fix a piece of castoreum to the fork on which they wind up their fishing lines; and when this is thrown into the water, the whales presently plung down and disappear: oil of juniper will also drive them off. It is by similar means that man must learn to protect himself against the insect tribes, the most annoying of his enemies, and against many of whom there is no other possible means of defence. The white streaked eagle formerly built its nest on Tintholin, one of the smallest islands of the group, but which was then inhabited, as is proved by the still existing ruins of some houses. One day an eagle darted upon an infant, which was lying at a little distance from its mother, and carried it to its nest; this was upon a rock so steep towards the summit, that the boldest bird-catchers had never ventured to climb it: the mother, however, ascended; but she came too late, the child was dead, and its eyes torn out. This destructive bird is no longer to be found in Feroe ; if at any time a solitary one strays thither, such an invasion is the unica necessitas which calls the inhabitants to arms. There is but one of the falcon tribe, the lanner, or Falco lanarius, not so large as a pigeon, and yet the tyrant of these islands; the starlings, when pursued by this bird, will take shelter in a church or house, and seek refuge even in the presence of man. They often escape by means of what is called a wind-house, a building for drying meat and fish, the sides of which consist of laths placed at a very small distance from each other through these the starling slips, and the lanner is frequently found jammed between them, the victim of its own eagerness. The little wren is called, by the Feroese, musabrouir, or the mouse's brother, because, like the mouse, it creeps through the chinks in these wind-houses, and feasts on the dried meat.

The martin, which in England is still considered as bringing good fortune to the house under the eaves of which it builds its nest, is regarded as a bird of ill omen in Feroe : it never builds here, and the islanders dread its appearance, believing that either there will be a destructive sickness in the country, or that a corpse will soon be carried from the house over which it happens to fly. The crows are singularly troublesome, deriving great part of their subsistence from plunder. Not content with picking seed from the fields, they dig up the newly planted potatoes, destroy the barley before it is ripe, cut off the cabbage roots, and those of almost every other garden vegetable ; devour the fish which is hung up to dry, and carry off the goslings and ducklings. Necessity has made them omnivorous. They will even enter houses, where people are sitting, in search of prey. Those extraordinary assemblies, which may be called crowcourts, are observed here as well as in the Scotch isles: they collect in great numbers as if they had been all summoned for the occasion. A few of the flock sit with drooping heads; others, says Landt,

seem as grave as if they were judges, and some are exceedingly ac tive and noisy in the course of about an hour the company disperse, and it is not uncommon, after they have flown away, to find one or two left dead on the spot. Dr. Edmonston, in his view of the Zetland islands, says, that sometimes the meeting does not appear to be complete before the expiration of a day or two, crows coming from all quarters to the session. As soon as they are all arrived, a very general noise ensues, and shortly after, the whole fall upon one or two individuals, and put them to death; when this execution has been performed, they quietly disperse. The crows in Feroe feed also upon shell fish, which they let fall on the rocks from a considerable height. They manage better in this, than the Hematopus Ostrilegus, which sometimes, when a large muscle is gaping, thrusts its bill in, and is caught by the closing shell. The natives have a strange notion about the heron, attributing to it a ridiculous practice for promoting or rather ensuring digestion, directly the reverse of that medical operation which old fablers have said was borrowed from the stork.

In the winter of 1797, a plague prevailed among the cats in Feroe; there was a very general mortality among them about the same time in England, and that it should have prevailed in these remote islands when it could not possibly have been communicated by contagion, is a remarkable fact. Sea bathing was tried with little effect; emetics were administered successfully, but the cases were not sufficiently numerous to establish the remedy. The life of a domestic cat is of some value there, for rats are very numerous; they will destroy a corn-field in the course of two nights, and when they can get at the sea fowl, they commit such havock among them, that they leave little to be done by the fowlers. They have, however, since their introduction nearly rid the islands of mice. The Hanover rat made his appearance there in 1768, arriving upon the wreck of a Norway ship which was lost on the island of Lewis, and drifted to Suderoe. It is observed that he will not touch any thing that is poisoned; sagacious as the rat is, this must be owing to want of skill in disguising the poison, for in England, of which these vermin have made a more complete conquest than any former invader, (having literally extirpated the original rat of the country,) poison is the most common method of destroying them.

Hay tea, though in England regarded as a new discovery in feeding, is given to the cows in Feroe. It seems to have been long in use in other countries. Fifty years ago the Dublin Society printed instructions for rearing calves with a portion of this food, according, as they say, to the method practised in divers countries. Kine are subject there to white swellings in the corners of the mouth, which prevent the animal from eating or ruminating, but are easily cut out. If a cow

loses its appetite from any other cause, the remedy is a superstitious one. All the churches are covered with living turf; two or three handfulls of grass plucked from that part of the roof which is directly over the choir, the altar, or the pulpit, are supposed to be a specific. Whitelocke in his Journal, (a book every way interesting,) descibes the sheep and goats as clambering up the Swedish country houses to graze upon the turf with which they are covered; the buildings being very low, and the roof just sloping sufficiently for the wet to run off. This mode of covering houses is common in Feroe. in one part of Stromoe, which is surrounded on all sides by steep hills, (except toward the sea,) every bull, which is either bred or brought there, becomes exceedingly ferocious and dangerous; the same fact is observed in Borrodale at the head of Derwentwater, and for the same reason, they are made furious by the echo of their own bellowing.

