was the least gratifying feature in Edinburgh society in those days the breaking down of the old party barriers in social life, which, in the days gone by, had been so wide and so insuperable. John Wilson and Mackenzie, the son of the author of the Man of Feeling,' and fully his father's equal in originality and genius, lent the lustre of their great social powers to the same circles as the leading Whigs of the Review. Not one remains. They have all disappeared from the scene, and it will be long before Edinburgh can again boast of a society so brilliant.

From politics, of course, and from literature for the most part, Jeffrey and his judicial contemporaries had necessarily ceased; nor do we stop here to recall what well deserves to be recalled, how much they had done, with little aid but their own right arm, to promote what they believed, and what the country had accepted as sound canons of political thought and sound principles of literary criticism. It was from Edinburgh that the first notes were sounded, and although the subsequent progress of opinion has thrown some of their efforts into the shade, the work was ably done, and could only have been done by able and earnest men.

His old friends received Charles Bell with open arms and profuse hospitality. He was kindly welcomed at the University, and began his new duties with energy. He was universally treated with the respect due to his great reputation, and he began to meditate still further scientific triumphs, and to plan and execute some piscatorial expeditions which were crowned with great results. But in some respects the process of transplanting was not altogether successful. Some local difficulties in the University to a certain extent affected the attendance on his lectures, and the amount of consultation practice on which he had reckoned was not realised. The ground of course was occupied, and it is no easy matter for a man, however able, when past his meridian, to start on a new career of professional labour; and Bell was in his sixtythird year.

One object, however, his comparative leisure enabled him to accomplish. He undertook a journey to Rome, and thereby satisfied an old craving of his life. This was in May 1840. There with his usual energy he sketched, and ransacked, and worked for materials for his new edition of the Anatomy of < Expression,' and was in his element of intense exertion. As 'to Rome,' he says, 'there I was driven as a slave, rode upon like one of the Galeotti. Heat, sleep, palaces, churches, "sketching, drawing, and the oppressive but kind interference

'of friends made it a month of labour, excitement, delight, and 'disappointment.' But he had filled two sketch-books.

But our limits compel us to finish this desultory notice. His Italian journal contains this passage: Went to poor John's grave. The Pyramid of Cestius attracts you from a distance. A plain stone marks the place as you enter the ancient re'formed burying ground. A single antique column is between 'the enclosure and the pyramid. Remembering old times, a fitting resting-place.' The career of the survivors was draw ing to a close. George Joseph had been attacked by blindness the year before. Charles Bell himself had been subject to spasmodic fits of illness. Indeed, since the death of John Shaw, and the distress and labour which he then underwent, his health had never been satisfactory. His symptoms in the spring of 1842 became more distressing, and he resolved, when his University Session closed, to leave for London, which he did. He reached Manchester, where he had an attack so acute, that he says in a letter to Richardson that he called for death. On the 27th he and Lady Bell reached Hallow Park, the seat of Mrs. Holland. Next day he seemed well, and walked about the grounds, but had a severe attack at night. It was relieved for the time, but in the morning he awoke with a spasm, laid his head on his wife's shoulder, and so died.

And never passed away a gentler, truer, or finer spirit. His genius was great, and has left a legacy to mankind which will keep his name fresh in many generations. But the story of his life in this little book has a more potent moral. It is the story of one who kept his affections young, and his love of the pure and the refined unsullied, while fighting bravely the battle of life; whose heart was as tender as his intellect was vigorous and original; who, while he gained a foremost place among his fellows, turned with undiminished zest to his home and his friends, and found there the object, the reward, and the solace of his life. George Joseph Bell died in the following year; and so ends this record of the brothers.

ART. VI.-1. Geschichte des Golfstroms und seiner Erforschung von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf den grossen amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg. Von J. G. KOHL. Bremen:

1868.

2. Ocean-Currents and their Influences. By A. G. FINDLAY, F.R.G.S. (Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, vol. xiv.)

3. Soundings and Temperatures in the Gulf Stream. By Commander W. CHIMMO, R.N. (Proceedings of Royal Geographical Society, Feb. 8, 1869.)

4. Physical Geography in its Relation to the Prevailing Winds and Currents. By JOHN K. LAUGHTON, M.A. 1870.

5. Mittheilungen aus Justus Perthes' geographischer Anstalt. Von Dr. A. PETERMANN. Gotha: 1870-1872.

6. Reports on the Scientific Exploration of the Deep_Sea, during 1868, 1869, and 1870, conducted by WILLIAM B. CARPENTER, LLD., M.D., F.R.S., J. GWYN JEFFREYS, F.R.S., and Prof. WYVILLE THOMSON, LLD., F.R.S. (See Proceedings of the Royal Society, 1868–1871.)

7. The Gibraltar Current, the Gulf Stream, and the General Oceanic Circulation. By WILLIAM B. CARPENTER, LL.D., M.D., F.R.S. (See Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, Jan. 9, 1871.)

