and the great have elbow-room at their feasts? or was it simply, as other philosophers think, because human experience is still in its boyhood, and men, in some respects, are not yet beyond the ants?

The sight of one of these military shows is, to us, the most elevating and the most humiliating thing in the world. It seems at once to raise us to the gods, and to sink us to the brutes. We feel of what noble things men are capable, and into what half-witted things they may be deluded. At one moment we seem to ride in company with them to some glorious achievement, and rejoice in constituting a part of all that strength and warm blood which is to be let out for some great cause. At the next, they appear to us a parcel of poor fools tricked, and tricked out; and we, because we are poorer ones, who see without being able to help it, must fain have the feeble tears come in our eyes. Oh! in that sorry little lookingglass of a tear, how many great human shows have been reflected, and made less!

But these weaknesses belong to the physical part of us. Philosophy sees farther, and hopes all. That war is an unmixed evil, we do not believe. We are sure it is otherwise. It sets in motion many noble qualities, and (in default of a better instrument) often does a great deal of good. That it is not, at the same time, a great and monstrous evil, we believe as little. One field, after a battle, with the cries of the wounded and the dying, the dislocations, the tortures, the defeatures, and the dismemberings, the dreadful lingering (perhaps on a winter's night), the shrieks for help, and the agonies of mortal thirst,-is sufficient to do away all shallow and blustering attempts to make us take the show of it for the substance. Even if we had no hope that the world could ever get rid of war, we should not blind ourselves to this its ghastly side; for its evils would then accumulate for want of being considered; and it is better at all times to look a truth manfully in the face, than trust for security ourselves, or credulity from others, to an effeminate hiding of our eyes. But the same love of truth that disguises nothing, may hope everything; and it is this that shall carry the world forward to benefits unthought of, if men of genius once come to set it up as their guide and standard.

What we intended by our present article was this: to suggest, whether we ought to value ourselves on any custom or skill which we possess in common with the lower animals; or whether we ought not rather to consider the participation as an argument, that, in that respect, we have not yet got beyond the commonest instinct. If the military conduct of the ants be not instinct (or whatsoever human pride pleases to understand by that term), then are they in possession, so far, of human reason, and so far we do not see beyond them. If it [PART 11.]

be instinct, then war, and the conduct of it, are not the great things we suppose them; and a Wellington and a Washington may but follow the impulse of some mechanical energy, just as some insects are supposed to construct their dwellings in a particular shape, because they partake of it in their own conformation. In either case, we conceive, we ought to remind ourselves, that the greatest distinction hitherto discovered between men and other creatures is, that the human being is capable of improvement, and of seeing beyond the instincts common to all. Therefore, war is not a thing we arrive at after great improvement; it is a thing we begin with, before any; and what we take for improvements in the mode of conducting it, are only the result of such circumstances as can be turned to account by creatures no higher in the scale of being than insects.

We make very disingenuous use of the lower animals, in our reasonings and analogies. If we wish to degrade a man, we say he acts like a brute;-if, on the other hand, we would vindicate any part of our conduct as especially natural and proper, we say the very brutes do it. Now, in one sense of the word, everything is natural which takes place within the whole circle of nature; and being animals ourselves, we partake of much that is common to all animals. But if we are to pique ourselves on our superiority, it is evident that we are superior in proportion as we are rationally and deliberately different from the animals beneath us; while they, on the other hand, have a right to share our 66 glory," or to pull it down, according to the degrees in which they resemble

us.

The conclusion is, that we ought attentively to consider in what points the resemblance is to be found, and in what we leave them manifestly behind. Creatures who differ from ourselves may, it is true, have perceptions of which we are incapable, perhaps nobler ones; but this is a mere assumption: we can only reason from what we know; and it is to be presumed, that they are as inferior to us in all which we reckon intellectual and capable of advancement, as they are known to be so in general by their subjection to our uses, by the helps which we can afford them, by the mistakes they make, the points at which they stop short, and the manner in which we can put to flight their faculties, and whole myriads of them.