There is a curious section in this volume under the head of Amphibia. In Feroe there are no frogs, toads, lizards, snakes, or serpents; and no amphibious animal of any kind, a circumstance which is worthy of remark.' Certes; but not worthy of a whole section; for this is the whole. This, however, seems to be a Danish way of making chapters. In Horrebow's Natural History of Iceland there are two such, chap. 42. Concerning owls. There are no owls in the whole island.'-and chapter 72. Concerning snakes. No snakes of any kind are to be met with throughout the whole island.' Would that our book-makers were equally honest, and when they came to a subject upon which they had no information to communicate, would frankly tell us so, instead of covering the shallowness of their meaning with the froth of their discourse! In the Danes this is not a trick of book-making, it proceeds from their love of method.

One melancholy reflection arises upon perusing this interesting volume. The Feroese inhabiting a group of rocky islands in a bleak and ungenial climate, and earning great part of their food by the perilous occupations of fishing and fowling, are an inoffensive and good people. In the happier regions of Polynesia and of the sugar islands, where earth almost spontaneously gives its fruit, and man has no other business than that of enjoyment, we behold vices and atrocities disgraceful to human nature. Let it not be supposed that we impute this difference to the effect of climate. God forbid! Of all sophists, those who pretend to regulate morality by degrees of latitude are the most pernicious. The crimes of the Polynesians are easily accounted for, without arraigning Providence they are savages; instruct them and convert them, establish among them a good government and a good church discipline, and their depravity will be remedied. The crimes of the

Creoles are of a deeper die, for ignorance cannot be pleaded in extenuation: the cause is to be found in the existence of slavery; and the inevitable demoralisation which this accursed practice produces is not checked by any due system of religious instruction. Let those who doubt the efficacy of education and religion look at what Scotland is, and recollect what it was two centuries ago. At present the Scotch are beyond all doubt, a peaceable, orderly, and moral nation; two centuries ago they were as turbulent, ferocious, and brutal as the wild Irish are now. The Feroe islands also invite us to a nearer comparison: there are no feudal oppressions; no sore grievances and sorer vexations to deaden the hopes, check the industry, and prevent the improvement of the people. Can we say this of the Scotch islands? This is a question which we shall soon take occasion to examine.

ART. IV. Caledonia: or an Account Historical and Topographical of North Britain, from the most ancient to the present Times: with a Dictionary of Places chrorographical and philological. By Geo. Chalmers, F. R. S. and S. A. In 4 Vols. 4to. Vol. I. pp. xii. 907. London: Cadell and Davies. Edinburgh: A. Constable and Co. 1807.

IT is not in the dignity of the subject more than in the talents, industry, and erudition of the author, that the Caledonia of Mr. Chalmers will assume and maintain a proud superiority over contemporary performances in the same walk of literature. Written in a very inferior language, it will notwithstanding be allowed to rank with the immortal Britannia of Camden, which it as much surpasses in industry of research and accumulation of matter, as it falls short of it in purity and elegance of style.

In the infancy of studies of this nature, appeared the Britannia, in an octavo or rather a diminutive quarto, purporting to be an account of this great island from the era of its first inhabitants to the age in which it was written. The information which it contained was of course superficial, but the matter was well-arranged, the style good, the reasoning clear, and the whole work classical. The Britannia, in consequence, after being considerably expanded by the author, has been successively augmented by editors and translators, till, in the vast folios of Mr. Gough, he would scarcely discover his own seminal germ. But what the Britannia has after the improvements and additions of more than two centuries become, so far at least as matter and order are concerned, the Caledonia appears at onceit is born a giant.

Let not the freedom of these remarks be understood as intended

to rob the father of English antiquaries of his just and well-earned reputation. In the reign of Elizabeth, Mr. Chalmers could not have produced the Caledonia. The prodigious quantity of light which has been poured upon the subject of topographical antiquities in the course of two centuries, the facility of communication with a country then almost inaccessible, the curiosity which has been universally awakened in the established clergy of Scotland, and above all, the minute exactness with which the remotest glens of the Highlands have been surveyed by men of science since the great revolution in property and manners occasioned by the rebellion in 1745 and 1746; all these causes have happily conspired to facilitate the production of a national work, for which a people, not unmindful of the patriotic labours of their countrymen, will surely cherish the name of Chalmers while he lives, and venerate it when he is no more.

Camden on the contrary, with the exception of his great forerunner, whose merits he most ungenerously laboured to suppress, had no helpers. The whole of South Britain indeed had been lately and accurately surveyed by Saxton ; but the information conveyed by maps is merely that of relative distance. Whatever intelligence he required, like Martinus Scriblerus, his own legs were to be his compasses. The hospitality of the religious houses, which had afforded to Leland both entertainment and information, was no more. The roads were rugged and almost impracticable; byeways from town to town, the most interesting part of the country to a Roman antiquary, perfectly inaccessable; the inns either wretched or none at all; and such the incurious barbarism of the English in general, that the inquiries of an antiquary were more likely to be replied by scorn than encouraged by information. The rewards, too of literature were then confined to the praises of a few scholars. Mankind were divided into the learned and the unlearned. There was no middle class of 'well-informed men,' who, in the present day, are so numerous as to constitute the bulk of purchasers of books, and of so much weight as perhaps to have contributed in no small degree to the discontinuance of Latin composition on these, and indeed almost all other subjects. In those days, no book, whatever were its merits, could be said to be popular. Literature spoke a language of its own, and the scholar prided himself not so much in the discoveries which he had made, as in the felicity of having wrapped them up in a language unintelligible to the generality of his countrymen. One consequence of this procedure was, that matter was disregarded in comparison of style. What could be well and elegantly told found a place; on the other hand, many valuable facts would be omitted, quæ versu dicere non est, which could not without difficulty be wrought