"some

They don't wear out their time in sleeping and play,

But gather up corn in a sunshiny day,

And for winter they lay up their stores: They manage their work in such regular forms, One would think they foresaw all the frosts and the storms,

And so brought their food within doors."

or the thirty-fourth year of our era, is des- thereby intimating the future opulence of the cribed by Tacitus as an event of the first im- sleeping boy: portance, and worthy of transmission to the remotest posterity "Every five hundred years the phoenix," says Tacitus, "comes into existence, though it is true," he adds, assign four hundred and sixty-one years as the true period. The first phoenix appeared in the reign of Sesostris; the second was seen in the reign of Amasis; and the last under Ptolemy III. This last phoenix, surrounded by a crowd of feathered attendants whom it Bees clustered round the cradle of the sleep-' far outshone in splendor of plumage, took its ing Plato, alighted on his lips, and intimated flight to Heliopolis, the city of the sun." The that the wisdom, of which bees are an emRoman historian does us the favor to inform blem, should one day issue from his eloquent us that "when its time of death approaches, lips. Serpents climb up and lock the infant the phoenix constructs a nest in its native Roscius in their folds; and, in the great pitchcountry, which it inundates with a generative ed battles of the Roman armies, eagles are principle. From this nest springs a new seen hovering in the sky, as heralds of victory. phoenix, which, on attaining maturity, take Mysteries to which men are blind are clearly diligent care to perform the funeral rites of perspicuous to birds; and this, owing to their its deceased parent, and exhibits extraordinary elevation over terrestrial things, the great sagacity in accomplishing its pious task. It length of their vision, the purity of their carries bundles of myrrh from great distances, aerial element, the innocency of their lives, to accustom itself to bear burdens, and, when strong enough in the wing, takes its deceased parent on its back, and bears it through the air to the altar of the sun, where, laying the body down, it burns it with spices."

and their power of ascending into the heavens. The debates in the councils of the gods are audible to birds; indeed augury takes its name from them, augur and augurium being, according to Varro, derived from avium garritus, the chattering of the feathered race.

"At

Believed by the people and blazoned by poetry, and recorded by history, religion also As polytheism was altogether a religion of lent its sanction to these fables, while painting ceremony, negligent of morals and void of and sculpture gave them universal currency. dogma, it consecrated all these dreams, and The humbler animals, not sufficiently elevated thus resigned the management of most magniwhen placed merely on a level with mortals, ficent empires to the meanest animals. were advanced to the dignity of internuncios Rome the consuls and emperors have much between gods and human beings; they were less influence," says Pliny, "than the sacred oracles of the future, and revealed the Divine chickens. The peckings of domestic fowls are will. The most momentous affairs, the armies contemplated with awe and solicitude. The and the colonies of the ancients, were, in all proceedings of the magistrates are regulated dangerous and foreign expeditions, guided by according to the caprices of these fowl. As birds. The dripping fugitives who escaped the chickens show an appetite or reluctance from the deluge of Deucalion, were guided to to feed, the magistrates open or shut their safety by a pack of wolves, and, in gratitude, houses. The legions engage the enemy when their new city was named Wolftown. Egypt the chickens are vivacious; they prognosticate was indebted to the same animal for its safety victory, and command the commanders of the from Ethiopian invasion. The sites of the most renowned cities were indicated to their But it was not merely the Romans-the founders by quadrupeds or birds, as was espe- deities of Olympus applied for information to cially the case in the instance of Rome, Alba, birds. Jupiter, the master of the universe, and Constantinople. The lower animals were was at one time somewhat puzzled to make the real priests of ancient prophecy, and in out the precise centre of the earth; so he enthe very desirable quality of clearness, the gaged two eagles to fly, the one to the east, language of the brutes always surpasses that the other to the west, and proceed constantly of the oracles. Achilles is told by his horse, forward till they met. The eagles obeyed, and without a shadow of ambiguity, that he must the oracle of Delphi being the spot over which die before Troy. In the midst of the Forum, they came together, the ancients believed a patriotic ox warns the astonished people, Delphi to be the umbilical point, the bupanós bellows his threats, of the dangers which envi- of the earth; and in grateful memory of the ron the republic. Ants are seen busily en- meeting of the eagles, the Delphians placed gaged in conveying grains of corn, and plac- two golden images of that bird in the temple ing them in the mouth of the infant Midas, of Apollo. Delphi was to Greece what Meath

world.”

was to Ireland, or the Midhyama of the Hindoos, the Midheim of the Scandinavians, the Cuzco of the Peruvians, and the Palestine of the Hebrews.

ling in ligatures were dragged to their shrines and solemnly murdered before the unintelligent eyes of these "monster gods," fully justifying the remark of the Stagyrite," man is in many instances more stupid and meaner than the beasts." "Oh! how vile must man be," exclaims Pascal, when he subjects himself to quadrupeds, and adores brutes as deities!"

