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fed upon its substance, and lived without air. Not long since a living toad was found in the heart of a cedar at West Chester, in America, about half grown. The cavity was just large enough for it. The tree was solid, of thirty years' growth, and there was no communication for the circulation of air. In 1773, a toad was found even in a large block of coal, in the bosom of which no fissure could be perceived.' An insect, resembling a worm, was also found in a cell, the size of a sparrow's egg, in a fragment of coal (1820), dug out of Woodey-field pit, at the depth of twelve fathoms. When touched, it moved its conical part to any side: thus shewing it had a rotatory motion. It had five or six circular horny rings, connected by moveable membranes. The tree, which contained the toad seen by Mons. Seigne, was about an hundred years old: but the age of

Two toads were locked up in a box by way of experiment, at a village near Wakefield, in 1806; taken out in 1807, when they were found alive and healthy, after living two years without air or food.

A woodman, lately splitting a large cherry-tree at Haming, in the county of Selkirk, found a living bat of a bright scarlet colour.-The cavity, in which it was enclosed, was surrounded by wood perfectly sound and solid.

"The Vorticella rotatoria," says St. Pierre," is found in a state of such thorough dryness, as to fall into powder, on being touched with the point of a needle. It may be preserved for a number of years in an apparent state of DEATH; continuing to retain life without seeming to take any nourishment. A little drop of water let fall upon it is sufficient to break it, so delicate are its organs; but if this water reach it through particles of dust, the insect opens its members by degrees, and swims in this single drop as in an ocean.".

VOL. IV.

U

1

the worm found in the coal, it would be impossible to form even the slightest probable conjecture.

III.

Nature has the curious custom of suspending the animations of certain animals and vegetables. Some quadrupeds, birds, reptiles, and insects, at the autumnal equinox, earlier or more late according to the relative state of the atmosphere, enter into a state of dormity, and remain so till the following spring. This remarkable suspension may, perhaps, arise from the influence of galvanic power.

Frogs have recovered their animation after having been buried two years in snow'; and snails have revivified even after a suspension of fifteen years.2 Similalar effects have been observed in the seeds of plants. A seed of a royal Scotch thistle was planted, after having been laid up more than sixteen years. It sprung, vegetated, and produced a plant, the foliage of which was resplendently beautiful.-Sensitive plants are said to retain the virtue of germination from thirty to forty years; and oats even to a thousand!

That the human frame, too, is subject to a suspension of animation is evident from many instances recorded on testimony, at once faithful and decisive. Dr. Chrichton3 relates an account of a young lady, who was in such a state of suspended animation, as to be

1 Spallanzani's Experiments on the Circulation of the Blood, p. 136. 2 Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. iv. P. 237.

3 On Mental Derangement, vol. ii, p. 84.

to all appearance dead. She was put in her coffin; when the horror of being buried alive gave such an activity to sensation, that it exhibited itself by a slight convulsive movement of the hands. While in this state, as she related afterwards, she distinctly heard her friends lament her death. "We have witnessed," says a Bavarian letter," the superb funeral of the Baron Hornstein; but a shocking result is what induces me to mention it in my letter. Two days after the funeral, the workmen entered the mausoleum; when they witnessed an object, which petrified them! At the door of the sepulchre lay a body covered with blood. It was the mortal remains of the favourite of Princes. The Baron was buried alive! On recovering from his trance, he had forced the lid of the coffin; and endeavoured to escape from the charnel-house. Finding it impossible, it is supposed that he dashed his brains out against the wall. The royal family, and indeed the whole city, are plunged in grief at this most horrid catastrophe."

CHAPTER Χ.

IF from the works of Nature, we recur to the labours of man, we recognize duration chiefly in the labours of the medallist and architect. Of the former there are no Hebrew medals older than the age of Simon Maccabeus. No Roman copper and silver

Whiter's Dissertation on the Disorder of Death, p. 276.

medals go higher than the 484th year of Rome and no gold one higher than the 546th. All others are spurious.

In respect to ARCHITECTURE, the veneration of ages belong to the ruins of Palmyra, Persepolis, Memphis, Thebes and Babylon: but a greater antiquity may be applied to the pyramids of Egypt, and to the fragments at Stonehenge.-These gigantic fragments I esteem to be of an age at least equal to that of the Pyramids. That they are not Roman, as some have supposed, is evident from the undeniable circumstance, that the Romans never built in that manner;-the entire history of their architecture being known even from the days of Romulus. Nor are they Saxon, or Danish. In fact, there is no religion upon record, in which temples of this description were used: and as no evidence can be adduced to prove, that either the pully, the lever, or the wedge were known to the Britons, previous to the time of Cæsar, I am inclined to believe, that these fragments belong to a period even antecedent to that of the Druids.

From architecture we may recur to EMPIRES. The Babylonian lasted sixteen hundred and eighty years: the Assyrian fourteen hundred and fifty: the Persian two hundred and twenty: but the Macedonian, including a larger extent of territory than either of the preceding, lasted only thirteen years. The Roman empire was seven hundred and twenty years in growing to its most effective strength. From the age of Augustus to the division of the empire elapsed about three hundred and sixty years; and thence to the capture

of Rome by the Goths one hundred and ninety.The Eastern empire, from Constantine to the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks, lasted eleven hundred and forty-seven years.

II.

The human frame, up to the period of five years, vegetates so quickly, that it has attained nearly as great a height, as it does in sixteen years afterwards. With man, as with all other objects, time never assumes the attitude of repose. His life resembles a ship, that never anchors. For whether he eats, drinks, walks, speaks, slumbers, or meditates, time is ever on the wing, and constitutes the best portion of every man's estate. And as those objects are the most sublime, which are not only invisible to the eye, but above the reach of the imagination to conceive, time is one of the most mysterious subjects on which the mind can meditate; since, constituting what has been called a moveable image of immoveable eternity, the transparent solitude of interminable space seems the only mansion for its residence. But time is only an imaginary quality. To two persons, differently situated, time has either the wings of an eagle, or the crawling feet of a snail. To a man in expectancy, a single day appears a week; and a month a year. To a man in possession, the sun seems no sooner risen, than it has set; and summer has scarcely arrived, before autumn seems ready to appear.'

"Time," says Colton, in his Many Things and few Words,' is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of all things. The past is gone, the

future

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