war, pestilence, and famine, is both historically and scripturally correct. These phenomena, moral and natural, taken together, impart a formidable character to the passion for bloodshed, of which the preceding account is but its natural history, as it is exhibited in the histories of nations.*

It is the autumn of life, and the storms are stripping the leaves for the ensuing winter of the world. The migratory birds are on the wing; their time is short, and they are taking to flight or ever the frost and the snow stamp their cold seal on the hybernating death of nature.

"Like the leaves of the trees when the summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset was seen;
Like the leaves of the trees when the autumn is blown,
That host in the morning lay withered and strown.

"There lay the steed with his nostril all wide,
But thro' it there rolled not the breath of his pride;
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.

"And there lay the rider distorted and pale,

With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail," &c.

Were finer lines than these ever penned by poet?

BYRON.

Never was a siege undertaken on a soil more replete with classical legend and historic recollections than that of Sebastopol. In the Crimea, the Tauric Chersonesus of the ancients, upon the borders of the Black Sea, the Pontus Euxinus of the Latins and Greeks, beyond the Thracian Bosphorus, and close to the Palus Mæotis, or Sea of Azoff, the moderns have played a memorable part in the annals of modern warfare. It was of this

"On the field of battle one soldier at the appearance of blood experiences the intoxication of carnage; another will swoon at the same sight. Sir Walter Scott, in the poem in which he has referred to the battle of Bannockburn, alludes to the various feelings that influence the mind in the heat of an engagement; and, it will be perceived, that he directs particular attention to those who are influenced by no other motive than the pleasure they derive from sacrificing human life :

"But oh! amid that waste of life,

What various motives fired the strife!
The aspiring noble bled for fame,
The patriot for his country's claim;

This knight his youthful strength to prove,

And that to earn his lady's love;

Some fought for ruffian thirst of blood;

From habit some, or hardihood;

But ruffian stern and soldier good,

The noble and the slave,

From various cause the same wild road

On the same bloody morning trode

To that dark inn, the Grave.'"

The "Anatomy of Suicide." By Forbes Winslow, M.D.

spot that Euripides chanted his real or fabulous tale of "Iphigenia;" and there it was that the Greeks actually reclaimed the Tauri from their brutal manners. There they fixed their maritime stations, perhaps in Balaklava itself, or the now half-calcined harbour of what was once Sebastopol. There, where the Cimmerian Bosphorus joins the Euxine with the Mæotis, is situated Kertch, or Panticapæum, the site of Cæsar's far-famed bon mot, or pithy despatch, of Veni, Vidi, Vici. The Romans once advanced within three days' march of the Tanais, or Don, the native ground of the marauding Cossacks, and the boundary between Asia and Europe. In frail flat-bottomed barks, framed of timber only, without a particle of iron, and covered with nothing but a slender roofing of reeds, the Goths carelessly trusted themselves to the mercies of an unknown sea. Their natural daring, and the hope of plunder, stimulated their ignorance and inexperience. They pillaged the Crimea; but at a later period the republic of Kherson assisted Constantine against them, The Genoese, the Venetians, and the gallant Franks, in their turn, penetrated those distant waters in pursuit of gain or adventures, till at last they fell under the rule of the Tartars, the Turks, and the Russians.

The basin of the Black Sea is a volcanic hollow, looked into by the snowy Caucasus, the heights of Ararat, and the shores of Mithridatic Pontus. Sinope furnished a god to Egypt, and the delta or liman of the Danube was the pitiful spot of Ovid's exile, for what he had seen-quod vidi-in the halls of Augustus Cæsar.* Some of the largest rivers of Europe empty their floods into its stormy bosom, which is as black as it is fathomless and an old proverb declared the mariner to be a fool who entered the Euxine before the ides of May, or tarried in it after the kalends of October. Yet such is the sea navigated by our ships of war, which have floated upon it throughout the whole year, prepared for action, and scatheless of shipwreck or disaster.

The long line of the Danube, from Galatz at its embouchure

"Cur aliquid vidi?—cur noxia lumina feci? (Ovid. "de Ponto," lib. ii.) He says "Carmen et error" was the cause of his exile: the verses were Ovid's own, but the error is the supposed incest of Augustus with his own daughter. For such a sight, if true, banishment was only less than death. He makes the same allusion in other places.

A young friend of ours, who has lately joined his regiment in the Crimea, says, speaking of his voyage thither: "The water of the Black Sea is certainly black. I was very much struck with its dark appearance on our passage from the Bosphorus to Balaklava."

"It is very deep, no bottom having been reached with a line of 140 fathoms."Mrs. Somerville, "Phys. Geogr." 1851. Vol. i. p. 359.

Upwards of forty rivers, many of them the largest in Europe, flow into it. It receives the melted snows from the Caucasus, Ararat, the Balkan, the Carpathian and the Swiss mountains; and the waste waters from Central Russia and the Oural mountains.

up to Singidunum or Belgrade, on the Austrian frontier, is overcharged with medieval and imperial recollections; Trajan's Wall at the Dobrudscha and Hadrian's Bridge beyond Kalafat are too well known for more than a casual allusion to them; and it was between these two extremities that the barbarians rushed across in winter, when the river was frozen over. The most active of the Roman emperors were continually engaged in fortifying this long extent of open country against their frequent incursions: here Aurelius earned or lost his laurels, and so did Probus and others; here were signed the famous treaties of Unkiar, Skelessi and Balta Liman; and here did Omar Pasha win his undying military renown. It was here that the Goths crossed over in force in the fourth century, seized upon the present point of Schumla, passed the defiles of the Balkan, descended into Roumelia, and fought and defeated the Emperor Valens near Adrianople. Valens,* with his personal staff, took refuge in a cottage, which the Goths set fire to, and burnt both him and his officers to death. It was in Gallipoli that the Turks first set foot in Europe. The whole locality is full of the living past: Mount Olympus, Achilles, and Troy-the Cyanean rocks, or floating islands, Hero and Leander, and the Argonauts.