To place animals in, temples and solemnly consecrate them was not enough for Polytheism. It raised them to Olympus, where it associated them with gods. The eagle, bearing thunderbolts in its pounces, was alike the instrument of the pleasures and of the ven- The vileness which Pascal laments, origigeance of Jupiter. Standing by his throne, it nates in an ignorance which he could not rewas ever ready to sweep forward with the medy. To human investigation the intellect message of wrath or the pledges of his affec- of brutes presents the most puzzling enigma tion. Polytheism twisted serpents round the in the visible creation, and what man cannot caduceus of Mercury, placed an owl on the understand, he naturally, if not inevitably, rehelm of Minerva, fed the horses of Olympus verences. Man, unenlightened by revelation, with ambrosia, endowed them with immortality, could not answer the query of the poet :and extolled them as more rapid than the very gods.

"Who taught the nations of the field and flood

To shun their poison and to choose their
food?

Prescient, the tides or tempest to withstand,
Build on the wave or arch beneath the sand?
Who made the spider parallels design,
Sure as Demoirre, without rule or line?
Who bade the stork, Columbus-like, explore
Heavens not his own, and worlds unknown
before?

Who calls the council states the certain day?
Who forms the phalanx and who points the
way?"

It was not enough for Polytheism, which a father of the Church terms "the madness of mankind" to blend brutes indiscriminately with deities; it raised them from the humility of associates to the dignity of gods themselves. Thus Rome instituted the worship of the locust, and celebrated its festival on the eighth of the kalends of December, the object being to prevail on those creatures to forbear destroying the harvests of Italy. Fetishism seemed pushed to its utmost extravagance by the Babylonians and Canaanites, but Egypt really perfected the superstition. The animal king The question was first clearly stated by dom furnished the country of the sphynx with Montaigne and Pereira, philosophers who laid nearly all its religious emblems. Birds, quad- the foundation of the two distinct schools rupeds, and reptiles swarmed in its temples, which divide the philosophic world at this moand were deified by its priests. Not satisfied ment into hostile camps. One of these schools, with this, Egyptian imagination furnished the which may easily trace its origin to Pereira, devotees of Egypt with what may be termed refuses intelligence, or even feeling, to low"monster-gods." It dignified or degraded er animals, while feeling and intelligence, and Anubis with the head of a dog, and set off Isis even soul, are conceded to the brutes by the with the head of a cow, while Osiris was made disciples of Montaigne. The foremost chamto look cunning and ridiculous with the head pions of the spirituality of the human soul of a hawk. Jupiter Ammon looks foolish may be found among those who make the through the head of a ram, and Saturn grins souls of brutes material; while, on the other portentously with the long snout of a crocodile. hand, those philosophers who are most liberal Paganism built temples to house quadrupeds, in endowing brutes with spiritual intelligences, and hollowed ponds for the evolutions of finny are very niggardly and stingy in allowing divinities. At Melita a serpent lay coiled men any souls at all. Brutes are considered within a tower erected exclusively for its preservation, while trains of priests and servants were seen every day proceeding to lay flowers and honey on the altar of this reptile.

by Pereira as insensible puppets, which some veiled hand jerks this way and that; and though they utter cries of joy or sorrow, without being sensible of either sorrow or joy; The countless multitudes of Egypt sadden and though they eat they are not hungry, at once into the deepest mourning at that (to though they drink they are not thirsty. Acthem) appalling event-the death of a dog, a cording to these philosophers, animals do not cat, an ibis, or a jackal. The mourning na-act from anything resembling human knowtion embalms them with pious solicitude, ledge, but solely from the disposition of their orweeps over their inanimate forms, conveys gans. Descartes admits, what it would be very them with solemn pomp into the sepulchres of difficult to deny, that brutes possess life; but royalty, and tenderly places them beside the while he allows them feeling he refuses "buried majesty" of Egypt. The insanity of them intelligence. He illustrates his arguEgypt hav ng deified the brutes, went a step ment by comparing brutes to watches, which farther an awful step: men pale and tremb-though made exclusively of insensible ma

