56 The British Naturalist. 



is enough to engage our interest and excite our admiration 

 really to be found in nature, without having recourse to the 

 marvellous and fictitious. We must protest against such 

 clap-traps, introduced merely ad captandum vulgus, at the 

 expense of all truth and probability. Should the work go, as 

 we hope it will, to a second edition, we trust the author will, 

 for his own sake, have the good sense to erase this fable from 

 his pages, unless he be content to rank among those 



" who greedily pursue 



Things that are rather wonderful than true j 



Make nat'ral history rather a gazette 



Of rarities stupendous and far-fet ; 



Believe no truths are worthy to be known, 



That are not strongly vast and overgrown." * '^ 



As fair specimens of our author's style, we extract from the 

 third chapter the following valuable passages on the beauty 

 and the use of lakes ; observing, as we pass, that he is always 

 for pointing out, as far as discoverable, the end and object, the 

 good effected, by any phenomenon in nature : — 



" To the enthusiast in the picturesque, nature no where presents an 

 aspect of such varied beauty as amid these combinations of hill, and water, 

 and glade. That monotony which characterises a wide expanse of unbroken 

 plain, even when clothed in a mantle of uniform hue, and that unrelieved 

 sense of awe and loneliness which a mountain range, without this soothing 

 accompaniment, is apt to suggest, are alike absent here. All that is most 

 sublime is softened by all that is most beautiful, and all that is most beau- 

 tiful is elevated by all that is most sublime. The pervading and perpetual 

 presence of water clothes the earth in its richest robe of verdure ; and 

 there is a spirit of life and motion over all, which prevents that feeling of 

 oppression and melancholy with which man finds himself bowed down in 

 the immediate presence of nature, in her mightier agencies. The air is full 

 of soothing sounds, poured from a thousand naturd sources ; the ripple of 

 the mimic wave upon the mimic beach; the murmur of the cascade; the 

 roaring of the cataract ; the sighing of the breeze, or the rushing of the 

 blast among the rocking woods, all blend into one wild but enchanting 

 harmon}', repeated by a thousand voices, from hill, and grove, and glade, 

 that it might well suggest a mythology like that of the Greeks of old, and 

 lead the imagination to people every cliff, and stream, and tree with a 

 dryad or a faun." (p. 96.) 



After noticing the fertilising effects of lakes, and the more 

 equable temperature produced by their presence, the author 

 thus proceeds : — 



" But lakes in mountainous countries have another advantage; they 

 prevent those floods of the rivers which are so destructive where there 

 are no lakes ; and if they be in warm latitudes, they prevent the soil from 

 being burnt up and becoming desert. Rains fall with greater violence upon 

 varied surfaces than upon plains, because there the atmosphere is subject 

 to more frequent and rapid changes ; the slopes of the surfaces precipitate 

 the water sooner into the rivers, and thus the rain passes off in an over- 



* Butler's " Elephant in the Moon," 1. 527, 



