458 PHYSIOLOGY AND NATURAL HISTORY. 



enable the nation to share this power, and, through the intellectual bond of a 

 common language, secure the sympathy of the good and disarm the malevolence 

 of the designing ? Shall there be malevolence or antagonism in the next genera- 

 tion ? Will laymen solve the problem which priests in vain essayed ?" 



The great question, therefore, of the Hawaiian Cabinet and king- 

 dom in 1856 was the reception of the EngHsh language as the element 

 of intellectual and social unity with the nation. That question, as we 

 have shown, has since been settled, and the interesting group of 

 islands, comparatively speaking so recently brought within our know- 

 ledge, already constitutes an important centre for the further diffusion 

 of the language in which Shakespear and Milton still live for all by 

 whom it is known. Remembering what the British Isles once were, it 

 would be folly to smile at the anticipated destinies of those Isles of 

 the Pacific ; but we cannot overlook the part played in all this by 

 " the daily increasing foreign element," to which the Honolulu 

 reviewer refers ; and are reminded that when the Celtic Briton first 

 learned the arts of civilization, and shared in the culture and refine- 

 ment of Roman intellectual progress, our Angle and Saxon ancestors 

 were unknown foreigners, and the English tongue was not yet in being. 

 In the triumph of the Anglo-Saxon in the Isles of the Pacific, as 

 among the wilds of America, it is to be feared that the native race is 

 destined to the same fate as the native language ; unless some unheeded 

 island-group supplies for the Polynesian race the same refuge which 

 the mountain fastnesses of Scotland and Wales have done for the 

 Celtic Briton, where, sheltered from the fatal influences of our trium- 

 phant progress, they may preserve for other generations the living 

 record of that Archipelago of the Pacific, the discovery of which, in 

 the eighteenth century, stirred the fancy and stimulated the enthu- 

 siasm of Europe, with feelings akin to those to which the revelations 

 of Columbus gave rise in the close of the fifteenth century. 



D. W. 



SCIENTIFIC AND LITERARY NOTES. 

 PHYSIOLOGY AND NATURAL HISTORY. 



CLASSIFICATION OF MAMMALIA, &C. 



We transcribe the tabular view of Owen's latest arrangement of Mammalia, 

 from the fifth number of the Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnteau Society, 

 that such of our readers as have it not already before them may be enabled to 



