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the injurious effects of intoxicating liquors in both climates.

My first voyage was to Jamaica, where the captain and several of the crew died. Excepting that I never drank any spirits, I took no care of myself; I exposed myself to the burning sun, slept on deck in the dew, and ate fruit, without feeling any bad effects. I soon lost my hat and shoes, and ran about bareheaded and barefooted, but I never tasted spirits; and to this alone do I attribute the extraordinary good health I enjoyed.

My next voyage was to St. Petersburgh, where I spent the winter in like manner. I was running about, bareheaded and barefooted, on the ice, but I never tasted spirits.

My next voyages were to the Bay of Honduras, and alternately to the Baltic.

On the last voyage to Honduras, all the common sailors, twelve in number, died; and I was the only person that went out in the ship who came home alive, which I attribute entirely to my abstaining from the use of spirituous liquors.

I shall now say a few words on my voyage to the Arctic regions, which occupied the space of four years from April, 1829, to October, 1833.

I was twenty years older than any of the officers and crew, and thirty years older than all, excepting three, yet I could stand the cold, and endure the fatigue better than any of them, who all made use of tobacco and spirits.

The most irresistible proof of the baneful effects of spirituous liquors upon seafaring men, was when we abandoned our ship, the Victory, in Victoria Harbour. We were obliged to leave behind us all our wine and spirits, because we could not carry any on our heavily-loaded sledges, which we had to drag nine hundred miles before we got to Fury Beach. There, indeed, we found provisions; but, thank God! no spirits; and it was quite remarkable to observe how much stronger and more able the men were to do their work when they had nothing but water to drink; but particularly the cook, who was a drunkard, and who, when we arrived home, was in perfect health. He received his pay, went to a public-house, and, melancholy to relate, drank himself to death.

PETER THE PEASANT—A TRIAL OF INTEGRITY.

PETER was the son of an honest French peasant, who lived on the banks of the Moselle; when he was eighteen years of age, his father was obliged to send him to Paris, to gain his livelihood as a carpenter.

"Poverty," said the old man, imposes upon us painful separations. You go to Paris to find work; you will be exposed to many temptations; but remember the les sons of your mother, who has always shown you an example of virtue; that though you are parted from your earthly parents, you have a Father in heaven. I have lived sixty years in our village, and no one could ever blame me for a dishonest or dis honourable action. Peter, my son, you must not shame your parentage. Adieu!"

And so saying the old man took a hasty embrace, and Peter, with a rather heavy heart, set out on his route to Paris. He turned more than once to take a farewell look at his native village; and when the church spire only was visible, he took off his hat, and reverently bending his knee as he looked towards the spot where his Saviour's image rested on the altar, he besought Him to give him strength to persevere to the end.

He was

At length Peter arrived in Paris; the journey had nearly exhausted his little stock of money; but he carried a letter of recommendation to a master carpenter, who immediately employed him. young, but he was willing, and he soon gained what enabled him to send presents to his parents, and to his little sister Marie a nice white frock, to wear on the day of her first communion, which she would be sure to wear for her dear brother Peter's sake. His heart was thrilled with joy when he thought of her happiness, for he remembered his own on the day when his Saviour God first communicated himself to him.

But this God saw it good to try Peter with adversity. His master was ruined by some unforeseen circumstances, and all his workmen were dismissed. Poor Peter! He could send no more presents to his cottage home; and that was the first thought that grieved him. Confidence in God, however, was unbounded; and God rewarded his confidence by putting it to a hard proof; his faith was to be strengthened and purified in the school of misfortune. One day that he had traversed the streets of Paris, seeking in vain for work, he became very faint as he crossed the Tuileries, and had just come to throw himself on a chair, or he would have fallen on the earth. The woman who kept the chairs did not perceive him; he might have gone away without paying, and he was very poor; but he said to himself, "If the woman lack vigilance, that is no reason why I should lack probity; God sees me, that is enough." And he called the woman and gave her the two sous. he pursued his way he was overtaken by

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an omnibus, when suddenly a wheel gave way, and down it came with a tremendous crash. A man who was passing at the moment was thrown down and severely hurt. Peter raised him up, and assisted him into a cabriolet which stood near.

