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imagination, and the most mutable caprice, have created the fashions of painting, as well as those of garments."

We have next a dissertation on manakins and monkeys, marimondes, titis, viuditas, and other quadrimanous animals,' which, to the naturalist, may be very interesting, but makes rather too large a break in the thread of the narrative where it is placed. This is succeeded by a dissertation on hail, which we pass over, and proceed to the mouth of the Paruasi, where the Oroonoko narrows. Near this place is a detached mountain, with a bare top, about 300 feet high, on which was once situated a fortress of the Jesuits -fortalza de San Francisco Xavier. The garrison which the good fathers maintained here was not intended merely to protect them against the incursions of the Indians; it was employed also in offensive warfare, or, as they say here, in the conquest of soulsconquesta de almas. The soldiers made military incursions into the lands of the independent Caribs, killed all those who dared to make any resistance, burnt their huts, destroyed their plantations, and carried away their old men, women, and children, as prisoners. M. de Humboldt says, that these spiritual conquests are not followed by the monks of St. Francis, St. Dominic, and St. Augustine, who now govern a vast portion of South America.

In proceeding upwards, our travellers passed several rapids, or small cascades, made by the granitic rocks rising out of the bed of the river. At the cataract of Cariven they were in some danger from those frequent eddies which occur in the Oroonoko, as well as in the Amazons. M. de la Condamine, we remember, was whirled round and round in the latter river for more than an hour by an eddy formed under an overhanging rock; and he mentions a poor missionary whose canoe, having got into one of these eddies, was whirled round incessantly for two days, and who was saved only from perishing of hunger by a sudden rise of the river, which sent his canoe into the middle of the stream.

Our travellers escaped a similar peril by the timely assistance of two Saliva Indians; but they lay all night on the shelf of a bare rock called Piedra de Carichana Vieja, which is one of those, M. de Humboldt says, where travellers on the Oroonoko have heard from time to time, toward sun-rise, subterraneous sounds, resembling those of the organ. Such stones are called by the missionaries laxas de musica. He, however, was not fortunate enough to hear any of this mysterious melody; but he believes in its existence, and ascribes the sounds to the difference of temperature between the subterraneous and external air, which attains its maximum about sun-rise, or at that moment which is at the same time farthest from the period of the maximum of the heat of the preceding day. The current of air issuing through the crevices

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may, he thinks, produce those tones which are said to be heard by a person lying on the rock with his ear in contact with the stone. May we not admit, (he adds) that the ancient inhabitants of Egypt, in passing incessantly up and down the Nile, had made the same observation on some rock of the Thebaid; and that the music of the rocks there led to the jugglery of the priests in the statue of Memnon? Perhaps, when" the rosy-fingured Aurora rendered her son, the glorious Memnon, vocal," the voice was that of a man hidden beneath the pedestal of the statue; but the observation of the natives of the Oroonoko, which we relate, seems to explain in a natural manner what gave rise to the Egyptian belief of a stone that poured forth sounds at sunrise.'p. 560.

The three savans Jomard, Jollois and Devilliers heard, at sunrise, in a monument of granite placed at the centre of the spot on which the palace of Karnac stands, a noise resembling that of a string breaking, which is precisely the comparison employed by the ancient writers in speaking of the voice of Memnon; and the French travellers thought, like M. de Humboldt, 'that the passage of rarefied air through the fissures of a sonorous stone, might have suggested to the Egyptian priests the juggleries of the Memnonium."

We take leave of our travellers, where the waters of the Meta join the Oroonoko, the most considerable of all its branches except the Guaviare, and large enough to be compared with the Danube. This branch will one day become of great political and commercial importance to the inhabitants of Guyana and Venezuela. Being navigable to the very foot of the Andes of New Granada, a direct conveyance by water is afforded from the Golfo Tristo by the Oroonoko and the Meta, to within fifteen or twenty leagues of Santa Fe de Bagota. The Meta,' says M. de Humboldt, is like a canal of communication between countries placed in the same latitude, but differing in their productions as much as France and Senegal.' That miserable spirit of monopoly, however, which has been the bane of all the Spanish colonies, has not only shut up the Meta, but also its more noble trunk the Oroonoko; the result is that those extensive regions through which they flow and scatter unprofitable fertility are tenanted only by a few straggling hordes of Indians and the wild beasts of the forest. But other days appear to be approaching, and hostile armies are already encamped on the borders of these majestic streams. If an evil Genius had not guided the councils of Spain, the murderous scenes that are now exhibiting on this fairest portion of the earth's surface might have been avoided, and all its inhabitants been prosperous and happy. Had the mediation of England been accepted, it is more than probable that the adoption of a more liberal policy would

VOL. XXI. NO. XLII.

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would have tended to the mutual advantage of the mother-country and the colonies, by putting a speedy end to a contest in which it is quite clear that the inhabitants at large take little or no interest. The Spanish portion of South America is become, in fact, nothing more than the arena on which a set of needy and adventurous prizefighters are contending, each for his own individual advantage. It is idle to talk of ten millions of people struggling for their liberties,' when they have scarcely an enemy to struggle with; for such is the imbecility of the mother-country, that had there existed any thing like a general wish among the colonists to shake off her yoke, -had even one of the ten millions said to be so desirous of independence, united against her, she could not have held out as many months as she has done years. In the mean time, shoals of foreign buccaneers are gathering round the shores of this unhappy country, and, under the ridiculous pretence of patriotism, are keeping up the unfortunate contest with the view of enriching themselves at the expense of both parties. The interested succours, and the sordid views of the Cochranes and M'Gregors can deceive no one; their sole object is plunder: but it is melancholy to think that so many brave fellows who have nobly fought for the liberties of Europe should be seduced from their country, and sent to perish ingloriously in the savannas of South America, to fill the pockets of crimps and swindlers, or minister to the cupidity of mercantile speculation.

