dergoes a change,-which makes us doubt whether it was not the result of necessity, which demanded that they should take advantage of the darkness, silence, and the unguarded state of their victims. In the menagerie at Paris, even the hyena sleeps at night, and is awake by day. They all, however, seek, as favoring the purpose, a certain degree of seclusion and shade, with the exception of the lion, who, Burdach informs us, sleeps at noonday, in the open plain; and the eagle and condor will poise themselves on the most elevated pinnacle of rock, in the clear blue atmosphere and dazzling sunlight. Birds, however, are furnished with a winking membrane, generally, to shelter the eye from light. Fish prefer to retire to sleep under the shadow of a rock or a woody bank. Of domestic animals, the horse seems to require least sleep; and that he usually takes in the erect posture.

Birds that roost in a sitting posture are furnished with a well-adapted mechanism, which keeps them firrily supported without voluntary or conscious action. The tendon of the claws is so arranged as to be tightened by their weight when the thighs are bent, thus contracting closely and grasping the bough or perch. In certain other animals which sleep erect, the articulations of the foot and knee are described by Dumeril as resembling the spring of a pocket-knife, which opens the instrument and serves to keep the blade in a line with the handle.

The following calculation is interesting. Suppose one boy aged ten years determines to rise at five o'clock all the year round. Another of the same age, indolent and fond of ease, rises at eight, or an average of eight, every morning. If they both live to be seventy years old, the one will have gained over the other, during the intervening period of sixty years, sixtyfive thousand seven hundred and forty-five hours, which is equal to two thousand seven hundred and thirty-nine and a third days, or just seven and a half years. If a similar calculation were applied to the whole country, how many millions of years of individual usefulness would it prove to be lost to society!

"God bless the man who first invented sleep!"

So Sancho Panza said, and so say I!
And bless him, also, that he didn't keep
His great discovery to himself, or try

To make it as the lucky fellow might-
A close monopoly by "patent right!"

Yes-bless the man who first invented sleep,

(I really can't avoid the iteration;)

But blast the man, with curses loud and deep,
Whate'er the rascal's name, or age, or station,
Who first invented, and went round advising,
That artificial cut-off,-early rising!

"Rise with the lark, and with the lark to bed,"
Observes some solemn, sentimental owl:
Maxims like these are very cheaply said;

But ere you make yourself a fool or fowl,
Pray just inquire about their rise-and fall,
And whether larks have any beds at all!
The "time for honest folks to be abed"

Is in the morning, if I reason right:
And he who cannot keep his precious head
Upon his pillow till it's fairly light,
And so enjoy his forty morning winks,
Is up-to knavery; or else he drinks!

Thomson, who sung about the "Seasons," said
It was a glorious thing to rise in season;

But then he said it-lying-in his bed

At ten o'clock A. M.,-the very reason

He wrote so charmingly. The simple fact is,
His preaching wasn't sanctioned by his practice.
"Tis, doubtless, well to be sometimes awake,-
Awake to duty and awake to truth;

But when, alas! a nice review we take

Of our best deeds and days, we find, in sooth,
The hours that leave the slightest cause to weep
Are those we passed in childhood, or-asleep!
'Tis beautiful to leave the world a while

For the soft visions of the gentle night,
And free, at last, from mortal care or guile,
To live, as only in the angels' sight,
In sleep's sweet realms so cosily shut in,
Where, at the worst, we only dream of sin!
So let us sleep, and give the Maker praise.
I like the lad who, when his father thought
To clip his morning nap by hackneyed phrase
Of vagrant worm by early songster caught,
Cried, "Served him right!-it's not at all surprising:
The worm was punished, sir, for early rising ""

OPIUM AND EAST INDIAN HEMP.

Children of Night! from Lethe's bourn,

Ye come to weave the oblivious veil,

And on the wretched and forlorn

To bid your sweet illusions steal.-Fracastoro.

