we see, throughout India, a race of men, whose make, physiognomy, and muscular strength, convey ideas of an effeminacy which surprizes when pursued through such numbers of the species, and when compared to the form of the European who is making the observation. The sailor no sooner lands on the coast, than nature dictates to him the full result of this comparison; he brandishes his stick in sport, and puts fifty Indians to flight in a moment: confirmed in his contempt of a pusillanimity, and an incapacity of resistance, suggested to him by their physiognomy and form, it is well if he recollects that the poor Indian is still a ma».

"The muscular strength of the Indian is still less than might be expected from the appearance of the texture of his frame. Two English sawyers have performed in one day the work of thirty-two Indians: allowances made for the difference of dexterity, and the advantage of European instruments, the disparity is still very great; and would have been more, had the Indian been obliged to have worked with the instrument of the Europeans, as he would scarcely have been able to have wielded it.

"As much as the labourer in Indostan is deficient in the capacity of exerting a great deal of strength at an onset, so is he endowed with a certain suppleness throughout all his frame, which enables him to work long in his own degree of labour; and which renders those contortions and postures, which would cramp the inhabitant of northern regions, no constraint to him. There are not more extraordinary tumblers in the world. Their mes sengers will go fifty miles a day, for twenty or thirty days, without intermission. Their infantry march faster, and with less weariness, than Europeans; but could not march at all, if they were to carry the same baggage and accoutrements.

"Exceptions to this general defect of nerVous strength, are found in the inhabitants of the mountains which run in ranges, of various directions, throughout the continent of Indostan. In these, even under the tropic, Europeans have met with a savage whose bow they could scarcely draw to the head of a formidable arrow, tinged with the blood of tigers, whose skins he offers to sale. Exceptions to the general placid countenance of the Indians, are found in the inhabitants of the woods, who, living chiefly on their chace, and perpetually alarmed by summons and attacks from the princes of the plains, for tributes withheld, or ravages committed, wear an air of dismay, suspicion, treachery, and wildness, which renders them hideous; and would render them terrible, if their physiognomy carried in it any thing of the fierceness of the mountaineer.

"The stature of the Indian is various: the northern inhabitant is as tall as the generality of our own nation: more to the south their height diminishes remarkably; and on the coast of Coromandel we meet with many whose stature would appear dwarfish, if this

idea was not taken off by the slimness and regularity of their figure. Brought into the world with a facility unknown to the labours of European women; never shackled in thei infancy by ligatures; sleeping on their backs, without pillows; they are, in general, very straight, and there are few deformed persons amongst them.

"Labour produces not the same effect on the human frame in Indostan as in other countries: the common people, of all sorts, are a diminutive race, in comparison with those of higher casts and better fortunes; and yield stil more to them in all the advan tages of physiognomy. Prohibited from ma rying out of their respective tribes, every cast sems to preserve its respective proportion of health and beauty, insanity and ugliness. There is not a handsomer race in the universe, than the Baniaus of Guzerat: the Harams cores, whose business is to remove all kinds o filth, and the buryers and burners of dead bodies, are as remarkably ugly.

"Nature seems to have showered beauty on the fairer sex throughout Indostan, wan a more lavish hand than in most other countries. They are all, without exception, lit to be married before thirteen, and wonkled before thirty-flowers of too short a duration not to be delicate; and too delicate to last long. Segregated from the company of the other sex, and strangers to the ideas of altracting attention, they are only the handsomer for this ignorance; as we see in them, beauty in the noble simplicity of nature. Hints have already been given of their phy siognomy: their skins are of a polish and softness beyond that of all their rivals on the globe: a statuary would not succeed better in Greece itself, in his pursuit of the Grecian form; and although, in the men, he would find nothing to furnish the ideas of the Farnesian Hercules, he would find, in the women, the finest hints of the Medicean Venus.

"If we consider the impossibility of a stranger being admitted into any one cast, to which a Bramin will administer any of his sacerdotál functions, and the universal, restriction of marriage to persons of the same cast, we shall not be surprized to find that the Indian has preserved his physiognomy from a resemblance with any of his neigh bours.

