The Press. — London, England, 1857-09-12 00:00:00

THE PRESS, SEPTEMBER 12, 1857. brown•coloured water. Modern geologists have been too hasty in assuming that the high temperature of the Sum mers on the borders of the tropics is sufficient to prevent accumulation of vegetable matter, as is the case in higher latitudes, where in moist situations the natural vegetation of one year does not rot away during the next. Sir C. Lyall supposes the shade of trees is essential to the accu mulation of vegetable matter in an low a latitude as 34 deg., which is that of the Dismal Swamp, where there is a deposit of peat from ten to fifteen feet in thickness. But, according to Dr. Hooker, accumulation takes place in the Jheels, which are on the borders of, or even within, the tropics, where there are no trees. In another part of his "Journal," he writes:—" The soil, which is sandy along the Burrampooter, is more muddy and clayey in the centre of the Jheels, with immense spungy accumulations of vegetable matter in the marshes, through which we poked the boat-staves without finding bottom; they were for the most part formed of decomposed grass-roots, with occasionally leaves, but no quantity of mossy or woody plants." In fact, it appears that these accumulations of vegetable matter, imparting a peculiar tinge to the water in the Jheels, have as close a resemblance to our peat mosses as the different climatic conditions will admit of. The decaying process is arrested in both cases ; and hence it is probable that this circumstance is the cause of the Jheels, as well as of the swamps of the Southern States, in their natural condition being comparatively healthy, like the peaty districts in Scotland. In conclusion, we would say that this is completely a farmer's book. It is essentially practical, and deals with the districts de scribed entirely as places out of which so much is to be got. Not that the author is without sentiment or taste—a charge which his chapters on Cuba would be sufficient to disprove—but he has gone out for a certain definite purpose, and that purpose, we make bold to say, he has very fairly accomplished. Subjoined as an appendix will be found some valuable computations relative to the winds, atmosphere, and general climate of the regions described, and we cannot say more, in conclusion, than that the work is an indis pensable adjunct to all persona practically interested in the prospects afforded to our countrymen by the vast area of land now thrown open to Anglo-Saxon energy on the " other side the Atlantic." Farina. A Legend of Cologne. By George Meredith, Author of " The Shaving of Shagpat." London : Smith, Elder, and Co. "GEORGE MEREDITH " appeals to the public under a pseudonyme, and asks that. his writings should be judged of for their own merits His talents justify his commendable self-reliance. His mind is still unformed ; he has fancy, and the germs of creative imagination are plainly discernible in his conceptions. He has grace ful utterance, and he writes with ease. The humorous at present seems to be his vein ; and we must caution him against the danger of too much seeking after the quaint,—it is apt to tire and sink into affectation, and is more suitable to older authors. If he should con tinue to write fiction, we should wish, also, that he would deliberately study human na ture. He has an artistic mind, and he is, we think, equal to the construction of a story, provided that he selected proper types for description. The present volume cannot be praised as an improvement on its predecessor. It is good of its kind, but it lacks the force and freshness of " The Shaving of Shagpat." It is a fable on " Farina," the renowned manu facturer of the eau associated with his name. The story is told in legendary form, and is rather spun out too much. Still, the compo sition has a true Rhenish flavour. The story thus commences : In those lusty ages when the Kaisers lifted high the golden goblet of Aachen, and drank, elbow upwards, the green-eyed wine of old romance, there lived, a bow-shot from the bones of the Eleven Thousand Virgins and the Three Holy Kings, a prosperous Rhinelander, by name Gottlieb Uroschen, or, as it was sometimes ennobled, Gott lieb von Groschen ; than whom no wealthier merchant bartered for the glory of his ancient mother-city, nor more honoured burgess swallowed impartially red juice and white under the shadow of his own lig-tree. Vine-hills, among the hottest sun-bibbers of the Rheingau, glistened in the roll of Gottlieb's possessions ; corn-acres below Cologne; basalt-quarries about Linz; mineral-springs in Nassau, a legacy of the Romans to the genius and enterprise of the first of German traders. He could have bought up every hawking creg, owner and all, from Hatto's Tuwer to Rheineck. Lore ley, combing her yellow locks against the night-cloud, beheld old Gottlieb's rafts endlessly stealing on the moonlight through the iron pass she peoples above St. Goar. A wailful host were the wives of his nauseam widowed there by hex watery intisl9. Farina, the hero of the volume, is thus intro duced : The chief members of the White Rose Club were Berthold Schmidt, the rich goldsmith's son ; Dietrich Schill, son of the imperial saddler; Heinrich Abt, Franz Endermann, and Ernst Geller, sons of chief burghers, each of whom carried a yard-long scroll in his cap, and was much too disfigured in person for men to require any in. spection of the document. They were dangerous youths