glad to be relieved from the charge of her child. She knows she has left it in a safe place; she perceives that the child likes the school, because it always goes willingly; she sees an improvement in the habits and temper of her child; she finds it easier to manage; fewer conflicts arise between them; she parts with it in the morning with satisfaction; she sees it come home with pleasure. Is there any thing in this to weaken the bonds of natural affection? Now let us see what happens where Infant Schools are not found. The mother has her daily task to encounter, sometimes at home, sometimes abroad. The child is in her way; she does what she can to amuse it; but she finds it a hard matter to attend to her work and her child too: she lets it run out into the alley or street in which she lives; the child gets into some trouble or difficulty, which vexes and irritates the mother; or, at best, it comes home covered with dirt, and any thing but the better for the manner in which it has been passing its time. When the mother does not follow this plan, she joins with a few neighbours (and this particularly occurs in the case of those who have out-door work) in hiring a girl, who, for six-pence a-week, takes charge of as many children as can be crowded together into a small room, her duty being to keep the door shut and the children out of harm. In this, however, she is not always successful. An eminent medical practitioner stated, when infant schools were first established, that he would support them, if for no other reason, to prevent the dreadful accidents that are continually happening from fire to the children of the working classes. Who that duly considers the subject can remain under the impression, that such a limited separation as that which is effected by Infant Schools between parent and child, can be injurious to either one party or the other? In what condition of life is it expected that parents are to spend every hour of the day in the society of their children? And with respect to the great mass of the population in crowded cities, how is it possible for them to do it? We may regret that the state of things is not otherwise; we may earnestly desire that less of labour might suffice to satisfy earthly wants; but, until that time shall arrive, our business is to deal with things as they are, and to seek, by every wise and good method, to mend them. An objection has been taken to some Infant Schools, and with reason ;-that the system followed in them is not sufficiently simple. This is a mistake which ought to be avoided. It gives a fanciful character to that which is in reality solid and substantial. There is room enough for discipline and instruction (the first being by far the most important of the two in these institutions) without teaching trigonometry, or the signs of the Zodiac. At the largest school in London, the " City of London Infant School," in Liverpool Buildings, nothing is attempted that can not be made intelligible to the capacities of the children. * In cases of sickness, the mothers state that the children's greatest grief is, that they cannot get to the school. TO THE RAINBOW. BY T. CAMPBELL. Triumphal arch, that fill'st the sky, To teach me what thou art— Betwixt the earth and heaven. When Science from Creation's face And yet, fair bow, no fabling dreams. When o'er the green undeluged earth, And when its yellow lustre smiled O'er mountains yet untrod, Each mother held aloft her child To bless the bow of God. Methinks, thy jubilee to keep, The first-made anthem rang, On earth deliver'd from the deep, And the first poet sang. Nor ever shall the Muse's eye Unraptur'd greet thy beam; Be still the poet's theme. The lark thy welcome sings, O'er mountain, tower, and town, A thousand fathoms down. As fresh in yon horizon dark, As young thy beauties seem, Heaven still rebuilds thy span, LINES IN PRAISE OF A GOOSE-QUILL, BY BISHOP ATTERBURY. The words of the wise man thus preach to us all, THE quill of the goose is a very slight thing, By Ramsay, by Cambray, by Boyle, or Despreaux. 66 into two tenements, one of which is occupied by the sexton of the parish. Under the same roof, although in a separate part, is the Girls' National School. The house is in a ruinous condition, but such is the reverence manifested for the memory of this great man, that it is kept in as diligent repair as is consistent with any preservation of the sameness of the buildings. We trust it will never be removed, but, when uninhabitable, permitted to follow the stream of time. "In their own quiet glade should sleep And wild flower wreaths from side to side The entry of Locke's baptism still remains in the Parish Register of Wrington. It is as follows: Anno Dñi 1637, Julie 16. John the sonne of Jeremy Locke & Elizabeth his wife. He died in the year 1704, aged 73. Locke was to the philosophy of mind what Newton was to the philosophy of matter. His opinions at the time were mistaken, and it was thought that they led to the overthrow of Christianity. Later times have shewn that they confirm the truth of religion; and, indeed, Locke was himself a convinced Christian, and author of a commentary on St. Paul's Epistles, and a Common-Place Book to the Bible. The last years of his life were spent in the study of the Holy Scriptures. THE PLEASURE OF AMUSEMENT COMPARED WITH THE PLEASURE FROM INDUSTRY IN OUR CALLINGS. -How is that man deceived, who thinks to maintain a constant tenure of pleasure by a continued pursuit of sports and recreations. The most voluptuous and loose person breathing, were he but tied to follow his hawks and his hounds, his dice and his courtships, every day, would find it the greatest torment and calamity that could befall him; he would fly to the mines and gallies for