Scarcely had he driven off when Peter observed a piece of paper on the ground, and, picking it up, found an order for five hundred francs. "How can I return this to the owner?" was the first thought that passed across his mind. Where are you going with that dreamy look?" said the voice of James, one of his late fellow-workmen, who lodged in the same house with bim.

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Peter had always been reserved with this man, for he knew little of him; and his father had warned him not to make acquaintances too hastily. "No work to be found yet, eh?" continued James.

"You know Paris," said Peter; "could you tell me how I can discover the owner of something I have found?"

"What?" said James," "would you look for the owner of what fortune has thrown in your way? Is it a ring, or a watch? Do you fear discovery?"

No," said Peter; "but I fear God, and must restore what does not belong to me." "What have you found?" said James. "A bill for five hundred francs," replied Peter.

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"Good," said James; some gambler has lost it as he came out of the gamblinghouse, or some rich merchant has dropped it out of his pocket-book; you would be a great fool not to keep it."

"It is not mine," said Peter.

"At any rate, you are entitled to a handsome reward for finding it.'

Peter went straight to the bank, but it was shut for the day; and when he returned to his lodgings, he found James had told his landlord that he had met with some good fortune; and the man immediately attacked him, and insisted on being paid for the last month's lodging. Poor Peter! He had nothing but the five hundred francs! The suggestion of James came to his mind: "It is doubtless the money of some rich man who will never miss it." Alas! poor Peter!

Meanwhile, M. Bonard, who had lost the order, was a prey to the deepest distress. When he was thrown down by the omnibus, he had the billet in his hand; but the pain he suffered from his fall made him forget everything; and it was not until he got out of the cabriolet that he missed the money. He was the owner of a shop, the rent of which was due next day, and having lately experienced heavy losses, he had no more money to pay, for he had drawn from

the bank his last five hundred francs. With what sorrow did he look at his wife and children! He durst not tell them his loss; but they soon saw that something untoward had occurred, and at length he was obliged to confess the truth. "Some honest person may yet find it," he said. "The will of God be done!" replied his wife. "You have been saved from an accident which might have cost your life, and every other evil seems light in compari

son.

Next day, towards twelve o'clock, a knocking was heard at the door. "Ah!" said M. Bonard, "it is our landlord, I fear, and there is no money to give him."

His wife with a trembling hand opened the door; for a moment her confidence in God had failed her. It was not the landlord; it was a friend who had been sent as a forlorn hope to the bank, and who had there found Peter, who now accompanied him, and presented the five hundred francs to the delighted and grateful family. "I cannot conceal from you," said Peter, “that I had some temptation to retain the money, and I do not deserve the applauses you bestow on my honesty."

"You do deserve them," said Madame Bonard; "no one need be ashamed of a temptation overcome."

"Thank God I did overcome" it, said Peter. "I should have fallen had I not remembered, 'What will it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?' and all the lessons of our good priest came back to my mind so forcibly that the temptation vanished."

"Your honesty has been tried," said the friend of Bonard; "and I have no hesitation in recommending you to be porter in the bank where you but now returned the billet. The situation is a lucrative one, and if you continue to behave as you have hitherto done, your advancement is certain. Do what is good, and thy reward will not linger."

MALARIA-WHAT IT IS, AND WHAT IT DOES.

REPRESENT heat by fire, and it may be said that all four elements-we mean the oldfashioned four-must unite in the production of malaria. There must be fire, air, water, and earth also. If earth were not essential, then malaria could board our ships at sea between the tropics. But she does nothing of the kind; she only boards them when they touch at any of her

coasts.