What faculties then have beasts and insects in common with us? What can they do, that we do also?Let us see. Beavers can build houses, and insects of various sorts can build cells. Birds also construct themselves dwellingplaces suitable to their nature. The orangoutang can be taught to put on clothes; he can sit up and take his wine at dinner; and the squirrel can play his part in a dessert, as far as the cracking of nuts. Animals, in general,

G

love personal cleanliness, and eat no more than is fit for them, but can be encouraged into great sensuality. Bees have a monarchical government: foxes understand trick and stratagem; so do hundreds of other animals, from the dog down to the dunghill-beetle; many are capable of pride and emulation, more of attachment, and all of fear, of anger, of hostility, or other impulses for self-defence; and all perhaps are susceptible of improvement from without; that is to say, by the help of man. Seals will look on while their young ones fight, and pat and caress the conqueror; and now it is discovered that ants can conduct armies to battle, can make and rescue prisoners, and turn them to account. Huber, in addition to these discoveries, found out that they possessed a sort of cattle in a species of aphides, and that they made them yield a secretion for food, as we obtain milk from the cows. It appears to be almost equally proved, that animals have modes of communicating with one another, analogous to speech. Insects are supposed to interchange a kind of dumb language, to talk, as it were, with fingers, by means of their antennæ; and it is difficult to believe, that in the songs of birds there is not both speech and inflection, communications in the gross, and expressions modified by the occasion.

Let the reader, however, as becomes his philosophy, take from all this whatever is superfluous or conjectural, and enough will remain to show, that the least and lowest animals, as well as man, can furnish themselves with dwellings; can procure food; can trick and deceive; are naturally clean and temperate, but can be taught to indulge their senses; have the ordinary round of passions; encourage the qualities necessary to vigour and self-defence; have polity and kingly government; can make other animals of use to them; and finally, can make war, and conduct armies to battle in the most striking modes of human strategy. Animals in general, therefore, include among themselves

Masons, or house-builders;
Getters of bread;

Common followers of the senses ;
Common-place imitators;

Pursuers of their own interest, in cunning
as well as in simplicity;

Possessors of the natural affections; Encouragers of valour and self-exertion; Monarchs and subjects; Warriors, and leaders to battle. Whatever, among men, is reducible to any of these classes, is to be found among beasts, birds, and insects. We are not to be ashamed of anything we have in common with them, merely because we so have it. On the contrary, we are to be glad that any quality, useful or noble, is so universal in the creation. But whatever we discern among them, of sordid or

selfish, there, without condemning them, we may see the line drawn, beyond which we can alone congratulate ourselves on our humanity; and whatever skill they possess in common with us, there we are to begin to doubt whether we have any reason to pique ourselves on our display of it, and from that limit we are to begin to consider what they do not possess.

We have often had a suspicion, that military talent is greatly overrated by the world, and for an obvious reason: because the means by which it shows itself are connected with brute force and the most terrible results; and men's faculties are dazzled and beaten down by a thunder and lightning so formidable to their very existence. If playing a game of chess involved the blowing up of gunpowder and the hazard of laying waste a city, men would have the same grand idea of a game at chess; and yet we now give it no more glory than it deserves. Now it is doubtful, whether the greatest military conqueror, considered purely as such, and not with reference to his accidental possession of other talents, such as those of Cæsar and Xenophon, is not a mere chessplayer of this description, with the addition of greater self-possession. His main faculty is of the geometrical or proportion-giving order; of which it is remarkable, that it is the only one, ranking high among those of humanity, which is partaken by the lowest ignorance and what is called pure instinct; by arithmetical idiots, and architectural bees. Idiots have been known to solve difficult arithmetical questions, by taking a thought which they could do for no other purpose; that is to say, by reference to some undiscovered faculty within them, that looks very like an instinct, and the result of the presence or absence of something, which is not common to higher organisation. In Jameson's Philosophical Journal for April,* is a conjecture, that the hexagonal plan of the cells of a hornet is derived from the structure of its fore-legs. It has often struck us, that the architecture of the cells of bees might be owing to a similar guidance of conformation; and by the like analogy, extraordinary powers of arithmetic might be traceable to some physical peculiarity, or a tendency to it; such as the indication of a sixth finger on the hands of one of the calculating boys that were lately so much talked of. We have sometimes thought, that even the illustrious Newton had a face and a set of features singu larly accordant with mathematical uniformity and precision. And there is a professional cast of countenance attributed, not perhaps without reason, to warriors of the more me

*See the Magazine of Natural History for July, a work lately set up. We beg leave to recommend this, and all

similar works, to the lovers of truth and inquiry in general; physical discovery having greater alliance with moral than is suspected, and the habit of sincere investigation on all points being greatly encouraged by its existence on any one.