ART. III. Dissertation on the Use and Importance of Unauthoritative Tradition. By E. Hawkins, M. A. Fellow of Oriel College. 8vo. Oxford and London.

THE

HE benefit derived from the Reformation, which can hardly be rated too highly, did not so much consist in the renunciation of particular errors, as in the emancipation from that usurped and pernicious authority on which the existing Romish errors rested for support, and on which fresh ones to an unlimited amount might at any time be founded. Vain would have been the removal even of all the abuses, if a door had been left open for their re-admission, by continuing to regard fallible men, instead of the word of God, as the tribunal of ultimate appeal; by leaving to oral tradition an authority equal and even paramount to that of Scripture, and to the Church an absolute power of deciding on the pretensions of that tradition. From error, in particular points indeed, human nature can never be completely secured; and that accordingly errors have crept into protestant churches, is more to be lamented than wondered at; but while such churches continue to appeal to Scripture as the sole unerring standard in matters of doctrine, they fur

nish the means for the rectification of their own faults, and the detection of their own mistakes: that they may not err, even as grievously as the Romish Church, we cannot decisively pronounce; but they can never err irretrievably, so long as they make their ultimate reference to the Bible as paramount to all human authority.

But the vehement and successful struggle against the usurped authority of the Church and of tradition seems to have produced, as indeed was to be expected, a strong reaction. The very name of tradition, from being associated with the abuses to which it had been made subservient, became odious; and some of those who had escaped from the unauthorised and unbounded pretensions of the popish hierarchy, seemed no longer to regard the Christian Church as a community established by the founder of our religion, and endowed by Him with authority and privileges, but as a mere name applicable to any collection of individuals who might think fit voluntarily to associate for the purposes of religious instruction and public devotion.

These notions are by no means obsolete in the present day. The important maxim, that the Bible and the Bible only, is the religion of Protestants, is eagerly cited by many, as an argument that men ought to be left to make out, every one for himself, a system of belief from the Scriptures; that consequently the circulation of the Scriptures alone, without note or comment, is not only a sufficient but is the only justifiable mode of religious instruction; and that the education of children in any particular mode of faith is an attempt unduly to bias their minds, to derogate from the authority of the Bible, and to limit the free exercise of reason.

Without entering into the questions which have been so often discussed, respecting the proper mode of national religious instruction, both for children and adults, it is important to remark that the total rejection or depreciation of all tradition, and the habit of regarding the Scriptures as not only the sole authority in matters of faith, but also the only proper medium for attaining religious knowledge, gives weight to a difficulty, which may raise doubts, in some instances, respecting Christianity itself, and in many more, concerning the truth of its most fundamental doctrines: this difficulty is found in the want of systematic form in the instruction which Scripture furnishes, and the oblique and incidental manner in which, many of what are usually regarded as its most important truths, are conveyed to us.

Why, it may be asked, are many of the most important articles of faith rather implied than taught; why have we to learn them in great measure from incidental notices of them in books written upon particular occasions, controversies, or heresies, many of them long since passed

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away, whilst some men have erred through ignorance of these particulars, and some have been at times perplexed although they have embraced the truth, and some have missed altogether that faith in which all are most concerned to live? Why this difficulty, they ask, when more direct and systematic statements of the main points of faith might have been with equal ease delivered by the same authority, and would of course, from believers, have met with implicit veneration?'-p. 1.

To encounter this difficulty, is the primary object of the work before us; though the course of the argument is such as to embrace incidentally several other points of no less interest.

The difficulty in question is, indeed, as Mr. Hawkins acknowledges, by no means universally felt; and accordingly he is at some pains clearly to point it out. This, however, is a circumstance by no means peculiar to the present case. Dr. Paley remarks, in the preface to his Moral Philosophy,' that 'in discoursing to young minds upon topics of morality, it requires much more pains to make them perceive the difficulty, than to understand the solution; that unless the subject be so drawn to a point, as to exhibit the full force of an objection, or the exact place of a doubt, before any explanation is entered upon,-in other words, unless some curiosity be excited before it is attempted to be satisfied, the labour of the teacher is lost.' But it is more especially necessary here, to put forward the difficulty in a distinct and prominent form, from its peculiar liability to be overlooked, in consequence of the mode in which most Christians have actually acquired their own religious

notions:

Thoroughly convinced by the authority of Scripture, they may not have attended strictly to the process by which their own conviction of the truth of the Christian doctrines has been established; although resting them entirely upon Scriptural authority, they may not have first collected them solely and immediately from the Scriptures. Hence they may not have observed, that the various proofs of a given doctrine have been accumulated perhaps from the parts of the sacred volume the most unconnected apparently with each other; that one text occasionally of the greatest importance towards their conviction, had no force at all in that respect until compared with another, and that perhaps with a third, each separately incapable of bearing upon the point in question, but all together composing an indissoluble argument, of so much the more force indeed, as it precludes the possibility of forgery and interpolation.'-p. 2.

It is hardly necessary to observe that the indirect manner in which particular doctrines are taught in Scripture, and also the irregularity and want of system in the delivery of the whole body of them, are circumstances which it is highly important to point out to those who have never been troubled with scruples arising from this cause; they cannot otherwise be properly aware of the im

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