chinery, wheels and springs, can, neverthe- But brutes must be gifted with conscience, less, count minutes and measure time more knowledge and responsibility before they can accurately than men. "The Being who made be admitted to the dignity of another life; them," says Malebranche, "in order to pre- and accordingly, these attributes are freely serve them, endowed brutes with an organiza- given them by the naturalist Bonnet. tion which mechanically avoids destruction Cuvier, Buffon, Locke, and Voltaire, and and danger; but in reality they fear nothing all the writers who have endeavored to peneand desire nothing." The automatism of ani- trate the mystery of existence through the mals was the fashionable philosophy of the medium of metaphysical inquiry, or the stuCartesians and Jansenists, and was at one dy of animal organization, have devoted metime all the rage in France. During the last ditation and investigation to what some term century a swarm of books was published on the intellect, and some the automatism, of the the subject, which instead of elucidating the lower animals. Their contradictions are inmatter, only rendered it more obscure. The numerable. But the medium between the most unfeigned astonishment is expressed by preposterous extravagance of refusing sensamany of these writers at the marvels of in- tion to the very organs of the senses, and the stinct, but these are the very writers who no less ridiculous theory which lodges an imare most emphatic in declaring animals mere mortal spirit in a flea, is to be found in machines. what is termed instinct; "But what is in

The followers of Descartes, who maintained stinct?" asks Voltaire. "It is a substantial

that the animals were inferior to machines, power,' it is a plastic energy?' C'est je ne were opposed by the followers of Montaigne, sais quoi, c'est de l'instinct. The nature of who maintained that they were superior to instinct has been often canvassed subsequently men. The animals are endowed by these to this writer, but the discussion has invariaphilosophers with freewill and foresight; the bly terminated in some unsatisfactory definibrutes speak, laugh, and reflect as we do. tion, proving the invincible ignorance of man Leibnitz, after carefully balancing the attri- on this subject, and that

butes of men and brutes, hesitates to admit the superiority of our species. He declares that some men, and no doubt himself among the number, are decidedly superior to brutes, while the difference between certain stupid men and certain intelligent quadrupeds is so small, that he doubts if any difference really exists, or admitting its existence, that the advantage is on the human side. He argues for the immortality of the souls of brutes, and—

"Thinks, admitted to an equal sky,

His faithful dog shall bear him company."

"Well hast thou said, Athena's wisest son, All that we know is, little can be known." It is one of those mysteries the solution of which is concealed in the mind of the Godhead. The unaided intellect of mam will never pierce it.

"What is this mighty breath, ye sages say,

That in a powerful language, felt, not heard,
Instructs the fowls of heaven? What but God,
Inspiring God, who, boundless Spirit, all
Adjusts, sustains, and agitates the whole."

A CHINESE REMEDY FOR THE CHOLERA A Chinese missionary writes to the Civilta Cattolica of July 12:

each one of my fingers, and pricked each one on the outside at the root of the nails until he brought a drop or two of the same kind of blood from One morning after having said mass I felt each. Then, to see whether the operation had symptoms of Cholera. I had a difficulty of been successful or not, he pricked me with the breathing amounting almost to suffocation. A same in the arm, very near the vein that is cold so intense took possession of my arms and usually opened in blood-letting, and seeing no legs that I could not feel a hot iron applied to blood issue, he pronounced it satisfactory. I still them. Just then a Chinese Christian came in felt, however, a fearful oppression of the lungs. to see me, and as soon as he looked at me he To relieve this, he ran the pin obliquely into the said, "Father, you have the cholera." To be pit of my stomach about two-thirds of its length. certain, however, he looked under my tongue, (This operation the Chinese call opening the and observing the peculiar blackness of the veins mouth of the heart.) Not a drop of blood came there, he remarked, that unless I applied a reme-out here, but in a moment I felt myself entirely dy speedily, I would not live until night. I told relieved, my blood began its circulation, my nahim to do what he could for me. He took an tural warmth returned, and, after an hour of ordinary pin and began pricking me under the slight fever, I went about my avocations. This tongue until he drew out from ten to twenty jet- is the ordinary Chinese remedy. I have known black drops of blood. Then, after rubbing my it to be applied to five of our fathers in cholera, arms gently, he tied a string very tightly about and it failed only once.

From Blackwood's Magazine.

