The Sun. — 1845-08-28 (London, England)

LITERA TURE.  NORTH BRITISH REVIEW, for August 1845.  No. IV.  This number contains few, but they are important, papers. We have articles headed, " Chemistry in its relation to Agriculture," " Life of Lord Hill," " Sayings'Banks," " Tytler's History of Scotland," " Hospitals for the Insane Poor," " Colonisation and the Allotment System," " Welsh's Church History," " Mrs. Hamilton Gray's History of Etruria," and " Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation." A fair variety of subjects, but a majority of them somewhat to ponderous for a periodical. We have been very happy to meet, under the first of these reviews, with occasional notices of a most valuable work of the father of the present Earl of Dundonald, " The relations of Chemistry to Agriculture" (4th, Lon., 1795). It is long since we made our first acquaintance with it ; a period in which elementary treatises on the chemical properties of soils, and of various kinds of manures, were far 'more scarce than they are at present. With equal pleasure we recal our first perusal of another tract, the title of which forms the second item in the heading in these papers, we mean, Sir Humphrey Davy's " Elements of Agricultural Chemistry" (Lon., 1814). These works are reviewed in common with Mr. James Johnston's " Lectures on Agricultural Chemistry and Geology" (Edin. and Lon., 1844); and the same author's " Elements of Agricultural Chemistry and Geology" (Lon. and Edin., 1844). We cannot convey a more favourable impression of the good sense and good spirit in which the reviewer has taken up this important subject, of the intimate relations subsisting between the extension and improvement of the process of chemical discovery and analysis, and the development of agricultural fecundity, than by quoting the following passage; promising, moreover, that the words we have printed in italics merit to be recorded in gold. They accurately touch that which is, at once, a capital heresy in our theory of domestic agriculture, and a fainthearted and timid apology for deficient enterprise and industry. " The advocates for protection not only predict disaster and ruin to the existing agriculturists as a body, from the opening of the trade in corn, but they foretell, also, that half of the poor lands (as they call them) of the empire will be thrown out of cultivation. This statement is, we believe, made in good faith, but it is made in ignorance of the capabilities of the soil, and of the means of developing them. Most of what these writers call ' poor lands' ought rather to be called neglected lands. The wealth they are capable of yielding, and the mode of extracting it are little understood. The pressure of harder times, should they unhappily fall on our already heavily, burdened agriculturists, will lead to the discovery of this unseen wealth, and will gradually impart to the now called ' poor lands' something of the character of those now called 'rich.' Lands which were considered sterile and worthless a century ago, now produce as much as rich lands did then. Has knowledge become so stationary in oar day that we may not expect the next century to produce a similar improvement ?" Neither have we much to except to in the writer's primary positions touching the duties and rights of a national agriculture. We could have wished that they had been introduced with the preliminary axiom, for which we are prepared stoutly to contend, that " climate is determined by the geological conditions of the soil." The Reviewer maintains—  The law of Loyola, amended by the famous Aquaviva, employs a multitude of words, merely implying, Thou shalt not say that murder may not be committed under any pretext ; thou shalt only refrain from affirming that it may be committed under one.' The silence here, that gives consent to many murders, has not escaped Jesuitical ingenuity ; and it were easy to show what crimes have been committed, under another and less equivocal rule of the order, which says that all things done by it were for the glory of God, and that therefore the end amply sanctifies the means employed to reach it."  LETTERS on the UNHEALTHY CONDITION of the LOWER CLASS D WELLINGS, especially in LARGE TOWNS; founded on the first Repo on the Health of Towns Commission. By the Rev. Charles Girdlestone, A.M.