But has she nothing vegetable in her ancestry? Where there is earth subject to much heat and much moisture, we usu

ally find rank vegetation, and much vegetable decay. Therefore it has, from the first, been said, and is now very generally said, that decay of vegetable matter is essential to the forming of malaria. There is no ague formed among the rotten cabbage-leaves of Covent-garden, or of costermongers' yards in London. That is a small fact. Dr. William Ferguson has brought together more decisive proof that malaria may exist where there is not only no decaying vegetable matter, but no vegetation.

In August, 1794, after a very hot and dry summer, the English army in Holland encamped at Rosendal and Oosterhout. The soil in Rosendal, the Valley of Roses, was a level plain of dry sand, where there was no vegetation. It was the same at Oosterhout. To within a few inches of the surface this sand was percolated with water, of good quality; that is to say, fit to drink, and not at all putrid. Upon this ground malaria produced intermittent and remittent fevers in abundance. was after a dry hot summer that the British army in Walcheren, over a soil of the same kind, a fine white sand, about a third part clay, suffered under the violence of malaria pains never to be forgotten, and "almost unprecedented in the annals of warfare."

It

In 1809 several regiments in Spain encamped in a half-dried ravine that had been lately the stony bed of a water-course. It contained neither vegetation nor mud. The pools of water standing in the rock were so clear that the soldiers eagerly encamped about them. The place proved pestiferous as any fen. Several of the men were seized with violent remittent fever before they could move from the bivouac next morning.

After the battle of Talavera, the army retreated along the course of the Guardiana. The country was so dry for want of rain, that the river course was no more than a line of detached pools. The troops along this tract "suffered," says Dr. Ferguson, "from remittent fevers of such destructive malignity, that the enemy, and all Europe, believed that the British host was extirpated."

The river Tagus, at Lisbon, about two miles broad, separates a healthy from a sickly region. On the healthy side the country is bare hill and rock, with watercourses. On the other side, the Alentejo land is quite dry, flat and sandy. That side is held in occupation by malaria. In and near Lisbon are many gardens, in which stone reservoirs hold water during the three months' drought, water foul and putrid, close to the houses and the sleep

ing-rooms. These reservoirs do not breed fever among people who live and breathe in their atmosphere; yet one night's sleep upon the sandy shore of the Alentejo, where no water at all has been seen for months- -no putrid water ever-would probably secure to the peasant a strong dose of remittent fever.

This does not mean to say that the product of vegetable decomposition is not an unwholesome thing. It means that it is not malaria. All that is requried for the production of malaria seems to be that an absorbent soil be soaked with water and then dried. The higher the drying temperature, and the quicker the process, the more plentiful and the more virulent will be the poison generated.

Malaria springs rather from a surface that having been wetted has been dried, than from a surface that continues to be wet. The edges of a swamp which dry, become wet or dry again, according to the season, are more dangerous than the perpetually wet ground in the centre. When streams have overflowed their banks, and then retired again, it is from the dried or half-dried ground on either side of them that fevers come.

Low damp grounds, that have been drying and producing fevers, become healthy when the rain sets in that floods them over. Whenever malaria has power to poison, she is more productive of disease and death, agues aud fevers, in hot and dry years, than in years that are cold and moist. In the West Indies, in the higher grounds, the cooler parts, malaria dispenses poison in its mildest form, producing agues; lower down, in warmer tracts, remittent fevers are the common form; but in the lowest and the hottest parts, the fever is continued. This fact is curiously illustrated by one of Dr. Ferguson's examples:

In 1816 the British garrison of English Harbour, in Antigua, happened to be disposed in three different barracks; one 300, one 500, and one 600 feet above the level of the marshes. The dock-yard was among the marshes themselves; and the marshes were so pestiferous, that it often happened that a well-seasoned soldier, coming down from the upper barracks in full health to mount the night-guard, was seized with furious delirium while standing sentry, and died of yellow fever, or of something very like it, thirty hours after he had been carried up to his barracks. In those upper barracks, including women and children, no fever of any kind afflicted those who did not go down upon duty. In the middle barracks, at a height of 500 feet, there occurred a little fever, but not much worthy

of notice. In the lower barracks, every man-even of those who did not go down to the marshes-was attacked with remittent fever, and one died. The Italians in the neighbourhood of the Pontine Marshes have been taught by experience to perch their villages on hills.