to meet, for the oaths, ceternonies, and recantations they demanded from every wayfarer under the rank of baron were what few might satisfactorily perform, if lovers of woman other than the fair Margarita, or loyal husbands; and what none save trained heads and stomachs could withstand, however naturally manful. The captain of the club was he who could drink most beer without inter mediate sighing, and whose face reckoned the proudest number of slices and mixture of colours. The captaincy was most in dispute between Dietrich Schill and Berthold Schmidt, who in the heat and constancy of contention were gradually losing likeness to man. " Good coin,' they gloried to reflect, " needs no stamp." One youth in Cologne held out against the standing tyranny, and chose to do beauty homage in his own fashion, and at his leisure. It was Farina, and deadly oaths were registered against him over empty beer-barrels. An axiom of the White Rose Clublaid it down that everybody must be enamoured of Margarita, and the conscience of the club made them trebly suspicious of those who were not. members. They bad the consolation of knowing that Farina was poor, but then he was affirmed a student of Black Arts, and from such a one the worst might reasonably be feared. He might bewitch Margarita ! There are various kinds of wine served at the hostelries along the banks of the Rhine, and, unlike the vintage of more southern lands, the flavour of the first glass is almost enough to decide the peculiar quality of the wine. So with " Farina.' These extracts show its un reality and its playful irony. The origin of the dreadful smells that infest Cologne is thus archly accounted for:- - It was noon when Farina came clattering down from the camp. " Father," said he, " I have sought thee." "My son," exclaimed Monk Gregory with silencing hand, " thou didst not well to leave me contending against the tongues of doubt. Answer me not. The maiden! and what weighed she in such a scale ?—No more ! lam punished. Well speaks the ancient proverb : Beware the back•blows of Sathanas ! I that thought to have vanquished him! Vanity has wrecked me in this world and the next. lam the victim of self-incense. I hear the demons shouting their chorus —' here comes Monk Gregory, who called himself Cull querer of Darkness !' In the camp lam discredited mod a scoff; in the city lam spat upon, abhorred. Satlianas, my son., fights nut with his foreclaws. 'Tis with his tail he fights, 0 Farina !—Listen, my son ! he entered to his kingdom below through Cologne, even under the stones of the Cathedral Square, and the stench of him abominably remained), challenging the nostrils of holy and unholy alike. The Kaiser cannot approach for him ; the citizens are outraged. And the moral, if such it can be called, is thus seen in the conclusion : The shadow of Monk Gregory was seen no more in Cologne. He entered the calendar, and ranks next St. Anthony. For three successive centuries the town of Rhineland boasted his visits in the flesh, and the conqueror of Sathanas caused dire Rhenish feuds. Sathanas repeated his famous Ilack•blow on Farina. TL•e youth awoke one morning and beheld warehouses the exact pattern of his own, displaying Husks shaped even as his own, and twelve Farinas to right and left of him. In a week they were doubled. A month quadrupled them. They increased. " Fame and Fortune," mused Farina, " come from man and the world. Love is from heaven. We may be worthy, and lose the first. We lose not love unless unworthy. Would ye know the true Farina? Look for him who walks under the seal of bliss : whose darling is for ever his young sweet bride, leading him from snares, priming his soul with celestial freshness. There is no hypocrisy can ape that aspect. Least of all the creatures of Seam nes ! By this I may be known." Seven years after, when the Goshawk came into Cologne to see old friends, and drink some of Gottlieb's oldest Rddesheimer, he was waylaid fifty tim4s by false Farinas, and only discovered the true one at last by chance in the music gardens near the Rhine, where Farina sat, having on one hand Margarita, and at his feet three boys and one girl, over whom both bent lovingly, like the parent vine fondling its grape•bunches in summer light. It would not answer to publish too much of this kind of writing, and when next we meet with " George Meredith," we hope that it will be on a more real subject, worthy of his most promising talents and his graceful pen. Sinai, the lledjaz, and Soudan. Wanderings Around the Birthplace of the Prophet, and Across the 'Ethiopian Desert, from Sawaki to Chartum. By James Hamilton. Lon don : Bentley. Boat Life in Egypt and Nubia. By W. C. Prime. London : Sampson Low and Co. A GOOD book of travel is a much rarer thing than, perlisps, is commonly supposed. How tics on all the estates which I visited was that the able bodied negroes begin the day's work at half•past four o'clock a.m., and at ten o'clock have an hour for breakfast. Then, resumint work, go on till sunset, when they get dinner and another hour's rest, after which they work on in unremitting toil till midnight, thus working eighteen hours out of the twenty-four, and with only four for sleep. The system is so thoroughly organised that no one can relax his efforts without being liable to punishment. On the majority of estates, there is one " driver" or under overseer for every ten ablebodied slaves. The slaves that take in the cane in wiggons from the