until this change in the habits of thinking and feeling in France shall have taken place, (an event of which we see no present indication,) any durable alliance between the two countries is impossible. They may not, we trust that they will not, bé at war; but their peace will not be the peace of friends. If the present hostility of France to England had arisen merely from the recollection of past defeats, it would wear out as those defeats receded more and more into the obscurity of history. If it had arisen from our disapprobation of her interference against the liberties of Spain, or of her colonization of Algiers, or from the Syrian dispute, the only matters in which for the last quarter of a century we have opposed her, it would have subsided when those questions had been disposed of. Her hostility springs from far deeper sources. Sixty years ago, towards the close of the American war, France was the most powerful kingdom in the world. Her population amounted to twenty-six millions, while that of the British islands did not exceed thirteen or fourteen; that of Austria and of European Russia about twenty-five each; and that of Prussia seven or eight. eight. She had flourishing colonies, a fleet which could cope with that of England, and a population superior in wealth and industry to that of almost every other portion of the continent except the Netherlands. On her southern and south-eastern frontiers were Spain, Savoy, and Switzerland, all under her influence; then the territories of petty German states; and then to the north the Austrian Netherlands, the weak dependencies of a distant empire. Now Spain, Savoy, and Switzerland, have thrown off her control. Belgium, in close alliance with England, is on her north, and the grand duchy of Luxemburg, Rhenish Prussia, Rhenish Bavaria, and Baden-all connected by the powerful Germanic confederation-close her in on her remaining frontier. Her military marine, no longer supported by an extensive commerce, has ceased to be formidable. Algiers is the substitute for almost all her colonies; the wealth and industry of her people are scarcely equal to those of the inhabitants of many of the nations round her; and while her population has reached only thirty-four millions, that of the British islands amounts to twentyseven millions, that of Austria to thirty-seven, that of Prussia to fourteen, and that of Russia in Europe to fifty. France looks at the change with a mixture of grief and terror.

She fears, that if her neighbours outstrip her in the next half

century as much as they have done in the last, she will sink to a secondary power. To a bystander, the remedy appears to be obvious. If she would cease to waste the resources of her subjects by a grinding taxation, for the purpose of maintaining armies and fleets of no use but to keep up the enmity of Europe; if she would cease to throw, annually, thousands of men and millions of money into the vortex of Algiers; if she would modify the barbarous Tariff which excludes her from foreign commerce; if she would abolish the restrictions and monopolies which fetter and diminish her internal production, consumption, and exchange; in short, if she would liberally and honestly cultivate the arts of peace-there is no nation whose rivalry she need fear. With her territory, her soil, and her climate, she might in half a century possess a prosperous population of fifty millions. But the selfish short-sighted interests of large classes, and the vanity, impatience, and ignorance of all, seem to render such measures as these, for the present, impracticable. Self-condemned, therefore, to slow progress herself, she wishes to impede the progress of others. Since she cannot overtake them, she wishes to drag them back. Of all her rivals, England is the most powerful, and therefore the most detested. She believes, and we admit the justice of the opinion, that England would be seriously injured by a war. And hence her earnest desire to involve her in one-a desire which must last as long as its causes continue; that is to say, as long as England remains powerful, and France envious and ambitious. It is true, that France cannot be engaged in a serious war without overthrowing her present dynasty and her present constitution. They have no roots to withstand a storm. And this is the principal security for peace. But we doubt much whether the attachment of France to such a dynasty, and to such a constitution, would restrain her if a plausible pretext for war should arise. And the more numerous are the matters in which France and England have to act in common, the more numerous their points of political contact, the more numerous will be the occasions for a rupture.

We will venture to go further, and to suggest a doubt whether the variety and activity of our general diplomacy, since the termination of the war, may not have been somewhat excessive. Without adopting the opinion of one of our shrewdest statesmen, that the best thing for our foreign affairs would be, to lock up the Foreign Office for three or four years, and hide the key; we may wish that that Office were less easily accessible. It is possible that a plausible pretext might be brought forward for every case of our interference; but in how many of those cases were there not plausible grounds for remaining quiet? Up to the

present time, interference has been the rule, and abstinence from it the exception. We are inclined to wish the rule and the exception to change places. It is not necessary, indeed it would not be prudent, for England to announce beforehand what are the precise points which she would consider cases for remonstrance, or cases for war. What we wish is, that it should be felt that she seeks to avoid all interference; that when she does interfere, it is for a great object, and one in which others are interested as well as herself; and that, in such a cause, she will put forth her whole force.