It is after the heat of summer, in autumn, that the poison of malaria begins to work. Where the venom is peculiarly concentrated, it may kill speedily, as in the case of the sentinels just mentioned; but in temperate climates, the poison is both weaker and slower in its action. Many of the men who inhaled the poison of malaria at Walcheren experienced no bad effects until they had returned to England, and perhaps lived for some months at home. Irish harvesters carry the poison home with them frequently from Lincolnshire, and are attacked with agues weeks or months afterwards in Ireland, on the provocation of an east wind or a chill.

It is also a well-known fact that the inhabitants of districts subject to malaria become seasoned. At Walcheren the natives would not believe that their home was unhealthy. In the pestilential plains of Estremadura, the natives averred that the soldiers were swept off by mushrooms. The seasoned inhabitants of such malarious places are not, however, strong, or longlived men. They are puny, sallow, feeble, spiritless, abounding in swelled bellies and wasted limbs. Even the strangers, having had their dose of fever, become seasoned to the poison. The French general Monnet, who commanded for seven years at Flushing, recommended therefore that, however officers and men might demur, garrisons should be kept stationary in unhealthy places. He adduces the instance of a French regiment in Walcheren, which suffered, in the second year of its residence there, only half the sickness it had suffered in the first year, and in the third year almost none at all.

To the statement that the dwellers in a district subject to malaria, though seasoned, are unhealthy in it, an exception has to be made in the case of the negro. "To him," says Dr. Ferguson, "marsh miasmata are in fact no poison. The warm,

moist, low, and leeward situations, where these pernicious exhalations are generated and concentrated, prove to him congenial. He delights in them, for there he enjoys life and health, as much as his feelings are abhorrent to the currents of wind that sweep the mountain tops, where alone the whites find security against endemic fevers."

There is also an exception, again, in favour of the black colour among swamps. The exhalations from black peat-moss are said positively not to occasion intermittents. The marshy tracts in many parts of Scotland and Ireland, covered with peat-moss, are quite free from fevers. The same is the case in the instance of the Dismal Swamp, which covers 150,000 acres on the frontiers of Virginia and North Carolina.

What else we have to say about malaria will chiefly concern certain peculiarities of character and habit, by a knowledge of which we may, in case of need, perhaps be able to protect ourselves against her deadly enmity.

Like many other bad things, malaria is most dangerous at night; she poisons in the dark most efficaciously. To sleep out of doors in a malarious district, is to ensure the imbibtion of the poison. A ship of war having touched at the island of St. Thomas, sixteen of the crew slept several nights ashore; all of these had yellow fever, and thirteen died. The 280 other men went freely ashore in parties of twenty and thirty during the day, returning to the ships at night. No illness occurred among them. Such cases might be multiplied indefinitely. The reapers in the Campo Morto, a part of the fatal Maremma, are allowed to sleep for two hours at midday; it is then only that they can do so without danger. All strangers are admonished at Rome not to seek coolness by crossing the Pontine Marshes after the heat of the day is over. Though they are crossed in six or eight hours, many travellers who traversed them at night have been attacked by violent and mortal fevers. Wise people, therefore, in malarious districts will avoid the night air altogether.-Household Words,

Literary Notices.

Money Money! Money! or, Men and Methodism in Difficulties; addressed to the Supporters of Conference. By THOMAS

TAYLOR.