fields to the sugar house usually do so in companies of ten, over whom a Creole "driver" is set, mounted on horseback, with a whip in his hand and cutlass by his side. I was told by one planter, who was working his negroes on the Sunday, that a holiday was usually allowed once a week ; but I found others, well acquainted with the subject, who gave me a very different account of matters. On one large estate which I visited, the practice was that, so long as the machinery held good, there was no stopping, Sunday or Saturday, during the crushing season. The following account of a slave sale is worth quotation : The first slave to be sold was put up for sale, standing on the platform beside the auctioneer, and the bidding went on very rapidly among a crowd of about a hundred persons. He was a stout young mulatto, well dressed, and with so little of the appearance of a slave about him, that 1 was looking fur the object of this active competition among those who sat below. At length he was knocked down at 1,300 dols. ('631.), after which he stepped off the platform. The next was a young woman, whose qualifications were well rehearsed as being a good cook, could speak French and English; she sold for 1,130 dols. Two other household servants, at 900 dole. each, one of whom could speak English, French, and German. A man and wife, who were put up as field-hands, brought 1,000 dots. An old woman sold at 340 dols. She was the only one who appeared to be much concerned about this strange scene, fur she began to weep when the bidding slackened. The rest of the slaves were not sold, as the prices were deemed too low. How ever, the auctioneer, a Frenchman, speaking alternately in French and Eng'ish, did his part with great energy. Often would lie seize " the boys " by the arms, and maintain that such " strong chunky lielthhands" were going far below their value. Among the slaves for sale was a fiir mulatto boy, about seven or eight years of age, neatly dressed in green pants, brown surtout, and white hat with a b an d o f crape round it. Altogether he looked quite a little gentle. man, and as he romped about during the sale appeared perfectly happy, amid all that was going on. His mother and the other slaves who were not sold were ordered to go to the "office " of the auctioneer, and the little fellow went away dancing round her as merrily as if he had been at school. This is a little touch of nature which shows that Mr. Russell has an eye and heart fur something beyond turnips and maize, though he rightly, as a practical man, turns his atten- tion in the main to substantial rather than sentimental points of view. The following remarks on malaria are too important to be omitted Some years ago, I pointed out that it was a well-under stood tact in Scotland, when some of its inhabitants were very subject to ague, that wet clay soil produced that disease, while wet peaty soil did not. The character of the decomposition of the vegetable matter taking place on clay and on peuty soils being different, the emanations arising from the former seem to have a deleterious in fluence on the human system, while the latter are quite innocuous. Indeed, our peat•mosses in Scotland have decided antiseptic properties, which no doubt serve to retard decomposition; and they afford peculiar products. Among these, the vegetable extract that imparts the dark brown colour to many of our Highland rivers is well known. Now, it is curious that all the swampy districts which are healthy in the Southern States are characterised by the water being coloured by a similar vegetable extract. In the Great Dismal Swamp of Carolina, Sir Charles Lyall stye, " The water is transparent, though tinged by a pale brown colour, like that of our peatmosses."—Lyall'a Tra vels in North America, vol. i. p. 147. It appea►s that all the water in the swamps of the Southern States is of the same character, and it is very probable that this fact is indicative of vegetable accumulations, from which it pro ceeds, undergoing that particular species of decay which is not unhealthy. Dr. Hooker, in his " Himalayan Journals," writes : " The climate of Chattuc is excessively damp and hot throughout the year, but, though stink amid interminable swamps, the place is perfectly healthy. Such, indeed, is the character of the climate throughout the Jheels, where fever and agues are rare ; and, though no situation can appear more malarious to the common observer than Silhet and Cachago, they are in fact eminently salubrious. These facts admit of no explanation in the present state of our knowledge of endemic diseaseQ. Much may be attributed to the amount and purity (?) of the water, the equability of the climate, the absence of forests, and of sudden changes from wet to dry; but such facts afford no satisfactory explanation. The water, as 1 have above said, is if a rich chesnut brown in the narrow creeks of the Jheels, and is golden yellow by transmitted light, owing, no doubt, as in bog•water and that of dunghills, to a vegetable ex tract, and probably the presence of carbonated hydrogen." The climate of the Southern States of America is in every way the opposite to that of the Jheele, for it is any thing but equable ; forests abound, and the changes from we . , to dry are great and sudden. The only conditions that seem to be common to the healthy swamps both of America and of India are large accumulations of vegetable matter, rescubliog our pestlhooseg, mut the presence of this