his recreation, and to the spade and the mattock for a diversion from the misery of a continual unremitted pleasure. But on the contrary, the providence of God has so ordered the course of things, that there is no action the usefulness of which has made it the matter of duty and of a profession, but a man may lead the continual pursuit of it without loathing and satiety. The same shop and trade that employs a man in his youth, employs him also in his age. Every morning he rises fresh to his hammer and anvil; he passes the day singing; custom has naturalized his labour to him; his shop is his element, and he cannot with any enjoyment of himself live out of it. Johnson thought the happiest life was that of a man of business, with some literary pursuits for amusement; and that in general no one could be virtuous or happy, that was not completely employed. not solitary, be not idle," is the conclusion of BURTON'S Anatomy of Melancholy. THE OTTER. WE passed to my surprise a row of no less then nine or ten large and very beautiful otters, tethered with straw collars, and long strings, to bamboo stakes on the bank. Some were swimming about at the full extent of their strings, or lying half in and half out of the water; others were rolling themselves in the sun on the sand-banks, uttering a shrill whistling noise as if in play. I was told that most of the fishermen in this neighbourhood kept one or more of these animals, who were almost as tame as dogs, and of great use in fishing, sometimes driving the shoals into the nets, sometimes bringing out the larger fish with their teeth. I was much pleased and interested with the sight. UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE COMMITTEE OF GENERAL LITERATURE AND EDUCATION, APPOINTED BY THE SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE. The occupation of grinding the corn is generally performed by women, though it is not unfrequently committed to men, as will be seen by our print, which is copied from a drawing made on the spot, and published as one of a series of engravings by an ingenious native artist at Madras. It is the custom in the East for families to grind the | be called tender and delicate; take the mill-stones and corn and prepare the flour which they use at home. grind meal." The accompanying plate represents a Hindoo family engaged in this employment. The woman on the outside is cleansing the corn by pouring it on the floor against the wind, which carries away the dust and light particles that have become mixed with it. The corn thus cleaned is poured, a few handfulls at a time, into the hollow at the top of the hand-mill, which consist of two stones, about two feet and a half in diameter, and six inches thick. A stout wooden pivot connects the upper with the lower stone. The corn that is poured in at the top falls in between the two stones, and the turning round of the upper stone reduces it to flour, in which state it works out at the rim, and falls on a cloth spread to receive it. The flour is winnowed and sifted on the floor. The sort of corn-mill here represented is common in all parts of the East, and has been in use from the earliest ages. We find frequent mention of it in Scripture. The family mill was so essential to the preparation of the daily food, that it was forbidden by the law of Moses to take in pledge " the upper or the nether mill-stone;" and the reason stated for this prohibition is, that he who should do so, "taketh a man's life to pledge."-When Abimelech, after the defeat of the Shechemites, attacked the town of Thebez, and was about to set fire to the tower in which the inhabitants had taken refuge, a brave woman destroyed the oppressor by throwing on his head from the wall a stone of the household mill.-The fall and degradation of Babylon is thus foretold in the beautiful imagery of the inspired prophet Isaiah: "Come down and sit in the dust, O virgin daughter of Babylon-sit on the ground. There is no throne, O daughter of the Chaldeans; for thou shalt no more VOL. I. There is a remarkable passage in St. Matthew, where our Saviour is pressing upon his disciples the necessity of being always in a state of preparation, as well for the signal calamities of this life-such as the destruction which was to fall on Jerusalem-as for the sudden coming of the Day of Judgment. He warns them to reflect on the certainty that what is announced by God would come to pass; and not to look for warnings which should give them time for individual preparation, for the world will be found engaged in its ordinary pursuits when such mighty events occur-" For, as in the days that were before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and knew not till the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken and the other left;-two women shall be grinding at the mill,-the one shall be taken and the other left." It is very remarkable that mills of a similar construction are mentioned by Pennant as in use in the highlands of Scotland and in the Hebrides, and are called Querns. The description of their form, and the manner of using them, differ in no material point from what we have shown to be customary in the East. The introduction of a more expeditious and effectual machine, seems to have been opposed by the 9 prejudices of the people for a long time, and Pennant saw the hand-mill in use in the Isle of Rum in 1769. "The Quern or Bra," he says, "is made in some of the neighbouring counties on the mainland, and costs about fourteen shillings. This method of grind- | ing is very tedious, for it employs two pair of hands four hours to grind only a single bushel of corn. Instead of a hair-sieve to sift the meal, the inhabitants have here an ingenious substitute-a sheep-skin stretched round a