The modern and ancient worlds have touched each other. The difference of mind and manners is immense. Steam brings us in communication with the land of Cimmerian darkness in ten days over a distance of three thousand miles, and the electric telegraph in as many hours. The mode of warfare is also frightfully different. The Russians lost 200,000 men in less than a twelvemonth, and the Allies can have lost scarcely less. Perhaps the grand total of 400,000, both sides taken together, is not too large a number to put down to the score of battle and disease in the short space of time that elapsed between the siege of Silistria and that of Sebastopol. The defence of Sebastopol alone cost the Russians, according to Prince Gortschakoff's account, "from 600 to 1000 men a-day for the last thirty days;" and when the Allies triumphantly entered the fortress, they found the dead piled up in the streets, and mutilated limbs stowed away

* Gibbon, c. xxvi.

"No English writer would have dared to rate the Russian loss so high; it would have appeared an ignorant exaggeration. During thirty days,' says Gortschakoff, the garrison lost from 600 to 1000 men a-day.' This is independent of the slaughter of the last three days' bombardment, and in the last supreme struggle during six terrible assaults. What the Russian losses have been during the whole campaign it is scarcely possible to conjecture, for we believe that no adequate idea has been formed of the terrors of this wonderful siege. Disease, cold, and combat have laid men low in numbers which it requires some boldness to state. We say nothing of the allied loss, but that of the Russians seems likely to have fallen little short of 200,000. Never in modern times has there been so great a destruction on so limited a field."-The Times, Oct. 8, 1855.

in empty barrels. We turn from the account with sickening horror; yet the necessity was stern and unrelenting. Russia was stealing a march on the south of Europe: had she conquered Turkey, she would have made a flank movement on Italy, Austria, and Spain; had she not been checked, France must at last have fought her on her own borders, and we along our own shores. The necessity was obvious; and the people, with their natural sagacity, perceived the dilemma, and boldly extricated themselves from between its horns by insisting on war.

The present contest will strengthen more than ever the cause of freedom and the power of the people, who prove themselves to be as far-sighted in their diplomacy as the most finished diplomatist ever pretends to be in his. The result is already visible in the temperate but firm tone with which the British nation continues to address itself to the war, and bear the necessary cost of its being carried on to a successful issue. The liberality with which they provided for the sick and wounded was not less estimable than unpretending. They openly did their duty, without looking for applause or recompence. A frame of mind of this cool and deliberate character is more than an omen of success, because it is the means of success itself, and the inferences to be drawn from it in favour of the future are bright and encouraging. The first Napoleon said, "Fifty years after my decease, Europe must make up its mind to become Republican or Cossack." That crisis has arrived, and France and England united have faced the rising foe on his own ground, and encountered him in the secret lair of his vast dominions.

The end of war is peace, and peace upon a higher elevation than it was before the commencement of the struggle. Examples without end could be adduced from history to prove that right ultimately prevails over might, and that the poetic justice awarded in works of fiction, is but the conclusion drawn from our experience of the world; for were it otherwise, we should be disappointed, because its failure would not be in accordance with profane or sacred truth. But it is from this confidence in the course of events that we so fearlessly rely upon the fate of arms a proceeding which, though it may be discountenanced by the consent of mankind, yet is practically found to be the surest, if not the only means left for determining the balance of power or equity in the final adjustment of affairs. War is, therefore, the trial by battle on a large scale, in which thousands die instead of one, and the magnitude of the question at stake involves the welfare of millions instead of the particular interests of a king, a noble, or a plebeian. Nor is the appeal to Heaven in vindication of ourselves one iota less sincere and legitimate than the appeal to our drawn sword; since the dangerous

expedient of leaving the justice of our cause to the arbitrement of Heaven or of arms, seldom betrays us. The experiment is not likely to prove too much for itself the capricious choice of victory decides in favour of the injured party. A single battle or campaign may apparently go against this superstitious dogma; but, in the long run, success protects the deserving, and war never fails to yield the triumph incontestably in favour of truth, of justice, and of peace.

ART. II.-ON SOMNAMBULISM.

IN common with all animals which possess well-defined sensuous relations with the external world, man exists in two distinct, and, so far as the organs of these relations are involved, opposed conditions one of waking and one of sleep, labour and repose alternating. Under certain limitations, this alternation appears to be a general law of organization, more or less modified according to the varying complexity of the functions of life. It is true that in sleep only the animal or relational functions are at rest; the repose of the tissues concerned in vegetative life is of much shorter duration, action and rest recurring every instant. It is in accordance with the same principles that we find the amount and regularity of sleep in great measure proportionate to the development of relational life. In the higher carnivorous vertebrata, where the muscular and nervous tissues are at the maximum development, sleep is much more required than in those of lower type where the nutritive functions appear predominant; and in those lowest forms of organic existence which still appear to have some trace of animal nature, but whose chief and entire function appears to be assimilative, we have no evidence of the occurrence of the phenomenon at all. As might be expected, it is in man, where the balance of the two classes of functions is most evident, and where the operations are still more complicated by the superaddition of an intellectual nature, that the periodical recurrence of repose is most marked, and its regularity most essential to the well-being of the individual.

It will materially assist our investigation into some of the interesting phenomena involved in our subject, if we briefly examine the points of contrast between these two opposed conditions, as well as the points of resemblance, and those states in which they appear to trespass upon each other's domains.

What are the characteristics of a healthy waking man, mens