applauding. They both give rise to and see strange sights -the building up and the crumbling down of empires, the dead march of generations, and the hastening on of the final catastrophe, in which both shall expire. And this same time, inexorable and callous, which will take an urchin from school or a star from the firmament, as coolly as death will kill a fly or strangle a giant, took little Samuel from his beloved nook in the village seminary, by the time he reached his eleventh year, and set him down on a loom beside his father, with a shuttle in the one hand and a lay in the other. This was by no means a pleasant change to Samuel, and many a sigh, and tear, and fruitless wish it cost him, but Mrs Clugston was made of other stuff than to be moved by such things. It was in vain that Samuel pretended awkwardness, and pled indisposition, and declared his willingness to go to any other trade. His trade was fixed for him and he was fixed to his trade as firmly as a nail in a jail-door. When he saw there was nothing for it but to make the shuttle wheeze and the lay clank from early morning till late night, he got into a kind of desponding state; and, as despondency is well known for its narcotic qualities, he would sometimes sink down in a profound sleep upon the breast-beam, and take by stealth what he could not get by fair means. His father rather winked at this, for he had long felt that Lizzy was driving matters with rather a high hand over them both; but Lizzy was not the woman to be baulked in this way. As the shop was under the same roof with the house, and as Lizzy gave one of her ears to the shop, she soon detected Samuel at his stolen sweets and put a very unceremonious end to them, and gave his fatlier to understand, by a round of reasoning and plain speaking, that he was worse than the laddie, and answerable for his shortcomings, and carelessness, and misdemeanours. But as we have said before, there is no stopping of the wheels of time, and the heaviest inflictions as well as the highest pleasures soon come to an end; and so it was in the experience of Andrew Clugston and his only-born, who saw Mrs Clugston wheeled off one morning, after a short illness, to take her place among a long line of grandfathers and great-grandmothers in the churchyard of a neighbouring

parish.

Samuel was fifteen years old at this time, and one might have thought he would have had sense enough to conceal his joy on the occasion, which, I am sorry to say, he did not. He remarked, for example, to a neighbour, that folk would get their mouthfu' o' meat and their natural rest now, at ony rate;' and on the morning of the funeral it was with difficulty he was got out of his bed and dressed before the people assembled, and, as he was always falling behind in the procession, they had to put him into the cart beside the corpse, where he was scarcely seated when he toppled over and fell fast asleep. The rumbling of the vehicle and the soporific effect of grief on some constitutions, and having nothing else to do, might perhaps account for his being overcome; but there were many there not disposed to take so favourable a view of the question, but attributed it to indifference, and some to the excess of joy, and others to a spirit of malignant triumph, and insult to the departed, whose virtues did not fail to shine all the brighter against the dark background of her son's insensibility and ingratitude.

'Waken him,' said James Strang, a little ill-natured mannie with a red face and buck teeth, it'll affront the hale parish if we gang into the town that way. Feint matter though it should prove his last sleep, the lazy lout,' and James reached up his stick as he spoke, and poked Samuel very savagely about the ribs.

Samuel started up and cried out, ere he got through the dark confused passage which leads from the sleeping into the waking state. Mercy-is she come to again?'

The wright that made the coffin groaned, and some shook their heads to themselves, and some looked into each other's faces, and others put their hands to their mouths, and James Strang stood still as if he had really raised the dead, and first looked angry, and then got a glimpse of the ludicrous and fell a laughing even out, and said, 'it

cowed every green thing-the like o't was ne'er heard tell o'.

As for Andrew, the chief mourner, he behaved as well as man could do under the circumstances. He uttered no rebuke, but with a serious air reached out his hand and said to his son, Come away out Samuel, we'll soon be at the place, and ye'll get a hurl back.'

Samuel offered no resistance and went very demurely all the rest of the way, and, to his honour be it said, he slept none on the road going home.

CHAPTER III.

As there was little doing for a day or two after the burial, and a kind of Sabbath stillness pervaded the house, Samuel occupied his time chiefly in eating up the fragments of bread and cheese which had survived the dredgy,' and in nodding at the fireside, and looking out occasionally as a neighbour passed by or a noise got up among the dogs or children. His father gave him his own way for a time, letting him eat and sleep as much as he liked, with the view perhaps of bringing on a surfeit and consequent distaste; or it might be that he considered the boy had been unfairly treated by his mother, and that it was but right to let him have back what he had been unjustly deprived of. But instead of a disrelish appearing, the two master appetites seemed to increase; and instead of showing discretion in the matter and a proper sense of the indulgence granted him, he carried the thing to the last bounds of excess and abuse. A reaction on the part of his father soon took place, who forced him to rise when he rose (two hours later, it is true, than when his wife lived), and who kept him at his work till a reasonable time at night.