NONE of the "Supporters of Conference" will thank the writer of this pamphlet for

its publication. He writes certainly like a man that has smarted under the lash, and that is giving a plain and straightforward statement of his notions of the petty officers by whom the cat-o'-nine-tails has been employed. His facts are pungent and

LITERARY NOTICES.

his observations biting; but the severity of both consists in their truth. Is it any wonder that a man of irreproachable character, but expelled from a Christian church because he denies the infallibility of its ministry, and expresses an honest opinion upon its ecclesiastical acts, writes with vigour, and in the style of plain dealing, when he finds that his reverend expellers retain in their communion a man who has hardly paid in his 50l. to "John Scott's hobby, the normal schools," before he offers his creditors 2s. in the pound? Or, if such a man put a little that is piquant and severe in his pamphlet, when another of the "supporters of Conference" receives all honour from the divine-right pastors, although, while giving his 1,000 guineas for one Conference object, and his seven guineas a day for another, this liberal friend of spiritual despotism allows "his parents to appear in the streets

as

paupers?" Nor will it be deemed surprising that a victim of Conference tyranny gives vent to his feelings in terms of earnest indignation, when he remembers that one of the superintendent ministers of a circuit, having rendered himself incapable of finding his way home himself, "slips half a crown into the hand of a young man, to take him home, and say nothing about it." It is these gross inconsistencies in the exercise of church discipline, that is making Methodism stink in the nostrils of honest and virtuous men. Deeply is it to be regretted that the destinies of a religious community should be in the hands of men who give the world such occasion to declaim against the cant and hypocrisy and selfishness of priests. Bad as the case is, it would be much worse, were there not such men as Mr. Taylor to resist and to expose, by means of the press, such wicked deeds, to the locality in which priests have the effrontery to perpetrate them.

I've been Thinking; or, the Secret of Success. By MRS. ROE. Revised and edited by the Rev. C. B. TAYLER, A.M.

THIS is the first of a series of volumes to be issued under the general title of the "Run and Read Library." The object of the publishers in sending out this series they state to be an improvement in the class of light literature which now forms the staple of the reading for travellers by rail, road, and river. Quoting Mrs. Stowe on this subject, they say—

"Works of imagination are found not only in the library of the rich, but on the counter, in the work hop, in the tavern, in the steam-boat, and the railway car-the great evil is, that the worst

stands about an equal chance with the best. Shall persons professing to be regulated by right principles give up reading all works of fiction? There are many advantages to be gained by reading books of this class, if properly selected. It is not only right, but it is a duty, at certain intervals, to relieve the intellect and feelings from care and effort, and devote a certain portion of time to works of mere recreation and amusement; and the most elevating and the most refining of all amusements is the exercise of the imagination. Such considerations have inspired the conviction, that persons who have the taste, invention, sprightliness, humour, and command of diction that qualifies for a successful novelist, may become the greatest of public benefactors, by skil fully providing the healthful aliment that may be employed in supplanting the pernicious leaven."

The volume just issued is a reprint of a good American tale, with a most wholesome moral and healthy general tendency, which will be especially attractive and useful to the young.

The Philosophy of Atheism examined and compared with Christianity. By Rev. B. GODWIN, D.D. London: Hall, Virtue, and Co.

THE substance of this volume was delivered in a course of lectures in the town. of Bradford nearly twenty years ago. The lectures were then published under the title of "Lectures on the Atheistic Controversy." The volume having been some time out of print, and recent propagandism of atheism under the new name of Secularism, led the author, by the special request of his friends and townsmen, to re-deliver the lectures, which was done during the winter of 1852-3, on Sunday afternoons in the Mechanics' Institute of Bradford. The volume constitutes one of the most complete refutations of atheism in all its forms, that we have met with in so compendious a form. The arguments are cogent and closely reasoned, whilst the style is at once attractive and telling. We have pleasure in commending the volume as one calculated to be pre-eminently useful amongst a large class of the community to whom the apostles of atheism especially address themselves.

The Principles of Geology. By Sir C. LYELL, M.A., F.R.S., &c. London: Murray. THIS invaluable work is too well-known in the scientific world to need any recommendation from us. We are glad to see "a new and entirely revised edition" of it. To the increasing class of intelligent working men, particularly such as are interested in geological questions and facts, we cordially recommend this standard work of one of the ablest geologists of the day.

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