something even more dismal. Some of the gulls complained like children crying, whilst others indulged in a kind of sardonic laughter. "There is nothing in this sinister country," she adds, "for the eye to repose upon; nothing charms the ear; every thing is gloomy and miserablething, even to the birds.!" every Thus is outward nature made the re "In any other part of the world except in these Polar regions, a ship is safe when in harbor; but in Spitzbergen, as I have before said, it is a forced wintering; from one day to the event most to be dreaded is not shipwreck, another, from one hour to another, the bay that shelters you may be changed into a prison-and what a prison! No dungeon can inspire a similar amount of terror! One day I was enabled to realize the fact-it was on the 7th of August. Several members of the expedition, seeing that the weather was clear and the snow being swept away by a strong easterly breeze, made a boatexcursion to Hakluyt Point the most northerly cape in Spitzbergen. The excursion was to last a day. I was not allowed to make one of it, so I remained on board with the captain, who, you are aware, never quits his ship. The early part of the day went off well enough, and I envied the lot of those who were going to get a few the limits of the great banquise of ice—the aim leagues nearer to the Pole-perchance to reach of all our ambitions. flection of a petted, spoiled, diseased imagination. To those who study the resources of a kind Providence, as manifested in its various creations, the razorbills and foolish guillemots, the blackbilled auks and lesser guillemots, with their silky plumage and strange habits, congregating on ledges of high marine precipices, sitting closely together, tier above tier and row above row, depositing their single large egg on the bare rock, yet without confusion, or the egg ever rolling off in a gale of wind or a rush of birds, alike present much that is at once interesting and instructive to contemplate. The black guillemot, known to sailors as the Greenland dove, is not only a pretty, but it is a sprightly and active bird. If the great divers make at intervals a disagreeable croaking, their swiftness on and underneath the water is curious to "I reasoned with myself so as to calm my rewatch; and they live in pairs, as old Be-grets, and finished by finding my position to be wick has it, "with inconceivable affec- in a sufficiently elevated latitude. I said to mytion." We never yet met the individual self that I ought not to be jealous of these poor who did not say that the straggling, mixed men, whose pride had only exacted some flocks of gulls, consisting, as they almost twelve or fifteen leagues over me. always do, of various kinds, enlivened the rocks by their irregular movements and shrill cries, even when the latter were deadened by the noise of the waves or nearly drowned in the roarings of the surge. Michelet, we have lately seen in his admirable work on L'Oiseau, takes a precisely opposite view of nature in the Polar regions to that adopted by our lady Admirable, fruitful seas," he exclaims, "replete with life in an elementary state, (zoophytes and medusa ;) they are sought for in the favorable season by all kinds and descriptions of animal lifewhales, fish, and birds-in pursuit of their daily food. It is there that they procreate each short summer in peace, and hence are the Poles the great, the happy rendezvous of love and peace to these innocent crowds." But perhaps the lady may retort, M. Mignet has not been to the Polar regions has not passed a summer at Spitzbergen! traveler. 66 With her, one great idea prevailed over all others one morbid fancy alone filled her mind, to the exclusion of all other thoughts; it was the chance of wintering in that region of which she had manifestly seen more than enough the first day she arrived there. At last she was almost on the point of seeing her fearful anticipations converted into sad realities. "In order to pass away the long hours when the ship, deprived of its passengers, appeared to me so deserted, I set to work writing letters, and thus filling up my solitude with all the beings so dear to me whom I had left behind. Towards four in the afternoon I was obliged to leave off, it was so dark; a dense fog would no bulls-eyes, which took the place of windows. I longer permit any light to pass through the ascended on deck, and there I found the captain busy, looking through his telescope at a fleet of great icebergs, which were taking up their position at the entrance of the bay-a spectacle that filled me with inexpressible anguish. Captain,' I said, 'what is taking place? The bay will soon be closed up by all those icebergs.' 666 Be Do not make yourself anxious,' the commander replied to me; it is not yet cold enough to solder the icebergs together. sides, I am going to send a boat to see if a bar has formed itself there.' "And if the bar is formed, what shall we do ?' but "The captain did not vouchsafe an answer, busied himself giving orders to the boat to go. My eyes followed it with deep anxiety; I saw the men row zealously, turn round the great masses of ice and pass between the smaller, till at last they disappeared in the great field of floating ice. At the expiration of an hour's time they came back; it was in vain that they bay-no open passage remained; the cold which had endeavored to make their way out of the no one had mistrusted, had been sufficient to solder the icebergs and to convert them into an impassable wall of rock. Although sailors make a rule of keeping untoward impressions and events to themselves. I saw that the captain looked anxious as he listened to the report of the sailors. As to me, my heart quite misgave me, and terror filled my whole soul. "And our expeditionists!' I exclaimed; "how are they to get back? "That is just what puzzles me,' said the captain; they have only two days' provisions. It was very imprudent.' "And they are in open boats, exposed to the cold and snow. O Heaven! captain, it may become frightful. What will you do?' "I will fire two or three great guns over all this to-morrow, and try and make a hole in it. As to the rest, we will wait and see what the wind will do to-night.' "The captain remained silent, walking to and fro on the quarter-deck, his glass in his hand, looking alternately at the sky and sea. For several hours no change was observable; the sharp points of the ice broke here and there the thick fog by which we were enveloped, but they remained motionless. My heart was even more sorrowful than this lugubrious horizon, and I reflected gloomily on our rashness in having come to expose our lives in those frightful regions, where every incident is a catastrophe, and where a mere change in the wind or a lowering of the thermometer may entail death! "Towards midnight a wind sprang up, which gradually increased in violence to a hurricane; the old ocean shook her mane of foam with fury, enormous waves struck the ice, the barrier broke with a loud