It was plain to every one that Samuel was not cured of his passion for sleep and food, and that whenever he should become his own master, he would enter upon a course of unbridled indulgence.

A wearisome time indeed did Andrew Clugston continue to work and step about after his son had given vent to feelings of dissatisfaction respecting his longevity; but at last he did go, and Samuel entered at thirty-four into the full possession of all that his father and mother had saved by their industry and economy.

There was now a general curiosity felt as to the course which Samuel would take, for many had risked their reputation on his head. Conceive the dismay then that fell into the ranks of the foreseers, when Samuel, instead of laying his head into the laps of his Delilahs, resigned himself and his energies to a career of exemplary and even extraordinary labour. The discomfited prophets could hardly keep their fingers, and certainly their wives did not keep their tongues, off Samuel when they met him, but treated him to a panoramic view of his past life, with a lucid commentary on some of its more interesting passages. As every effect has its cause, the revolution we have mentioned had its cause too. A wag in the village had apprised Samuel of the predictions that were pending upon him, and as he did not like to become the subject of prophecy, he determined to upset the soothsayers; and so he did-but it was only for a time. The tension was too violent to last, and the seat which pride and a spirit of contradiction had usurped was soon vacated, and the old prescriptive occupant sat down with a deeper seat and a firmer hold than ever. The relapse was dreadful. It is true that Samuel assigned sickness as the cause for keeping his bed, but his looks and the quantity of food he took belied the statement. Human nature, after all, is not so bad; for several of the men whose repute as prophets had been damaged by Samuel's spurious attempt at industry, looked in upon him now, and spoke to him in the kindest manner, and even offered to send some dainty thing or other which they considered good for the nature of his complaint. At the end of six days, he rose and began to do a little again; but it was like the working of a piece of machinery through which a winter flood had passed. The virtue had left his limbs, and the mainspring seemed to have been broken within him. He was fusionless and fangless, and looked like one whose spinal marrow is injured, and whose mind

and affections are off finally for some other world. His very voice had the thrum of a paralytic Jew's harp, and his whole appearance indeed was one of extreme indifference and insensibility. No one who saw him for the first time but was impressed with the man. He was not quite six feet two but very near it. His hands were broad and squatty like the mole's, and his legs had an endless look about them like the ostrich's, for they were long and small in proportion to his body, and he had a peculiar drawling way of using them, as if one joint had to put the other in motion, and each had to wait its turn, like some serpents seen in toy shops. The trunk, again, was lumpy and burdensome, and seemed more to be carried about by the legs, than to form with them a part of the same system. The arms hung down like spokes, and a long heron-like neck held up his head as on the top of a pole. The head was of a piece with the body, as the arms and neck were with the legs. It was large, and thinly thatched with black lanky hair. The face was flabby, and had a sallow greasy expression about it, and the slow still eyes stood in their sockets with the lids half over them, as if their possessor were toiling on in the last stage of exhaustion through a tropical desert. It could not be said that his face was ugly; but it was so utterly phlegmatic and destitute of expression that it seemed a lump of half-inform ed clay, which was neither animate nor inanimate. His dress was the dress of his time and station-a substantial suit of home-made blue. The large deep vest had rounded pocket-lids like coat-tails, and his coat-tails would have made a decent suit for a citizen now-a-days. To be sure I am describing Samuel rather in his Sunday dress than in his every-day apparel. He usually wore through the week a huge jacket like a beggar's great-coat cut in two, and a roomy waistcoat made out of the fag end of a piece of drugget or blanketing.

