same now as they were at first. Their bloody commotions within, and their obtuse behaviour beyond, the limits of their empires, are proverbially unaltered and unalterable. They are obstinately opposed to the spirit and teaching of Christianity; and they are puzzled, as much as they are conquered, by the learning and science, the arts and arms of the whites. The American Indians, however, show some qualities of much higher merit than their opprobrious colour might seem to claim for them; their industry, endurance, and fidelity are noble virtues; and the natives of Mexico and Peru appear to have been a people capable of fulfilling a higher destiny than that assigned to them in history. But it But it is incontestable, that neither the Peruvians nor the Red Indians equal the Europeans, under whose sway they invariably diminish or disappear. The Osmanli Turks, the mixture if not the source of whose blood is Circassian, possess far higher mental endowments than their inveterate foes the Russians; but the fatal creed of Mahomet chills their manners, congeals the noblest impulses of their souls, and is incompatible with freedom of thought and action. The whites, with their oval faces and aquiline noses, ruddy complexions and fair hair, well-turned limbs and handsome demeanour, have hitherto governed the world. They are the descendants of those who entered Europe by the way of the Caucasus; the Circassians and the Georgians are esteemed their most beautiful specimens; and their attributes are typified in the statues of Apollo, Theseus, and Hercules. The colour of their skin discriminates them from the tawny or the black not more effectually than the pre-eminence of their moral feelings and intellectual capacity. The negroes and the Tartars may evince frankness, generosity, and hospitality, at times, in the highest degree; but in their general powers of knowledge, reflection, and understanding, they fall miserably below the whites. No European people has ever been in a condition similar to that of the present dark races, within the reach of any history or tradition. The whites may have degenerated, as in the cases of the Greeks and Romans; but they have always recovered themselves from their occasional failures or relapse, and their transcendent qualities have at no time been extinguished. Their natural prerogatives may be discerned in their least advanced states of civilization. The Germans of Tacitus and Cæsar were in no wise like the modern Hottentot or Red Indian; neither were the ancient Spaniard or Caledonian ever the same as the aboriginal African, American, or Mongolian tribes. The whites possess in the names of Scipio, Brutus, Virgil, Cicero, Horace, Livy, and many other equally great and gifted individuals, a galaxy of talent, not only unrivalled by the black or tawny races at their best estate, but also the representatives of their own lofty pretensions throughout all generations; and Theodosius or Charlemagne, Dante or Galileo, Torricelli or Raphael, Alfred the Great or Sir Isaac Newton, transmit the same intrinsic superiority of the race which they adorn, from one generation to another. To the Caucasians and their posterity alone belong nearly all the arts and sciences, or at least the most skilful application of them to the necessities of life. The treasures of literature and knowledge, civilization in its best and widest sense, politics and government, architecture and music, painting and sculpture, trade, manufactures, military tactics, diplomacy, steam navigation, the electric wire, the freedom of the press, the rights and liberties of man, and, above all, the Christian religion, are peculiarly and exclusively theirs. Europe has been their theatre of action from the first; and thence they have branched out and planted themselves all over the world. Wherever they have touched, there they have taken root. A new nation has grown up, endowed with the social and political virtues proper to its parent stock. They have never failed to live and flourish. Their ascendency is acknowledged paramount and supreme. Their prospects are unlimited, their hopes magnificent, their final object grand and praiseworthy. The world is theirs, and their own life, as well as the lives of others, are made over to their safe keeping, as a prey within their grasp. The Greenlander, Laplander, and Samoïede, prove by their habits and features that they do not belong to the great European family. They owe their origin to the Mongols, and retain in the north the marks of their extraction, which we find so strongly expressed in the Chinese and the widely-different latitudes of the south. At the same time, the parent tribes are living in Central Asia, equally removed from both their offspring. We have alreaded alluded to the Russian mind, marked off, both historically and socially, from the rest of Europe by its strong Mongolian taint, acquired so far back as the age of Zenghis Khan. It has been supposed that climate has modified, discoloured, or transformed, the original type of man. This theory is nowhere countenanced either by present facts or historical evidence. On the contrary, the tanned or sunburnt European is not the same as the African negro of the tropics; their natures are as distinct as their colours, with which climate has nothing to do; for blacks with blacks beget blacks, and whites from whites give birth to whites, under every climate and on every soil. The individual is modified for a time by the extremes of heat and cold, by intermarriage, social connexions, and local influences; but the race, and the germs of the race from which he sprang, remain intact, and reappear, the same as ever, as soon as the disturbing force is withdrawn or the primitive condition restored. The acorn never produces a willow, nor the lion a colt. The breed may be crossed, or the stock grafted afresh, from stronger or weaker species of the same kind, and the offset or progeny may be disfigured or apparently changed; but nature returns to her original type; the modifications are limited to the species alone or to the individual itself; the admixture of different kinds is resented with inherent pertinacity; the mule is born sterile, and without the continual intervention of an unnatural artifice the hybrid ceases to exist. The differences of language are at first sight not less perplexing than those of colour; for if the colours of the skin be only three, the varieties of language seem all but infinite. We are living in the midst of the ruins of the primitive tongue. There is no longer a pure and grammatical language spoken or written by any nation at present. When the Teutonic, in the eighth century, superseded the Latin, it rendered the reconstruction of a perfect language utterly hopeless; for