The Quarterly Review

ART. I. Travels in New England and New York. By Timothy Dwight, S.T.D. LL.D. late President of Yale College; Author of Theology Explained and Defended. 4 vols. Newhaven.

THIS writer was known in England about thirty years ago by an heroic poem upon the Conquest of Canaan, and a descriptive one, entitled Greenfield Hill,' both republished in this country. More recently his System of Theology has been reprinted here, and with considerable success. But the work before us, though the humblest in its pretences, is the most important of his writings, and will derive additional value from time, whatever may become of his poetry and of his sermons.

Soon after Dr. Dwight had been appointed President of Yale College, he found it necessary for his health to employ the vacations in travelling-of all restoratives, both for body and mind, the most effectual for men of sedentary habits. A wish to gratify those who, a hundred years hence, might feel curiosity concerning his native country, made him resolve to prepare a faithful description of its existing state. He made notes, therefore, and collected information, on the spot; the materials were arranged and composed at leisure; and when a weakness of sight compelled him to desist from the undertaking, the students of his college for him in successiona fact creditable to both parties, as showing

offered to attachment on their part which could not

have existed unless it had been deserved. The work is in the
form of
of Letters addressed to an English gentleman; the author,
however, wished it to be understood that they were written for
his own countrymen, supposing that few persons in Great Bri-
tain felt any desire to be acquainted with the condition of the
United States, or the real character of the Americans.

By the government,' he says, indeed we must, from the extent of our territory, our local circumstances, our population and our commerce, be considered as possessing a degree of political importance; and by the merchants of Liverpool, and the manufacturers of Manchester, Birmingham and Sheffield, we may be regarded with some attention as customers. But, except by the religious part of the British nation, we seem to be chiefly unknown or forgotten in the character of rational beings; or known and remembered almost only to be made the object of contempt and calumny. A book which professes nothing more than to give a description of a country and a people regarded in this

VOL. XXX, NO. LIX.

manner,

manner, can form no claims on the attention of those by whom the subjects of which it treats are thus estimated. It may, indeed, be read, or at least reviewed, by some or other of the literary journalists of Great Britain. From these gentlemen Americans and their writings have customarily met with one kind of treatment only. I neither claim, nor wish, any exemption from the common lot of my countrymen.'

There would be little courage in taking up a dead man's gauntlet; but, had the author been living, we should have examined his book in the same temper as is now brought to the work; with no hostile feeling toward him or his country, though with a natural and proper predilection for our own; willing to learn, inquire and compare; glad of whatever grounds we may perceive for believing that the Americans may become more and more an enlightened and a virtuous people; but not without a sense of satisfaction and thankfulness if, in those points wherein the constitution of their society differs most essentially from ours, cause should appear for concluding that, in proportion as they have departed from the example of the mother-country, where that example might have been followed, they have gone astray.

The present work (like all those collections of travels which begin and end always at the same place) is not one in which a reviewer may follow the author by the thread of his adventures. In default, therefore, of that easy and natural arrangement which a traveller's journal usually affords, we must form an artificial one, and notice the facts which the author records; the theories which he advances; and lastly, his political views, whether of retrospection or of hope.

The remarks upon natural history are those of an observant and sagacious man who makes no pretensions to science; they are more interesting therefore than those of a merely scientific traveller; and, indeed, science is not less indebted to such observers, than history to the faithful chroniclers and humbler annalists of former times. In travelling through the forests (which, even in the old states of America, still occupy no small portion of the soil, notwithstanding the improvident destruction of wood) Dr. Dwight was forcibly struck with the wisdom of Divine Providence displayed in the decay of the foliage. Were the leaves, when they fall, to go through the usual processes of fermentation and putrefaction, like other vegetables, the atmosphere would be rendered so unwholesome that it would be impossible for man either to inhabit or to clear a forested country. But the juices are exhaled before the leaves fall; they lie lightly on the ground, so as to permit a free circulation of air; so far from being offensive in their decay, they have even a peculiar fragrance, which poets have sometimes noticed among the melancholy charms of autumn; the mould into which they are converted appears to be the best of

all

all manures, being suited to more kinds, and producing higher degrees of vegetation than any other.' The pioneers of civilization bivouaque, or, in the true phrase, squat, in full assurance of their salubrity, in the woods; and endemical diseases are unknown there till men, collected in societies, prepare the way for and induce them, by their improvidence, their errors, their injurious habits or their crimes. For example, no country abounds more with small lakes and ponds than New England: they are supplied by subjacent springs; the water is cool, sweet and pure; and the margins are universally healthy ground. Dr. Dwight could not, after 'very extensive inquiries,' discover a single exception to this fact; but where dams have been raised, and artificial mill-ponds constructed, remittent and autumnal fevers have become endemic to an alarming degree.

