Notices of New Books. 534 1 



own stomach has two walls, one, or none, and I am confident I could 

 never find out this character in a polype. I don't even know whether 

 it be * free,' but I know it complains when I make too free with it." 

 Gentle reader ! this exhibition of Science is exceptional : the author 

 has widely different and more intelligible passages ; here is one in the 

 'Alton Locke' style, but not in inverted commas, and therefore, we 

 suppose not from the pen of Mr. Kingsley : — 



" Were you ever led, reader, by chance or by choice, into one of 

 the plague-courts of London ? I do not speak of the Black Death 

 of the fourteenth century, but of that pestilence which is hardly less 

 fatal in our own times, the plague of neglected poverty, — starving on 

 mouldy crusts and fiery gin, — choking in a poisoned atmosphere, — 

 wallowing in the accumulated filth of countless years. Have you 

 ever trodden those crowded, mouldering lanes and alleys, where 

 open sewers — witches' cauldrons of festering filth — seethe and welter 

 by the open doors, — nay, roll their rank pollution through the very 

 heart of the poor man's home ; where vermin, unnamed and unknown 

 in civilized life, creep and writhe, and die and rot, on wall and floor 

 and roof — a moving, mortifying crust of life and death — the mockery 

 and bathos of the decorative art; where the sickly glare and the 

 wearied smile of consumption ape the glance and the laughter of 

 health ; where the strong grow weak, and the weakly bow the head 

 and die ; where the innocence of the child is taught to curse and lie 

 and steal ; where the pride of manhood is quenched in the imbecile 

 leer of the sot; where the fair honour of womanhood is sullied, like 

 the snow which falls in those infernal regions; where God is as 

 unknown as the pure air of His own heaven ?" 



Though not very original, this is certainly very fine writing; 

 and the author has introduced three consecutive pages of such 

 writing as an introduction to the assertion that such places are 

 not adapted to the welfare of sea-anemones ; this, however, is some- 

 what of a fallacy, for Apothecaries' Hall, where resides Mr. Warington, 

 the inventor, perfecter and maintainer of the aquarium, is situated in 

 exactly such a locality as the brilliant imagination of a novelist might 

 convert into the Pandemonium described above ; and, strange to say, 

 under the skilful management of Mr. Warington, to whom we owe a 

 debt of gratitude never to be cancelled, sea-anemones and all the 

 other "strange forms of the deeps" live and increase their kind, and 

 enjoy the most exuberant health and spirits that can fall to the lot of 