And shell of Austria's cannon make huge gaps. Courier on courier, breathless spurring up, WAGRAM; OR, VICTORY IN DEATH. Bring him untoward tidings of the fight. THE battle of Wagram was fought on the Yet in a marble calm, as if no turn banks of the Danube, in 1809, between the Of Fortune's wheel could shake his clear-eyed Grand-army under Napoleon, and the Austrians soul, under the command of the Archduke Charles. He paces steadily that storm-swept spot, On the 20th May preceding, Napoleon, in at- Rooting by his example to their place tempting to force the passage of the river, had His vext brigades, now mustering dense and fast been signally defeated by the Archduke after a For the bold game on which his soul is set. bloody battle on the field of Aspern, and com-" Massena!" keep the Archduke's right in pelled to retire into a critical position in the islands of the Danube; but six weeks afterwards, on the 5th July, the French Emperor suddenly threw a bridge across the stream, at a point where he was not expected, and established his army in safety on the left bank. Here he was attacked next day by the Archduke Charles and the Austrian Grand-army on the plains of Wagram; while a lesser army, under the Archduke John, advanced towards the same spot from Rhab, but, being inefficiently led, arrived too late to affect the fortunes of the day.

Resolving to anticipate the plans of his dread
antagonist, the Archduke Charles put his columns
in motion at dawn, and, descending from the
plateau of Wagram, attacked the French at all
points, especially pushing forward energetically
his right wing, whose success soon threatened to
cut off the French from their bridge over the
Danube, and spread dismay throughout the rear
of their army.
The charge of the Imperial
Guard in the centre, under General Macdonald, a
Scotchman by extraction, retrieved the fortunes
of the day for the French; and the Austrian
empire, prostrated in the dust, only escaped dis-
memberment by yielding the hand of an Arch-
duchess to the Imperial victor. Wagram de
servedly ranks among the decisive battles of the
world. Had the French lost it, the catastrophe
of Waterloo would have been anticipated in
1809, and the star of Napoleon have sunk for-
ever on the shores of the Danube.

I SAW a sunrise on a battle-field,—
E'en at that early hour the gladsome beams
Broke upon smoke-wreaths and the roar of war;
And o'er the dewy grass rush'd hurrying feet,-
Austria's white uniforms sweeping to the charge,
While France's eagles trembled in the gale.
-Full 'gainst the Gallic left, not half array'd,
The Austrian horse are charging home; and foot
And cannon follow fast, quick belching forth
Their thunders. Troop on troop, amidst the
smoke,

Napoleon sees them, sweeping, between him
And the broad Danube; and their loud hurrahs,
Heard o'er the din of battle, tell how nigh
They come upon his rear, and threat with fire
The floating bridge that brought his host across.
Already stragglers flying from the charge,
Are seen, and baggage-waggons with their
startled team,
Scampering in hot haste for the river's bank.

But in the centre, where the Old Guard stands
Like serried granite 'neath the enemies' fire,
Paces The Emperor" to and fro, in front
Of the tall bearskin shakos,-where the shot

check:

Roll it but backward from the bridge apace,-
And the day yet is ours." But still his ear
Dreads every moment on his right to hear
The thundering of the Archduke's brother's
The vanguard of the host on march from Rhab,
Charging with freshness on his press'd array.

horse.

At last the moment comes, the word is

given,

The Emperor's self, as past his squadrons rush,
Down-bending o'er their chargers in hot haste,
Stabbing the air, cries out, "Give point! Give
point!"

And on sweep cuirassiers, hussars, and all,
Spurring, and thundering their "Vive l'Em-
pereur!"

Rank after rank bright-flashing in the sun
Like brazen waves of battle,-charging on
Right into smoke of th' enemies' batteries.
-Roar upon roar, and flash on flash, break out
Like a volcano bursting,-a red chaos glares ;-
And back they come, the routed horse, pell-mell,
Guashing their teeth in fury at defeat;
Rallying with dinted helms and batter'd mail,
Again to plunge into the thick of fight.
And still the saddles empty, and scared steeds
Rush backwards riderless; and with oaths and

Of flyers straight the serried column moves,
And the war storms anew. Right on they go,
Like men who hold life as a bagatelle,
Up to the brief slope, and in among the guns,
Giving and taking death.-yet still advancing,
Pushing their way with shot and bayonet-thrust
Amidst the foe, who round them like a wall
In front and on each flank hang dense; and still
The cannon thunder on the advancing band.-
Oh, then there was a grim conflict! and the
ranks

Of the French column melted fast away
In the unequal strife; and oft their chief
Sends word for help, and hears no help can
And that he must go on.
"Go on; the day
Hangs on your sword!" And on they went in
sooth.

come,

And as the hostile fire, or want of breath,
Or the re-forming of their shatter'd line,
Brings to a halt that foe-encompass'd band,

Nigh ruin'd by success, the Imperial Voice Or, proudest, sweetest thought of all, have felt Still sends them for sole word: "No aid - Go Victorious o'er themselves as o'er the foe! on !"