That man is physically lazy,' or 'lethargic to the backbone,' or 'constitutionally a sluggard,' were remarks that were frequently applied to him by intelligent strangers who saw him for the first time. Now, there might have been much truth in this; but I believe also that the course which his mother took with him, had a great hand in fostering and confirming the native tendencies of his constitution to indolence. But however this may have been, I have never known, read, or heard, of one who sunk so completely and hopelessly under the dominion of sloth. The person who has never felt the insidious approach of this passion, and the vampyre-like way in which it works, till it paralyses every energy of soul and body, can form no idea of its power, and will hardly credit the extent to which may be carried and indulged in. The Hottentots furnish an example on a large scale of what it can do when left to itself; and occasional instances are to be met in all countries of its absorbing nature and lamentable consequences; -depriving its victims of the power of resistance, and laying them down more vegetable than animal masses, and tormenting them with nervous irritations, broken and disturbed slumbers, nightmare, irresolution of purpose and confusion of thought, checkings of conscience, and fearful forebodings of coming labour, and penury, and wretchedness. How surely will any passion, if not resisted, obtain the mastery-but none more surely than this. Every vice indeed has a beginning but no end. It grows insensibly but certainly; and consequently there is little hope of the man who is under the power of chronic and abandoned habits. In our subsequent chapters on the history of Samuel, this will become apparent.

COMMERCE.

FIRST ARTICLE.

SOCIETY has no legitimate employment that is not conservative. The very principle of social communion was implanted in human nature in order that men might assist each other in the production and economisation of the necessaries of life, and other products of labour. Labour is the only truly noble employment of human kind--that is, labour in all the aspects which tend to make up the

great sum of productive thought and action; and whatever tends to distract or destroy, is not legitimate for humanity, and ought therefore to be deplored and discarded.

The two great divisions of human employment may be termed agriculture and manufactures. Involved in these two grand branches of labour, are many employments which do not properly belong to either manufacture or agriculture, but which may be still termed collateral employments, having been educed in connection with these fundamental sources of national wealth and greatness. Commerce is the exchange of either agricultural or manufactured products for money or goods. In the latter case the trade is called barter. Commerce is the employment of peaceful nations, and is the means by which men render common those particular products which belong to peculiar climates. Commercial cities have been the great theatres of human enterprise; the greatest minds that have ever illuminated the world in science or art were developed in them; all the world's real benefactors in art and knowledge have flowed from the conservative principle of labour, and the diffusive humanising principles of exchange. Trade is only now beginning to take its true position in the ideas of men. This is said to be the dawn of a new era, of which trade is becoming the chivalry. We shall only give a glance at the history of commerce in the meantime, however, leaving it to take its own place in the shifting position of this transition era of ideas. Commerce undoubtedly grew out of man's necessities. At first it must have been very limited amongst those tribes who lived upon venison, and clothed themselves with wild animals' skins. From Scripture, it appears that, in the period succeeding the flood, the system of commercial exchanges was hardly begun amongst the people of Nimrod and the other post-diluvian predecessors of Abraham, who lived upon wild animals which they hunted, and the flocks which they tended. The Greeks, previous to the immigration of Cadmus and other wise people from the east, who taught them handicrafts as well as letters, also lived, as did the Asiatic descendants of Canaan, upon the produce of the chase. When the Romans invaded Britain, fifty-five years before Christ, they found our fathers in the same truly primitive condition of life; and when the British again, in the sixteenth century, invaded the continent of North America, they found the tribes to form a complete historic parallel to their ancestors of that early period. As the savage peoples became acquainted with the civilised invaders, and saw that they had something that skins would purchase, hunting not only became a necessary employment, but one of gain; and so, bringing their furs to traders, in order to obtain the implements of warfare or agriculture, commerce was begun.

The next stage of advance upon the condition of hunting is that of pasturage. Above and beyond pasturage is agriculture, and wedded to it is handicraft. In the pastoral state, men could supply themselves with primitive garments and nutritious food from the skins, flesh, and milk of animals; but still there would be a retardation of popuiation, and the absence of high civilisation. The agricultural state induced a fixture of residence, a division of employment, the foundation of villages and cities, and the extensive interchange of commodities, civilisation and commerce both being dependent upon the density of a population. The first trading transactions of which we are cognisant are those carried on between the Ishmaelites and Egyptians. The latter people were very numerous, dwelt in cities, and produced in their fields more than enough of grain for their own wants.

This they could exchange with the Ishmaelites (Arabs) for spices, and slaves, and the other articles which the Arabs had to give and they required. Seventeen centuries before the Christian era a caravan of Arab merchants, carrying spices to the south, bought Joseph of his brethren, and sold him unto Potiphar, who was a captain of the guard, an office implying a highly artificial condition of society, and a considerable advance in social disparities.