hoop and bored with small holes made with a hot iron." During the work the women used to sing songs, sometimes of love, sometimes of praise of their ancient heroes, whose deeds they rehearsed to slow and me- | lancholy tunes. But Pennant observes that "singing at the Quern was almost out of date since the introduction of water-mills. The laird can oblige his tenants, as in England, to make use of this more expeditious kind of grinding, and empowers his miller to search out and break any Querns he can find, as machines that defraud him of the toll." ON THE ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF WHAT a wide field of wonder and reflection does the present advanced state of the press open to an observing mind! In all its departments wonderful, in none is it more astonishing than in the circulation of its Newspapers. Vehicles they are of all that can interest man as a moral and social being. In the lawful use of their mighty power, capable of being ranked among the great benefactors of mankind-the friends of religion, liberty and order-the patrons of every improvement which can add to the substantial benefits, the comforts, the ornaments of civilized life,-sources of daily information and innocent amusement, to every rank of society. In the wanton, profligate, and corrupt abuse of the same power, instruments of tyranny, oppression, moral, political, and religious degradation, confusion, and every evil work. Such being their power for good and for ill, their history, their origin, their past and present circumstances, can never be devoid of interest. We lay before our readers some acknowledged facts connected with these points. For an Englishman not intimately acquainted with the former history of his country, but who was now approaching" the age of man," it would be very natural to suppose, that, although he has observed newspapers to have increased prodigiously in size and numbers within the last fifty years, yet that their progress was like that of our roads. He might reasonably suppose, that though fewer, less frequent, and smaller,―in every point unlike those of the present day, still that they were in existence from time immemorial. The invention of printing, indeed, might have made the multiplication of copies infinitely more easy, still there is nothing of itself absurd, in supposing that newspapers, like our historical records, might have circulated in England from the time of Alfred, and before.* The fact, however, is strikingly the reverse. Nothing of the kind had any name or any being in our country for more than five hundred years after the Norman conquest. The origin of the first Gazette is very curious, and interesting to every Englishman: and it is this. When the Spanish Armada was in the English Channel, during the year 1588, many false reports * Venice is entitled to the honour of having produced the first Gazetta; and yet its jealous government, long after the invention of printing allowed it to be distributed only in manuscript, were naturally spread, calculated to alarm and dispirit the people of this island. To prevent these mischiefs, through a season of intense anxiety, the Government had recourse to the expedient of publishing real information. And (as Chalmers expresses it in his Life of Ruddiman) it may gratify our pride to be told that mankind are indebted to the wisdom of our Elizabeth, and the prudence of her minister, Burleigh, for the first Newspaper. The earliest gazette of this kind was entitled The English Mercurie, which, by authority, was "imprinted at London, by Christopher Barker, her Highnesse's Printer, 1588.” In the first of these newspapers, preserved in the British Museum, under the date of July 26, 1588, is the following notice: "Yesterday the Scots ambassador, being introduced by Sir Francis Walsingham, had a private audience of her Majesty, to whom he delivered a letter from the king his master, [James VI of Scotland, her successor on the throne of England] containing the most cordial assurances of his resolution to adhere to her Majesty's interests, and to those of the Protestant religion." And it may not be here improper to take notice of a wise and spirited saying of this young prince, [he was twenty-two] to the queen's minister at his court, viz. 'That all the favour he did expect from the Spaniards, was the courtesy of Polypheme to Ulysses, to be the last devoured.' I defy (observes Chalmers) the gazetteer of the present day to give a more decorous account of the introduction of a foreign minister. Burleigh's newspapers were all Extraordinary Gazettes, published from time to time, as that profound statesman wished to inform or terrify the people. The Mercuries were probably first printed in April, 1588, when the Armada approached the shores of England. After the Spanish ships had been dispersed, these Extraordinary Gazettes seldom appeared. On Nov. 24, 1588, the Mercurie informed the people that "the solemn thanksgiving for the successes against the Spanish Armada was this day strictly observed." It has been confidently but ignorantly asserted, that newspapers were invented by the French, in the time of Richelieu, who gave Théophrast Redaunot a patent for the Paris Gazette. But this was first published in 1631. The dates demonstrate that the pleasures and benefits of a newspaper were enjoyed in England more than forty years before the French possessed any thing of the kind. A newspaper had now gratified the curiosity of the people, and the people would no longer be gratified without a newspaper, though the English Mercurie ceased when the occasion which gave it birth had passed away. They were at first occasional, and afterwards weekly. The title of the first was The News of the Present Week. During the civil