noise, and never did a more terrible tumult give rise to happier impressions; the bay was opened - the boats could come in! They arrived, in fact, a few hours later, and the danger they had run insured them a cordial reception.' The day after this warning a number of men were employed in engraving the name of the ship, the date of her arrival, and a list of her men and officers on the rock. "They did me the honor," the lady tells us, "to place my name at the head of the list, and if it was not the most remarkable, it was most assuredly the most strange to meet with in such a place." It was now manifest that the delay in Magdalena Bay could not be prolonged much further. Excursions into the interior multiplied themselves accordingly, and our lady often took part in them. She would, however, on these occasions separate herself from her companions. "She took a pleasure," she says, "in feeling herself alone with this grandiose and terrible nature. Deserts have every where their own poetry: deserts of sand or deserts of ice, still it is always the infinity of solitude, and no VOL. XLV.-NO. IL ap "One day, however-and only one day-it was permitted to us to see Spitzbergen enlivened; it was the 10th of August. Early in the morning the great curtains of fog, which incessantly vailed the horizon, were withdrawn as if by an invisible hand, and wonderful to relate! the sun a real, beautiful, shining sun peared; under its influence the bay assumed a new aspect! Clouds chased one another across the heavens, carried away like fleccy things, the great rocks let their mantles of snow fall off, the sea trembled and shook with the glittering ices that sank into it on all sides; it seemed as if the sun's rays had suddenly conferred life upon this dead and gloomy country, and that the earth was unrobing itself for the labors of spring. It was a thaw-a genuine thaw-noisy and joyous—a thaw every where welcomed as the end of the bad season. Alas! in Spitzbergen, thaw, spring, and summer only last a few hours! The very day that followed upon this fine one, the fog once more darkened the heavens, a gloomy atmosphere took the place of a brilliant day, the cold became more intense, gusts of wind moaned lugubriously, the icebergs remained stationary, once more soldering themselves to the rocks, and every thing began to sleep again in that icy and funereal sleep which lasts upwards of eleven months." So brief a summer and the sudden return of winter obliged the expedition to set out on its return at once. "Toute tentative pour pénétrer plus aunord devenait impraticable," we are told but we do not gather at least from the lady's narrative-that there ever was any more intention of proceeding farther north than there was of wintering in the Arctic regions. In these respects, the late French expeditions, as that in the Reine Hortense, under Prince Napoleon, and that of which Madam Léonie d'Aunet formed a part, present a truly remarkable contrast to the navigations and winterings, and to the boat and sledge expeditions carried out by our gallant countrymen in the same regions. As voyages of discovery, although made in the nineteenth century, they are only fit to take place by the rovings of the three sons of the Red-handed Eirek, or the early pioneering efforts of a Butten, a Hawkbridge, or a Fox. It is almost needless to say how delighted our fair adventurer was at being 13 rowed by vigorous arms on the 14th of desolation; but if it was possible to be transAugust out of that fearful bay. ported without transition from our cheerful Paris to those icy latitudes, I have no doubt but that the most courageous would be seized with serious fright." "I saw (she says) with a feeling of deep relief the torn mountains, the sharp points, the immense glaciers of Magdalena Bay disappear suc- So much for an expedition the proposed cessively from my eyes. I felt that I was saved objects of which were, according to the from imminent danger, the greatest that, I feel statement made by Madame d'Aunet of assured, could ever be run, that of being imprisoned in these horrible ices, and of dying what M. Gaimard expounded to her at there, as our predecessors did, in the frightful the onset, to penetrate sufficiently into tortures of cold; add to which, the contempla- the Polar regions to determine if one can tion of the sinister beauties of Spitzbergen had pass that way from Europe to America! cast a vail of insurmountable melancholy over However, if M. Gaimard was not a Colmy spirits. This country is indeed strange and linson or a M'Clure, the experiences of a frightful, and if one is not seized with an abso- lady at the gates of the Polar regions lute panic on first nearing it, it is because one has been prepared by degrees for the lamentable (and Spitzbergen can not be designated aspect that it presents. The islands of Norway as any thing more, as compared with Meland the North Cape are stations, the sight of ville Island or Banks Land) are, at all which gradually initiates the eye to scenes of events, exceedingly amusing. From the British Quarterly. THE ATOMIC THEORY-ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND LITERARY.* AMONG our chemical acquaintances there are some who are walking cyclopadias of the science, who can tell you offhand the formula of malachite, or the average per centage of nitrogen in Canadian flour; but there is no enthusiasm about these men, they care little for general laws, and will certainly never discover any. On the other hand, there are chemists whose aspect and language breathe an intense love of science, and a fitness for seizing the latent analogies and significance of natural phenomena; yet their memory of particular facts is often treacherous, and in experimenting they may omit most necessary precautions. It is astonishing, too, how different science is to different votaries : "To some she is the goddess great, * Lectures on the Atomic Theory, and Essays Scientific and Literary. By SAMUEL BROWN. 2 vols. 8vo. Edinburgh: 1858. whether that butter come in the form of what is understood by bread and butter, or that less substantial commodity which gives the flavor to after-dinner speeches and other laudatory effusions. Some men take up chemistry because it is a gentlemanly profession, others because they are impelled to it by an irresistible love; some delight in building up the facts of the science, others in evolving its doctrines. Again, there are chemists of an inquisitive and contemplative turn, to whom nature reveals her secrets, while there are others who at once apply this knowledge to some practical end with material advantage to themselves and their fellows; and as these belong to two opposite types of intellect, it rarely happens that either is capable of success in the department of the other. To this theoretical class, animated by an intense love of science, and caring little either for minute detail or for material profit, belonged the subject of our present sketch. In the quaint old country town of Had |