In the early history of commerce, the means of transit

and exchange were inland, goods being carried upon the backs of animals, just as the Arabs of the Sahara carry on their traffic with the Barbary states and the nations of south-western Africa to this day, the more advanced system of wheel-carriages and made roads having never superseded the more primitive and simpler plan. In the provinces of Brazil, Peru, Buenos Ayres, and Columbia, commercial transit is the work of the llama, or other beasts of burden; and in Thibet, and the other Asiatic nations adjacent to the Himalayan range, animals carry all the articles of transmontane commerce. In Mexico, which is a vast and fertile country, and which for three hundred years has been peopled by a Spanish American race, there are only three or four roads fit to be traversed by wheel-carriages; so that almost all the goods imported or exported are taken from and to the coast on the backs of mules and horses. The earliest attempts to convey goods by water was in canoes and rafts across mere straits or inlets of the sea. Before there could be an extensive and distant sea communication, there must have been very great advancement in shipbuilding and in navigation. Another cause to intermit the progress of intercourse amongst nations by sea was the want of that important instrument, the mariner's compass. With the nations of antiquity, water communication was slow in beginning, and, when it did begin, its progress in advancement was very tardy. Vessels never lost sight of land in their voyages, but crawled, in little coasting expeditions, from town to town, or creek to creek, watching the least indication of storm, and seeking shelter in the land. The limited knowledge of geography which the ancients possessed confined their efforts of trade within very narrow limits; and their ships being open and chiefly propelled by oars, were not adapted for heavy seas. Summer was the only season in which these clumsy mariners dared venture to sea, and he who was foolhardy enough to launch his bark in winter, was reckoned a bold man indeed.

Navigation seems to have early reached a very high state of excellence in the Red Sea. We know that a great traffic was carried on there between Arabia and Cosseir, or the port which served as an entrepôt for the trade of the Red Sea with Thebes in Upper Egypt. The merchandise landed at Cosseir is commonly considered to have been the produce of India, imported in the first instance to several parts of Arabia, near the mouth of the Red Sea. The traffic was considerable, however, from whatever sources it sprung; and this is yet evident from the magnitude of the ruins of magnificent Thebes. The Arabs, it is well known, were considerable adepts in astronomy, and had early employed instruments in making nautico-astronomical observations. When Vasco de Gama, in 1497, was at Melinda, near to the ancient Tarshish of Scripture, the King of Melinda presented the Portuguese mariner with a seaman slave. This Malemo Cana, a native of Guzerat, was the most experienced of all the mariners in the Indian seas. When he saw the astrolabe, and other instruments used by De Gama in nauto-astronomical observation, he evinced not the least surprise, declaring that the pilots of the Red Sea, from time immemorial, had used instruments of nearly the same construction for the same purpose. There is no doubt that the science of navigation was considerably advanced upon the Red Sea, as agriculture and its kindred arts were in Upper Egypt. The flying sands from the Lybian Desert, however, eventually covered a great portion of the cultivated valley of the Nile, and caused the seat of Egyptian government to be removed from Thebes to Memphis, which is situated nearly where Cairo now stands. This removal, of course, led the trade more Levant-wards, and ships from Tyre and Sidon, the two chief cities of the Phoenicians, began to come from Syria to Memphis.

the sea.

The Egyptians were never a great commercial nation, however, neither did they ever evince any predilection for Their religion was of a water-hating kind, and their government was almost as restrictive towards foreigners as is that of modern China. The Phoenicians, on the other hand, were quite a trading nation, and Sidon,

their chief city, is the first commercial one of consequence mentioned in history. It was situated only about one hundred and fifty miles distant from the mouths of the Nile, and all the foreign trade of Egypt was in the hands of the Sidonese mariners. It has often been asserted of warlike nations like Greece and Rome, that they carried civilisation and the arts, with their arms, into conquered countries. For this civilisation they were themselves dependent upon commercial nations. Situated in the centre of the then most active nations of the world, Phoenicia sent her ships to Egypt, Cyprus, and Cilicia, and theu, becoming bolder and wider in her range of visitation, she planted colonies in Crete, Greece, Lybia, and Sicily, into all which barbarian countries her mariners peacefully introduced the rudiments of knowledge and the useful arts. Independent of this her Mediterranean trade, Phoenicia had a regular traffic with the southern part of Africa; goods being conveyed by land between Phoenicia and Elath, a port in the northern part of the Red Sea, and then by ships on that sea. Commercial Phoenicia fell, however, before the stride of homicidal Alexander. Warlike Greece, after a dreadful struggle, trampled down with pride and scorn the people who had given them letters, and had taught them the arts.