it upset every rule of grammar then in vogue. First of all, it struck out the middle verbs and dual number, so characteristic of the Greek: it then introduced the constant use of auxiliary verbs and indeclinable moods and tenses, extracted the particle from the tenses and moods, and reduced the number of cases from five to three. The verb no longer selected its own place in the sentence, governing and governed by its noun, but was left to take care of itself by immediately following its nominative and going before its objective. The pronoun, participle, and adjective no longer agreed with the noun in number, case, and gender, known by their terminations, apposition, and agreement; and the pronoun, which had hitherto been expressed by the final syllable of the verb, escaped from its entanglement, and stood alone. The noun and the pronoun became the leading words of the sentence; and the Runic or Gothic mind gave vent to its barbarity by a grammatical solecism or egotism. The indicative mood was preferred to the potential; and it is difficult to write or speak continuously in the subjunctive or optative in any of the modern languages. It erased all those delicate inflections of the future and conditional tenses, so accurate in the Latin, so multiform in the Greek; and it abolished, at a breath, the numberless expletives with which the Greek abounds to the torment of the critic, but which rendered so rich, redundant, precise, and explicit the language that employed them so correctly and fluently. The stubborn nature of the modern, particularly of the English, idiom is almost unequal to the effort of giving utterance to rhetoric or poetry, declamation or prose, in the same lofty style as that which once charmed or controlled the fierce democracies of Greece or Rome. It would be carrying the object of this article too far, were we to follow up our analysis by showing that the original tongues are, like the original races, only three-the Indo-Germanic, the Malayan, and the Trans-gangetic. To these three belong all the languages now spoken by man. The European is the Indo-Germanic, the most comprehensive and complete of them all. includes Noah and Abraham, the Pharaohs, the Chaldees, the Greeks, the Romans, and the Sanskrit. But we must come to a close; and our task will have been accomplished, and its end attained, if we have been able to show that the psychology of nations is as demonstrable and conclusive as the colour of their skins, the history of their progress, and the evidences of their relative excellence and ascendency in literature, arts, arms, and religion. ART. III.-NOTES OF A VISIT TO THE PUBLIC LUNATIC ASYLUMS OF SCOTLAND. BY JOHN WEBSTER, M.D., F.R.S., AND F.R.C.P., (Continued from page 66.) MURRAY'S ROYAL ASYLUM. THIS institution for the insane, founded in 1827, is situated near Perth, upon the north-western declivity of the picturesque hill of Kinoull, having a magnificent prospect over the basin of the river Tay, with the Grampian Hills on one side, and those of Strathearn on the opposite. Being constructed on a kind of slope, the lower story windows of the building are nearly on a level with the adjacent ground in front, whereby, this part of the structure is rendered rather dark, somewhat damp, and consequently not so airy or salubrious as, the upper portion. In this respect, the asylum partly resembles that of Colney Hatch, where the same objectionable peculiarity prevails. Having been erected prior to the introduction of many modern improvements, which science and more extended experience have introduced into recently-built asylums, several defects might be fairly pointed out by hypercritical observers, but which need not be now mentioned; as altogether, this establishment deserves much approval in reference to its general management, and especially, with regard to the treatment of patients therein confined. One great defect characterizes this asylum,-namely, its present scanty supply of water; and, what is still more regrettable, there is very little prospect of this deficiency, in so necessary an element in every institution for the insane ever admitting an effectual remedy. Being placed so much above the neighbouring river Tay's level, and the city of Perth, any supply from that locality can never likely be conveyed to this high position. Farther, as adjoining landlords have objected to water being brought from sources on their property, the institution has to depend chiefly upon wells sunk within its own precincts, aided by rain reservoirs. The gardens attached are extensive, well arranged, highly cultivated, and appeared exceedingly productive. They produce plenty of fruit and vegetables for the establishment, besides being, along with the adjoining fields-belonging to the asylum-of great use to the patients, as such appendages supply ample means for giving inmates employment, as also affording amusement and healthy recreation. Similar to every public institution for the insane throughout Scotland, the Perth asylum receives both pauper and private patients. Of the latter description, there were 50 inmates at the time of my inspection, who paid from 80l. to 250l. per annum, board and lodging included. The pauper, or lowest class of patients, pay eight shillings per week, which is certainly very moderate, considering the recent high price of provisions. Taken in the aggregate, the total lunatic inmates, on the day of my visit to this asylum, amounted to 141 individuals, of whom 77 were males and 64 females: hence giving, as at Glasgow, more of the former sex than the latter. Amongst the above, only 2 men laboured under general paralysis; 2 males and 6 females were dirty patients; and 1 male and 2 females suffered from epilepsy; the other cases being mostly of a chronic description. No patient was then under bodily restraint, excepting two males, who had strong leather gloves temporarily upon both hands, to prevent them destroying their clothes. However, one of these persons had been only recently brought to the institution, in a violent state of excitement, which seemed not yet abated. One female lunatic also was placed in an open court-yard, to avoid all annoyance to other patients through her violence, but none were actually in seclusion; and the strait-waistcoat appeared unknown, or had become a matter of history. During last year, 36 new insane patients were admitted, of whom 23 were males and 13 females; 6 males and 11 females were discharged cured, whilst 7 male and 8 female lunatics died: 7 of the above deaths having been caused by cholera, which visited the establishment last season as an epidemic. Respecting the form of insanity in the cases admitted, it appears 8 were examples of mania, 8 melancholia, 9 monomania, 7 dementia, 2 |