How much expense, how much anxiety, how much danger, and how much enmity, has America escaped by her system of non-interference ? What is the circumstance which has allowed her to adopt that wise and fortunate system? Chiefly her belief that she is protected by the Atlantic from serious attack. But the sea which separates America from Europe, separates England from the Continent. We are nearly as difficult of access as she is. Experience, indeed, might lead to the belief that Washington is more exposed than London. It is supposed that our constant exertions are necessary in order to keep the Balance of Power. It is difficult, however, to believe that this Balance may not be preserved by the mutual fears and mutual exertions of the great continental monarchies, with less action on the part of England. Germany now knows her own power; France is beginning to appreciate the power of Germany; Russia is an object of jealousy to both. Is it certain that our intermeddling may not have tended as often to disturb the equipoise as to adjust it? We must add, that the indifference of the British public to foreign affairs, and the secrecy in which our negotiations are enveloped, greatly useful as these circumstances are in many respects, sometimes add to the dangers to which all diplomacy is exposed. The publicity of all the acts, and of all the correspondence of the American Government, and the co-operation of the Senate in treaties, have their peculiar evils and dangers; but they have at least one advantage. The country knows where it is. It cannot be surprised into an engagement or a war. It cannot be suddenly informed that, during a period of apparent inactivity, the national faith and the national honour have been pledged to promises, demands, and threats, which the national opinion would have refused to sanction. But in England, alliances, guarantees, and all the other expedients of diplomacy, may be concocting in Downing Street, while the Bank Parlour and the Royal Exchange enjoy a fancied security; and the nation may be awakened from its dream of safety only by the presentation of Papers and the demand for a Vote of Credit.

ART. II.-1. Mémoire sur la Variation de la Temperature dans les Alpes de la Suisse. Par M. VENETZ, (Denkschriften der Allgemeinen Schweitzerischen Gesellschaft. Band I. 2te

Abtheilung.) Read 1821.

2. Naturhistorische Alpenreise. thurn: 1830.

Published 1833.

Von F. J. HUGI. 8vo. Solo

3. Notice sur la Cause probable du Transport des Blocs Erratiques de la Suisse. Par M. J. DE CHARPENTIER. 8vo, pp. 20. Paris: 1835. (Extrait du Tome VIII. des Annales des Mines.)

4. Discours prononcé à l'ouverture des séances de la Société Helvetique des Sciences Naturelles à Neufchatel, le 24 Juillet 1837. Par L. AGASSIZ. 8vo, pp. 32. 1837.

5. Etudes sur les Glaciers. Par L. AGASSIZ. 8vo. With folio Atlas of Plates. Neufchatel: 1840.

6. Theorie des Glaciers de la Savoie. RENDU. 8vo. Chambérry: 1840.

Par M. LE CHANOINE

7. Essai sur les Glaciers, et sur le Terrain Erratique du Bassin du Rhone. Par JEAN DE CHARPENTIER. 8vo. Lausanne : 1841.

8. Etudes Géologiques dans les Alpes. Par M. L. A. NECKer. Tome I. 8vo. Paris: 1841.

G EOLOGY as a science is subject to revolutions similar to those of which it treats. Alternations of opinion are as frequent as those of strata; and a change comes, from time to time, over the spirit of the cosmogonal dream, as one or another agent or mode of action seems best to fit the explanation of a certain large class of phenomena. At one time all in geology is turmoil, earthquake, and conflagration; at another, the speculator sees in the evidences of past change nothing but proofs of the long continuance of the existing comparatively peaceable state of things. For a series of years, whilst Plutonism' was on the ascendant, all was to be accounted for by the latent or developed action of heat-at another time, water or an 'universal 'menstruum' bathed the surfaces of our valleys and mountains, producing by its changing condition not only all the chemical, but nearly all the mechanical changes which the earth's surface has undergone.

A soberer spirit of philosophizing has united the two apparently

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inconsistent doctrines of geological change, and ascribes to fire and to water their respective shares in the manipulations—if we may use the phrase-which reduced the external crust of a once chaotic sphere to a condition fit for the existence and maintenance of varied organic bodies. But amidst the prevalence of that modified Huttonianism' which expresses the geological creed of a great majority of the cosmogonists of the present day, one condition has been held as incontrovertible, namely that the ancient world was hotter than the modern one; that tropical animals inhabited the temperate and even the polar regions of the globe; and that the palm and tree fern clothed the shores where now flourish only the dwarf birch and the Norwegian pine. The fossil plants of the carboniferous period, and the shells of all but the most recent of the tertiary formations, point alike to a great but indeterminate excess of warmth in those times above the present.* But the generalization so long accepted, is now assailed by a weight and combination of evidence which demands the fullest investigation. An agent, which may be termed new in the application which has been made of it, is now to be pressed into the service of geology; and the Plutonism' of the older theorists, and the Neptunism' of their successors, are about to be succeeded, in the history of hypotheses, by the universal ICE-FLOOD with which the modern school of Swiss Naturalists would invest our globe, from the tropics to the poles.

It is to explain the more recent and superficial changes of the earth's surface that the mechanical agency of permanent ice, or Glaciers, is proposed to be introduced. Even the fundamental questions of the aqueous or igneous origin of Granite and Trap rocks, and the doctrine of Universal Formations, have not been more keenly contested by geologists than the nature and duration of those processes by which the most recent geological changes have been effected, the final contour given to the soil, and large masses of rock detached from their natural position, and transported, whether to form gravel beds of enormous thickness or solid angular fragments, to surprising distances from their origin. Such phenomena are the accumulations called the drift in the south-east of England, the gravel beds of the Great Glen of Scotland and the beaches of Glen Roy; the occurrence of fragments of granite, native only in the Scandinavian peninsula, dispersed along the southern shores of the Baltic, and the plains of Russia, Estonia, and Denmark; or lastly, the deposition, on the calcareous chain of the Jura, of angular masses of rock,

* Lyell's Elements of Geology, 1841, i. 285, ii. 125.