"Montesquieu attributes much to the effect of climate; and his critics impute to him, to have attributed much more, to this effect than he really does. It is certain, that there is no climate in which we may not find the same effects produced in the human species, as in climates entirely different in situation, and in every other circumstance. The Sybarites, whose territory was not more than a day's journey from the country of the Hora ti, the Cincinnati, and the Scipios, were more effeminate than the subjects of Sarda napalus; and there are Sybarites at this day, in the country of Vercingétorix. The Britons, although they possess, at this day, all the courage of their painted ancestors, who beat

the greatest general of the world out of their country, are, doubtless, incapable of bearing like them the fatigues and hardships of a campaiga.

But it would be to contradict all our feelings, not to allow that it is much more dmcult to bring the human race to particular tabits in some countries than in others. To make a Sybarite of an inhabitant of the 50th degree of latitude, infinite inventions must have been carried to the greatest degree of perfection: apartments must be closed and fuelled so as to render the alterations of Seasons little sensible to him: he must be carried in vehicles, contrived to be as warm as the apartments he leaves, and almost as easy as the chair in which he slumbers: his food must be every thing that is not simple. "To produce the same effect in such a climate and such a country as Indostan, nothing is necessary but to give the man his daily food. The effect of the sun on the perspiration of the human body, together with the soitness of the air, render this secretion in India more powerful than the effect of labour in other countries. The awkward constraint arising from rest in northern climates, is the call of nature to throw oif something obnoxious to the habit, or to quicken the circulation into warmth. Sensible of neither of these impulses, and satisfied with the present sense of case, the inhabitant of Indostan has no coacetion of any thing salutary in the use of exercise; and receiving no agreeable sensation from it, esteems it, in those not oblized to it by necessity, ridiculous, or the effect of a discontented spirit.

46

This general tendency to indolence being admitted, we shall find nature encouraging tae in it.

The savage, by his chace, and the perpetual war in which he lives with the elements, is enabled to devour, almost raw, the flesh of the animals he has killed. In more civilized nations, the plowman, from his labour, is enabled to digest, in its coarsest preparations, the wheat he has sown. Either of these foods would destroy the common inhabitant of Indostan: as he exists at present his food is

rice.

“To provide this grain, we see a man of Do muscular strength carrying a plow on his shoulder to the field, which the season or reservoirs of water have overflown. This slender instrument of his agriculture, yoked to a pair of diminutive and feeble oxen, is traced, with scarce the impression of a furrow, over the ground, which is afterwards sown. The remaining labour consists in supplying the field with water; which is generally etfected by no greater a toil than undamining the canals, which derive from the great reservoir. If, in some places, this water is drawn from wells, in most parts of India it is supplied by rain; as the rice in those parts where the rainy season is of two or three months' duration, is always sown just before this seasun begins. When reapeti, the women sepa

rate the grain from the husk, in wooden mortars, or it is trampled by oxen. Instead of hedges, the field is inclosed with a slender bank of earth.

"A grain obtained with so little labour, has the property of being the most easily di gestible of any preparation used for food, and is therefore the only proper one for such a effeminate race as I have described. "There is wheat in India; it is produced only in the sharper regions, where rice will not so easily grow, and where the cultivator acquires a firmer fibre than the inhabitant of the plain. It was, probably introduced with the Alcoran, as all the Mahomedans of northern extraction prefer it to rice, as much as an Indian rejects a nourishment which he cannot well digest, even in its finest preparation.

"Water is the only drink of every Indian, respectable enough to be admitted into their assemblies of public worship, as all inebriating liquors are forborn, through a principle of religion; not that the soil is wanting in preductions proper to compose the most intox icating, nor themselves in the art of preparing them for the outcasts of their own nation, or others of persuasions different from their own, who chuse to get drunk. They have not equally been able to refrain from the use of spices, and these, the hottest, without which they never make a meal. Ginger is produced in their gardens, as easily as radishes, are in ours: and chilli, the highest of all ve-, getable productions used for food, insomuch. that it will blister the skin, grows spontaneously: these, with turmeric, are the principal ingredients of their cookery, and by their plenty are always within the reach of the poorest. A total abstinence from animal food is not so generally observed amongst them as is imagined; even the Bramins will eat fish; but as they never prepare either fish or flesh, without mixing them with much greater quantities of spices than Europeans suffer in their ragouts, animal food never makes more than the slightest portion of their meal; and the preference of vegetables, of which they have various kinds in plenty, is decisively marked amongst them all. The cow is sacred every where: milk, from a supposed resemblance with the amortam or nectar of their gods, is religiously esteemed the purest of foods, and receives the pieference to vegetables in their nou ishment.