Next to Phoenicia as a trading nation comes Judea. For seven centuries after their settlement in Egypt to their greatest glory under the reigns of David and Solomon, they had been progressing in numbers and power. Under these kings they made the conquest of Idumea, a province which extended along the north-eastern shore of the Red Sea, and, perceiving the wealth that flowed into their neighbours of Phoenicia from trade, they became desirous of engaging also in foreign commerce. The friendly relations of David and Solomon with the city of Tyre rendered this desire easy of accomplishment; so that corn and oil were sent from Judea, while gold, and silver, and foreign merchandise returned to the Jews from Tarshish and Ophir, and the other distant ports of southeastern Africa and India. Unaccustomed themselves to working ships, the Jews bought the vessels and had them manned with Phoenician sailors. They then, as at this day, could perform all the counting-house and land-work departments of trade; the seafaring part was left to bardier and more physically energetic men. The trade of Judea, however, only existed for a very short period. When the dismemberment of the kingdom took place, after the death of Solomon, the foreign trade almost at once ceased, or fell into the hands of Phoenician merchants.

Phoenicia and Egypt imparted their own vitality of civilisation and trade to Greece, and they declined as she rose. The early annals of few countries tell tales of peace. War and rapine are the most fruitful themes of almost every historian; yet the earliest records of Grecian history bear ample and honourable testimony of these foreigners, who came in peace from the East, bringing the useful arts and letters, and founding cities, and instructing the rude peoples with whom they mingled in agriculture, navigation, and the forms of regular government. Greek civilisation dawned eleven centuries before the Christian era; and long before this time Egypt had been possessed of a great population, and an elaborate political system, which the Greeks improved upon. It was under the influence of labour and trade that Argos, Mycenae, Athens, Thebes, Sparta, and Corinth_rose to that state of magnificence attributed to them, and assuredly not without cause, by Homer. About eight centuries before the Christian era Greece was in the zenith of her greatness, and she would doubtless have improved still more, but baneful intestine wars intermitted her peaceful labours and destroyed her trade, so that she too began to decline. The Dorian invasion of the Peloponesus, called in history the Return of the Heraclidæ,' and considered to have taken place eighty years after the Trojan war, was the beginning of her decay. The Dorians took the Morea, and caused the expatriated descendants of Pelops to move uorthward to Thrace and Phrygia; while the

Emperor, speaking with interest. Yes, Sir,' replied the young artist, who was far from supposing the rank of the person who interrogated him. I live in the midst of what I love, but I am only an assistant to the head gardener.' Napoleon never disapproved of ambitious ideas. He had remarked in the young florist his profound study, and the interest he took in his profession. 'What would you like?' says he. Oh,' said the young Belgian, 'what I would like is madness.' 'But still let me know,' says the Emperor. 'It would require a fairy to realise the dream that has often occupied my mind.' 'I am not a fairy,' replied Napoleon, smiling in his turn, but I am about the person of the Emperor, and he could, if he knew them, realise your wishes.' 'You are too good, sir,' said the young man. 'It is certain that the Emperor could be the fairy that I wish for, for it all depends on him. During a journey that I made for my instruction, I saw in France the gardens of Malmaison, with its eleven bridges and Turkish Kioskes. The Emperor, I understand, has given this charming place to Josephine-if a fairy were here, I would ask for nothing more than to be head gardener to Josephine. You see how modest I am.' • I will think of it,' says the Emperor, almost betraying his incognito, but do not despair of fairy lore;' and after some further conversation with the young botanist, Napoleon withdrew. He left Brussels on the morrow.

During the two months that followed this conversation, the young gardener could scarcely think of anything but the wand of a fairy and the place of head gardener, when one day he received a sealed packet with the arms of the Empress Josephine upon it; it contained his nomination to the post he had so much wished for; he hastened to the spot, and was very soon introduced to the fairy of Lacken-that man who forgot nothing, and in whom he only recognised the Emperor, to express to him almost a species of adoration.

He still occupied the place of first botanist at Malmaison when the Empress Josephine died.—L' Impartial.