WHEN Lothair first honoured Mr. and Mrs. Putney Giles

-6.66

with his company at dinner, we learn from his biographer that his hostess'expounded to him with brilliant perspicuity the reasons which had induced her to believe that the Gulf Stream had changed its course, and the political and 'social consequences that might accrue. "The religious senti""ment of the Southern races," said Apollonia, "must be wonderfully affected by a more rigorous climate. I cannot doubt," she continued, "that a series of severe winters at "Rome might put an end to Romanism." If Mr. Disraeli intended this as a sneer at the shallow nonsense which has been talked about the Gulf Stream, and at the exaggerated estimates of its potency which have been put forward by men (as well as women) who ought to have known better, he could have scarcely hit upon a more apposite illustration. As Dr. Hayes (the American Arctic explorer) truly remarks:

Weather predictors without end have launched upon it their stupidities; meteorologists have deluged the world with their assumptions respecting it; theorists of all kinds have floated their notions upon it.

One whirls it away into the Arctic regions, and opens a passage to the Pole with it; another compels it to give a climate to countries where otherwise there would be no climate worth mentioning; while still another spins it round in the Atlantic Ocean, and its widespread arms close upon a stagnant Sargasso Sea. . . . Through means such as these mankind has come to look upon the Gulf Stream with a certain degree of awe. It is a "breeder of storms;" the giver of heat; it might become the father of pestilence. Will it always continue to do its duty as hitherto? or will it start off suddenly with some new fancy, and by pursuing some new course upset the physical and moral status of the world?'

Is it really in the power, we may add, of our Transatlantic cousins as one of them has recently asserted-by buying up the Isthmus of Panama, and cutting a sufficiently wide channel through it, to convert the climate of France and Austria into that of Canada, and to turn England, Germany, and Northern Europe into a frozen wilderness like Labrador?

These questions may now, we think, be answered with a considerable approach to certainty; much light having been thrown on the subject from various sources, since we last brought it under the attention of our readers in a review of Capt. Maury's Physical Geography of the Sea' (April, 1857). The careful investigations which have been carried on by the officers of the United States Coast Survey, under the able direction of the late Professor Bache, have brought together a body of trustworthy information as to what the Gulf Stream is and does, between its exit from the Gulf of Mexico and its final departure from the seaboard of New England. Our own surveyors have examined its thinned-out margin near the Banks of Newfoundland; and our Hydrographic Department published in 1868 a set of Wind and Current charts of the Atlantic Ocean, embodying all the information that has been obtained of late years in regard to the temperature and movements of its superficial stratum. And the investigations in regard to the Temperature of the sea, both at the bottom and at various intermediate depths, which have been made under the direction of Dr. Carpenter and Professor Wyville Thomson in the Lightning' and Porcupine' expeditions of 1868-70, have thrown an entirely new light on the cause of that north-easterly 'set' of ocean-water, which carries into the Arctic circle between Spitzbergen and Nova Zembla the warmth of Temperate seas, and seems likely to afford the best opening to the navigator who seeks to penetrate the Polar ice-barrier, so as to find his way into that open Polar sea sea' which some of our physical geographers regard as a myth, whilst others represent it as an all but proved reality.

The history of our knowledge of the Gulf Stream has been worked out with true German industry and exhaustiveness by Herr Kohl, whose published travels in various regions had given ample evidence as well of his scientific as of his literary ability. During a visit which he paid to the United States between 1854 and 1857, his attention was drawn to the subject by Professor Bache; at whose request he prepared for the Archives of the United States Coast Survey an account of the earlier contributions to our knowledge of the Gulf Stream, from the discoveries of Columbus to the first third of the nineteenth century; and to this is now added an excellent summary of the results of the inquiries which have been since carried on under Professor Bache's direction. The eight periods, however, into which he divides his history seem to us reducible to three, which may be defined as follows:-The first period we regard as commencing with the current-observations of Columbus and his immediate successors; and as closing with the great generalisation of Anghiera, who had been the personal friend of Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, Sebastian Cabot, and Cortes, and had watched their discoveries with the most vivid interest. By the correlation of the data he had even thus early collected, he was able, in the important work De Rebus Oceanicis et Orbe Novo,' which he published in 1523, to trace the deflection of the Equatorial Current by the opposition of the American coast-line, to recognise its rotation around the Gulf of Mexico, and to follow the extension of the vast and rapid stream which issues from the Florida Channel, as far as Newfoundland and the mouth of the St. Lawrence.

The second period includes all the additional information gathered by European voyagers as to the course, velocity, and extent of the Gulf Stream, down to the important discovery of Drs. Franklin and Blagden, that the passage of the Stream across the Atlantic between the parallels of New York and New England may be recognised by the elevated temperature of its water. The history of this discovery is more correctly given by Kohl than it had previously been by Maury, on whose account of it we relied too implicitly in our former article. As there stated, the attention of Dr. Franklin was first drawn to the subject by his learning from a Nantucket whaling captain, whom he chanced to meet in London in 1770, that he had come to the knowledge of the course and limits of the Gulf Stream, by finding that whales are found on either side of it, but never in it. When returning to America in His Majesty's ship Liverpool' in 1775, he made a series