"If the rice harvests should fail, which, sometimes happens in some parts of India, there are many other resources to prevent the inhabitant froin perishing: there are grains of a coarser kind and larger volume than rice, which require not the same continuation of heat, and at the same time the same supplies of water, to be brought to perfection: there are roots, such as the Indian potatoe, radish, and others of the turnip kind, which, without manure, acquire a larger size than the same species of vegetable in Europe, when assisted with all the arts of agriculture, although much inferior to those of Peru, of which Garcilassa

had left off from ignorance of the motives which led to its adoption; they come again a posteriori to the usage which an priori syllogist had exploded. If they record their experience when they resume their usage, ridicule not only can never triumph again, but cannot even be brought to bear against such pusage. We can no more laugh at a proposal to reverse actions wisely willed, than at a paralytic stroke. Where marriage takes place so early as in Indostan, tradition needs to have great weight. The boy and girl housekeepers could not go on, unless they took almost every action of life upon trust, and managed by imitation like their parents. By the time they have learnt they have got to teach the arts of life: not the slightest interval, during which the acquirements of education could be compared with the wants of society, is allowed. The child must be educated exactly like its parents, or not educated at all, wherever the system of very early marriage prevails. Early gestation shortens the endurance of feminine beauty. This circumstance, added to the legal permission of divorce, must render the proportion of faded widows, whose endowments are coveted, very considerable in the East; and may have favoured that

inhuman state of opinion in which widow. burning was preached into vogue. In order to abolish the practice, our oriental novelists should make the attack on the surviving relations, and represent them as in conspiracy with the priest, to seize and divide the property of the sacrificed enthusiast. Let it become a disgrace to a family, that, from eagerness to inherit, it avoided to dissuade the voluntary death of a mother. But these are speculations, in which it is rash to indulge without local observation,

These, like all the other productions of Mr. Qrme, will be a lasting honour to his country: nor has the utility derived from them, practically, been less conspicuous than their literary merit. We trust that the possessors of the History will occasion a sufficient demand to clear off the copies printed of this supplemental volume, and that a new edition of the works of Orme, chronologically arranged, will speedily illustrate the London press.We are not convinced that Mr. Orme's orthography of proper names ought always to be respected; and we recommend that, at least in the indexes, the oriental orthography be given in Persian characters.

CAPTAIN Marcus Rainsford has passed about twenty-five years of his life in the British service, and was on duty in the West Indies during the late war, at the time of the attack on St. Domingo. After the evacuation of the island by the British troops, Mr. Rainsford took occasion to embark in Jamaica for Martinique, on board a Danish schooner, the Maria, which was overtaken by a hurricane, and obliged to seek refuge in Cape François; it was thought most expedient and most safe to announce him as an American passenger, in which capacity he was freely received by Toussaint L'Ouverture, and saw much of the internal composition of the black republic. The information collected during that interesting residence was laid before the public in a small book, which was reviewed in our first volume. Other particulars have since been collected of the negro-insurrection, an introductory history of St. Domingo is prefixed, public papers and documents are reprinted as an

appendix, and thus a great book has grown out of a short and accidental visit. The map has merit: the other engravings demerit.

The introduction contains an analysis of the principal sources of intelligence consulted by the author. He calls the Abbé Raynal's work an able compilation: we think otherwise. The information it offers concerning the West Indies may be more trust-worthy than that concerning the East Indies; but he who asserts after the Abbé Raynal risks rashly; and he who enquires after him will usually find that much was narrated as true which is wholly invented and fictitious, that more was already known than his pretended diligence collected, and that his declamatory inferences are politically unwise. The Abbe Raynal's is, in the literary world, a dropt book: his intelligence is derivative, and his sources must all be reconsulted.

The first chapter of this history gives a succinct view of the fortunes of St. Do