There is nothing in nature more curious and inexplicable than the influence on the circulating fluids, and through these on the brain and its functions, of various narcotic drugs. Among these, opium, and Cannabis Indica, or East Indian hemp, occupy the most prominent place. No reflective person can look into the writings of Coleridge, De Quincey, or Bayard Taylor, each of whom has experienced the effects of these drugs in his own person, and graphically described his sensations, thoughts, feelings, and dreams while under their influence, without being struck with awe and astonishment at the modifying and disturbing influences which these substances exert upon that mysterious connection which exists between the mind and the material medium through which it manifests itself. Take the following, for example, from the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, which, not only for grandeur of description, but for psychological interest, is unsurpassed by any thing in the English language.

"The dream commenced with a music which now I often heard in dreams, a music of preparation and of awakening suspense; a music like the opening of the Coronation Anthem, and which, like that, gave the feeling of a vast march-of infinite cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable armies. The morning was come of a mighty day-a day of crisis and of final hope for human nature, then suffering some mysterious eclipse and laboring in some dread extremity. Somewhere, I knew not where-somehow, I knew not how-by some beings, I knew not whom—a battle, a strife, an agony, was conducting, -was evolving like a great drama, or piece of music; with which my sympathy was the more insupportable from my confusion as to its place, its cause, its nature, and its possible issue. I, as is usual in dreams, (where, of necessity, we make

ourselves central to every movement,) had the power, and yet had not the power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could raise myself, to will it; and yet again had not the power, for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt.

"Deeper than ever plummet sounded,' I lay inactive. Then, like a chorus, the passion deepened. Some greater interest was at stake, some mightier cause than ever yet the sword had pleaded or trumpet had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms; hurryings to and fro; trepidations of innumerable fugitives-I knew not whether from the good cause or the bad; darkness and lights; tempest and human faces; and, at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth all the world to me, and but a moment allowed -and clasped hands, and heart-breaking partings, and then everlasting farewells! and, with a sigh such as the caves of hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of death, the sound was reverberated,-everlasting farewells! and again, and yet again, reverberated,—everlasting farewells! And I awoke in struggles, and cried aloud, 'I will sleep no more !'"

De Quincey took laudanum for the first time to dispel pain, and he thus describes the effect it had upon him :—“But I took it, and in an hour, oh, heavens! what a revulsion! what an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me! That my pains had vanished was now a trifle in my eyes. This negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had opened before me,-in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed. Here was a panacea,a φαρμακον νεπενθες for all human woes. Here was the secret of happiness, about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered! Happiness might now be bought for a penny and carried in the waistcoat-pocket; portable ecstasies might be had corked up in a pint bottle; and peace of mind could be sent down in gallons by the mail-coach."

Dr. Madden describes more soberly his sensations when un der the influence of the drug in one of the coffee-houses at Constantinople. "I commenced with one grain. In the course of an hour and a half it produced no perceptible effect. The coffee-house keeper was very anxious to give me an additional pill of two grains, but I was contented with half a one; and in another half-hour, feeling nothing of the expected revery, I took half a grain more, making in all two grains in the course of two hours. After two hours and a half from the first dose, my spirits became sensibly excited: the pleasure of the sensa tion seemed to depend on a universal expansion of mind and matter. My faculties appeared enlarged; every thing I looked at seemed increased in volume; I had no longer the same pleasure when I closed my eyes which I had when they were open; it appeared to me as if it was only external objects which were acted on by the imagination and magnified into images of pleasure: in short, it was the 'faint, exquisite music of a dream' in a waking moment. I made my way home as fast as possible, dreading at every step that I should commit some extravagance. In walking, I was hardly sensible of my feet touching the ground: it seemed as if I slid along the street impelled by some invisible agent, and that my blood was composed of some ethereal fluid, which rendered my body lighter than air. I got to bed the moment I reached home. The most extraordinary visions of delight filled my brain all night. In the morning I rose pale and dispirited; my head ached; my body was so debilitated that I was obliged to remain on the sofa all day, dearly paying for my first essay at opium-eating."

These after-effects are the source of the misery of the opiumeater. The exciting influence of the drug is almost invariably followed by a corresponding depression. The susceptibility to external impressions and the muscular energy are both lessened. A desire for repose ensues, and a tendency to sleep. The mouth and throat also become dry; the thirst is increased; hunger diminishes; and the bowels usually become torpid.