The Mongrel Cedar appears to shed its leaves in a manner which has not yet been observed in any other tree. It resembles in its growth a spreading oak of moderate size-which in Europe would be an enormous tree. In autumn red spots, not unlike roses at a little distance, but generally larger, are dispersed over it: upon examination it is found that these are small twigs, the growth of the existing, or perhaps the preceding, year, which die together with their leaves, assume a red or reddish brown colour in their decay, and fall; so that the tree sheds its leaves not singly but with the spray from which they spring, exchanging annually, according to Dr. Dwight's observations, about a third of its foliage, in this manner. Singular as the fact is, it seems heretofore to have passed unnoticed, and the author could find no person able to give him any account of it: but he had opportunities of examining and verifying it himself in his different jour

nies.

The seeds of forest trees (and probably of all others) spring more readily and successfully, he tells us, when left on the surface, than when buried in the ground even at a very small depth. He is mistaken however in asserting that they will not germinate upon a sward; for numerous instances to the contrary have fallen under our own observation: the fallen leaves supply them with moisture, and conceal them from birds and beasts. The changes which take place in forest vegetation in America, and which former travellers have related without always obtaining the credit they deserved, are noticed by the present author; and he has collected some curious facts to illustrate the subject. Wher oaks have been destroyed, pines or other trees have sprung up Such changes of dynasty in the forest world are common in New England and other parts of North America where the land has been cultivated, or cleared by fire, and again covered with wood; and

A 2

Dr.

Dr. Dwight tells us it is 'commonly attributed by unthinking, as it has often been by thinking men, to equivocal generation; the material elements being supposed to possess a chemical power of originating and perfecting vegetation without the aid of seeds.' The opinion might perhaps be more accurately explained as agreeing with Azara's whimsical notion of an occasional creation. Neither theory, however, were it admitted, would afford the materialist the slightest help in his impossible system; and the present difficulty, as Dr. Dwight has clearly shown, stands in need of no such solution. His grandfather about a century ago abandoned the cultivation of a field because of the savages: upon the piece of ground thus left to nature, a grove of white pines sprung up, covering it, and exactly retaining its figure. There was not, and probably had not for ages been, a single tree of that kind near the spot; here then was proof that cultivation had brought up the seeds of a former forest. A judge in Vermont informed him that cherry trees in immense numbers, and of a peculiar species, sprung up in the cultivated fields of his estate, there being no tree of that kind in the original forest. 'As he was walking in a field newly broken up and recently ploughed, he observed the infant stems of these cherry trees springing up in great multitudes. His workmen, who believed in the doctrine of equivocal generation, triumphantly asked him whence he supposed these trees to proceed? Without answering the question he forced his hand a little distance into the earth, and drew out a handful of cherrystones.' These facts are decisive: but how, in a country which had never been cultivated, the forests of prior growth should have become extinct, and how seeds, which in the course of nature are dropt on the surface, should have been buried beneath an accumulation of soil deep enough to preserve them till chance should turn them up, are questions more easily to be asked than answered.

Some years ago, when some of the marshes on the eastern coast of England were drained, there sprang up a great quantity of white mustard on the earth which was thrown out of the ditches. The plant had not been known to grow any where in the vicinity within the memory of man; but it was ascertained, upon inquiry, that it had been extensively cultivated there by some Dutch settlers two centuries before. Many similar instances the author could have advanced; and he says, if seeds will continue possessed of vegetable life for twenty years, they may unquestionably for two hundred, two thousand, or twenty thousand. A much more extraordinary fact, concerning the preservation of an animal seed, came under his immediate knowledge:-but the fact and the reasoning upon it may best be given in the author's own words.

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The Quarterly Review, Том 30