WHERE'S PLEASURE FOUND? 'Where's pleasure found?' I ask'd a maid, Who, in a garden fair,

Had chosen from the private shade
Moss roses for her hair.

'Tis found within the palace-walls' -
Thus said the blooming girl;
In masquerades, and full-dress balls,
And in the waltz's twirl.'
And as she spoke a crimson hue
Suffused her lovely cheek:

Oh, may thou ever happy be-

None other transports seck!

'Where's pleasure found?' I ask'd the youth
Who met in joyful glee,

While yet their tiny voices rung
In mirths of infancy.
They pansed awhile, as if to ask
What other joys there were,
Than in the noon-day sun to bask
Or sport in open air?

Oh, happy be thine infant years,
While yet they know no guile,
And never may life's restless fears
E'er damp thy childish smile!
'Where's pleasure found?' I ask'd the old
Whose limbs with palsy shook,
And cheeks, with many a wrinkled fold.
Their length of days bespoke.

Oh, seek not in this world that joy,

Lest thou be led astray,

The only pleasures we enjoy,

Is when to God we pray.'
Oh, blessed be your hoary heads,
For grace to you was given!
And may you rest in pleasure's beds
Where they are found-in heaven!

DIRGE.

They laid her where earliest flowers were bending,
With lives like her own, so fair and so frail;
They laid her where showers of sweet leaves were descending,
Like tears when the branches are stirred by a gale.

They laid her where constant the south winds awaken,
The echo that dwells in that lone myrtle grove,
That the place of her rest might be never forsaken
• By murmurs of sorrow, and murmurs of love.
They raised the white marble, a shrine for her slumbers,
Whose memories remain when the summers depart;
There a lute was engraven, and more than its numbers,
The strings that were broken appealed to the heart.
The bride brought her wreath of the orange-flowers hither,
And cast the sweet buds from her tresses of gold;
Like her in their earliest beauty to wither,
Like her in their sunshine of hope to grow cold.
The wild winds and waters together bewailing,
Perpetual mourners, lamented her doom:
Still sadness 'mid nature's sounds is prevailing,

Ah! what is all nature but one general tomb?
But vainly the spring's gentle children were dying,
And the tears of the morning amid the long grass,
And vain, vainer still was the human heart's sighing,
That one so beloved, and so lovely, should pass.
The grave is an altar, whereon the heart offers

Its feverish pleasures, its troubles, its woes;
Stern, silent, and cold, the dark sanctuary proffers
Its gloomy return of unbroken repose.
How much of the sorrow that life may inherit,
That early departure to slumber will save!
The hope that drags onward the world-weary spirit,
Rests but when its fever is quenched in the grave.
Weep not for the dead with a fruitless recalling-
Their soul on the wings of the morning hath fled;
Mourn rather for those whom yet life is enthralling,
Ah! weep for the living-weep not for the dead.

THE UPAS-TREE.

LEL

THE word upas, perhaps, revives one of the most awe-inspiring recollections of youth, and it has entered into the English vocabulary with a very decided and withering signification. We used to be told regarding the Dead Sea, which lies directly to the east of Jerusalem, calm as a baby asleep, in its deep depression, that birds could not fly over its surface without being dragged by a mysterious gravitation into its bosom; that men might not attempt to sail over it or swim in it, for death was in, and above, and below it; that the cities of the plain lay beneath it, sealed till the judgment-day; and that mortality had written its superscription over the dull, immobile, stagnant, sickened waters that bore heavily upon the foundations of Sodom and Gomorrah. Impressions parallel to those produced by the fables recorded of the Dead Sea were those which arose from the descriptions of a supposed poison-tree in Java, named the upas. It arose like some fell assassin on the young mind, producing fear, and trembling, and vague ideas of the dangers to which mariners were exposed, because in its assumed nature it was a most deadly vampire and destroyer. Nobody dared to approach it lest its pestilential breath might wither them up; no bird or beast might come within the influence of its shade and live. The fabulous account of this tree was likely introduced into Europe by some Dutch mariner at a period when people were prone to believe all sorts of wonderful stories; and that it was generally received is very probable from the circumstance that in nursery circles the belief of its deadly nature is not yet extinct. In the year 1783, however, what pur ported to be a description of this same tree was published by a Dutch surgeon named Foersch; and this description having found its way into the London Magazine,' became the standard by which the collaborateurs of nursery literature measured their accounts of the upas. Foersch was