XIV. A WALK FROM DULWICH TO BROCKHAM.

IN A LETTER TO A FRIEND.

With an original Circumstance or two respecting Dr. Johnson.

DEAR SIR,

As other calls upon my pilgrimage in this world have interrupted those weekly voyages of discovery into green lanes and rustic houses of entertainment which you and I had so agreeably commenced, I thought I could not do better than make you partaker of my new journey, as far as pen and paper could do it. You are therefore to look upon yourself as having resolved to take a walk of twenty or thirty miles into Surrey without knowing anything of the matter. You will have set out with us a fortnight ago, and will be kind enough to take your busts for chambermaids, and your music (which is not so easy) for the voices of stage-coachmen.

Illness, you know, does not hinder me from walking; neither does anxiety. On the contrary, the more I walk, the better and stouter I become; and I believe if everybody were to regard the restlessness which anxiety creates, as a signal from nature to get up and contend with it in that manner, people would find the benefit of it. This is more particularly the case if they are lovers of Nature, as well as pupils of her, and have an eye for the beauties in which her visible world abounds; and as I may claim the merit of loving her heartily, and even of tracing my sufferings (when I have them) to her cause, the latter are never so great but she repays me with some sense of sweetness, and leaves me a certain property in the delight of others, when I have little of my own. "O that I had the wings of a dove!" said the royal poet; "then would I fly away and be at rest." I believe there are few persons, who having felt sorrow, and anticipating a journey not exactly towards it, have not partaken of this sense of the desirability of remoteness. A great deal of what we love in poetry is founded upon it; nor do any feel it with more passion, than those whose sense of duty to their fellow-creatures will not allow them to regard retirement as anything but a refreshment between their tasks, and as a wealth of which all ought to partake.

But David sighed for remoteness, and not for solitude. At least, if he did, the cares of the moment must have greatly overbalanced the habits of the poet. Neither doves nor poets can very well do without a companion. Be that as it may, the writer of this epistle, who is a still greater lover of companionship than poetry (and he cannot express his liking more strongly) had not the misfortune, on the present occasion, of being compelled to do without it; and as to remoteness, though his pilgrimage was to extend little beyond twenty

miles, he had not the less sense of it on that account. Remoteness is not how far you go in point of ground, but how far you feel yourself from your common-places. Literal distance is indeed necessary in some degree; but the quantity of it depends on imagination and the nature of circumstances. The poet who can take to his wings like a dove, and plunge into the wood nearest him, is farther off, millions of miles, in the retreat of his thoughts, than the literalist, who must get to Johnny Groat's in order to convince himself that he is not in Edinburgh.

Almost any companion would do, if we could not make our choice, provided it loved us and was sincere. A horse is good company, if you have no other; a dog still better. I have have often thought, that I could take a child by the hand, and walk with it day after day towards the north or the east, a straight road, feeling as if it would lead into another world,

"And think 'twould lead to some bright isle of rest.” But I should have to go back, to fetch some grown friends.

There were three of us on the present occasion, grown and young. We began by taking the Dulwich stage from a house in Fleet-street, where a drunken man came into the tap, and was very pious. He recited hymns; asked the landlady to shake hands with him; was for making a sofa of the counter, which she prevented by thrusting his leg off with some indignation; and being hindered in this piece of jollity, he sank on his knees to pray. He was too good-natured for a Methodist ; so had taken to stiff glasses of brandy-andwater,

"To help him to support uneasy steps

Over the burning marle."

He said he had been "twice through the gates of hell;" and by his drinking, poor fellow, he seemed to be setting out on his third adventure. We called him Sin-bad. By the way, when you were a boy, did you not think that the name of Sindbad was allegorical, and meant a man who had sinned very badly! Does not every little boy think so? One does not indeed, at that time of life, know very well what to make of the porter Hindbad, who rhymes to him; and I remember I was not pleased when I came to find out that Hind and Sind were component words, and meant Eastern and Western.

The stage took us to the Greyhound at Dulwich, where, though we had come from another village almost as far off from London on the northern side, we felt as if we had newly got into the country, and ate a hearty supper accordingly. This was a thing not usual with us; but then everybody eats "in the country;" -there is "the air;" and besides, we had eaten little dinner, and were merrier, and