wars the country was inundated with those occasional "News." Still they were more of the character of pamphlets than newspapers. In 1665, the London Gazette was published, under the title of the Oxford Gazette, it having been printed at that University during a session of Parliament held there on account of the plague then raging in London. This was reprinted in London, in two small folio pages, "for the use of some merchants and gentlemen who desire the same." From 1661 to 1688 no less than seventy papers were published under different titles. From an advertisement in the Athenian Gazette, 1696, it appears that the coffee-houses in London, were then supplied with nine newspapers. In 1696, there seems not to have been any daily paper, though it has been said that the London Courant was published daily. As early as the reign of Queen Anne, London enjoyed the luxury of a newspaper every day, though, even in 1709, the Daily Courant was the only paper published every day, Sundays of course excepted. The rest were published three times a week, or less frequently. In 1724 the number was three daily, six weekly, seven three times a week, three Halfpenny Posts, published three times a week; and the London Gazette twice a week. In 1815, the number of newspapers in Great Britain had risen to 252. Of these 55 were published in London, 15 daily, and 40 periodically; 122 in the country parts of England, 26 in Scotland, and 49 in Ireland. The total number of these papers printed during three months, ending April 1, 1815, was 5,890,621, making the annual average 22,762,764. In the year 1829, the number of the newspapers published in the Metropolis alone amounted to about 18,000,000; in 1830 to nearly 20,000,000; and in 1831, it was upwards of 22,000,000. REMEMBRANCE. The remembrance of youth is a sigh.-ALI. Man hath a weary pilgrimage With heaviness he casts his eye And still remembers with a sigh From hard control and tyrant rules, In thought he loves to roam; And tears will struggle in his eye Youth comes; the toils and cares of life Where shall the tired and harass'd heart Its consolation find? Then is not youth, as fancy tells, Life's summer prime of joy? Ah no! for hopes too long delay'd, Yet age remembers with a sigh SOUTHEY, THE WRYNECK. THE Wryneck derives its name from its peculiar habit of lengthening the neck, which at the same time it writhes from side to side with serpent-like bendings, now pressing down the feathers so as to resemble the head of a snake, and again half-closing the eyes, swelling out the throat, and erecting its crest, when it presents an appearance at once singular and ludi crous. Among our most interesting and attractive birds, this little harbinger of spring delights us, not by the splendour of its hues, but by the chasteness of its colouring, and the delicate and singular way of its markings, which, from their intricacy and irregularity almost defy the imitations of the pencil. Among our migratory or wandering birds the Wryneck is one of the earliest visitors; arriving at the beginning of April, generally a few days before the cuckoo, (whose mate, from this circumstance, it has been called) when his shrill unchanging note, pee pee pee, rapidly reiterated, may be heard in our woods and gardens. The places where this bird is found, appear to be very limited; the midland counties being those to which it usually resorts in England. M. Temminck informs us that it is seldom found beyond Sweden, and is rare in Holland, occupying in preference the central portions of Europe. We are able to add to this information, by stating that it is abundant in the Himalaya mountains in India, whence we have frequently received it as a common specimen of the birds of that range of hills, with others bearing equally a British character. In manners, the Wryneck is shy and lonesome; and were it not for its loud and well-known call, we should not often be aware of its presence; its quiet habits leading it to close retirement, and its sober colour, which agrees with the brown bark of the trees, tending also to its concealment. In confinement, however, or when wounded, this little bird manifests much boldness; hissing like a snake, erecting its crest, and defending itself with great spirit. It breeds with us soon after its arrival, the female selecting the hole of a tree, in which she lays her eggs, to the number of eight or nine, of an ivory white. The young take after the plumage of the parent birds, which shows scarcely any difference between the two sexes. The food of the Wryneck, like that of the weakerbilled Woodpeckers, consists of caterpillars and other insects, especially ants and their larvæ, to which it is very partial. In the manner of taking its food this little bird makes but little use of the bill itself; its long hollow tongue, capable of being thrust out to a considerable distance, and made sticky by a proper gland, being the chief instrument. This it inserts between the crevices of the bark, or among the loose sandy earth of the ant-hill, thrusting it out and withdrawing it so rapidly, with the insect sticking to it, as almost to deceive the eye. Leaving England in the early part of the autumn, the Wryneck passes over to the southern districts of Europe, and probably extends its journey to Asia, where it finds a kindly climate, and food still abundant. The prevailing colour of this elegant little bird consists of different shades of brown, inclining to gray on the head, the rump, and the tail, but of a bright chesnut on the larger wing-coverts and the first feathers; the whole beautifully varied with delicately shaped markings of a deep brown, which give it a mottled appearance. Breast wood-brown, penciled with slender cross tracings; belly dirty white, speck |