doomed to be one of them." And the tears would pour into his eyes. No: not so, poor wretch: thou art no devil-there is no such thing as devilishness or pure malice for its own sake; the very cruellest actions are committed to relieve the cravings of the perpetrator's want of excitement, more than to hurt another. But though no devil, you are very ignorant, and are not aware of your ignorance. The energies of the universe, being on a great scale, are liable, in their progress from worse to better, to great roughness in the working, and appalling sounds of discord. The wiser you become, the more you diminish this jarring, and tend to produce that amelioration. Learn this, and be neither appalled nor appalling; or if your reflections do not travel so far, and you are in no danger of continuing your evil course by the subtle desperations of superstition, be content to know, that nobody ill-treats another, who is satisfied with his own conduct. If the case were otherwise, it would be worse; for you would not have the excuse even of a necessity for relieving your own sensations. But it never is so, sophisticate about it as you may. The very pains you take to reconcile yourself to yourself, may show you how much need you have of doing so. It is nothing else which makes the silliest little child sulky; and the same folly makes the grown man a tyrant. When you begin to illtreat your child, you begin to punish in him your own faults; and you most likely do nothing but beat them in upon him with every stroke of the scourge: for why should he be wiser than you? Why should he be able to throw off the ill-humors of which your greater energies cannot get rid ?

These thoughts we address to those who are worthy of them; and who not being tyrants, may yet become such, for want of reflection. Vulgar offenders can be mended only with the whole progress of society, and the advancement of education. There is one thing we must not omit to say, which is, that the best parents are apt to expect too much of their children, and to forget how much error they may have committed in the course of bringing them up. Nobody is in fault, in a criminal sense. Children have their excuses, and parents have their excuses; but the wiser any of us become, the less we exact from others, and the more we do to deserve their regard. The great art of

being a good parent consists in setting a good example, and in maintaining that union of dispassionate firmness with habitual good-humor, which a child never thinks of treating with disrespect.

We have here been speaking principally of the behavior of parents to little children. When violent disputes take place be. tween parents and children grown up,-young men and women, -there are generally great faults on both sides; though, for an obvious reason, the parent, who has had the training and formation of the other, is likely to be most in the wrong. But unhappily, very excellent people may sometimes find themselves hampered in a calamity of this nature; and out of that sort of weakness which is so often confounded with strength, turn their very sense of being in the right, to the same hostile and implacable purpose as if it were the reverse. We can only say, that from all we have seen in the world, and indeed from the whole experience of mankind, they who are conscious of being right, are the first to make a movement towards reconciliation, let the cause of quarrel be what it may; and that there is no surer method, in the eyes of any who know what human nature is, both to sustain the real dignity of the right side, and to amend the wrong one. To kind-hearted fathers in general, who have the misfortune to get into a dilemma of this sort, we would recommend the pathetic story of a French general, who was observed, after the death of his son in battle, never to hold up his head. He said to a friend, "My boy was used to think me severe; and he had too much reason to do so. how I loved him at the bottom of my heart; late."

He did not know and it is now too

CHAPTER XII.

Houses on Fire.

Ir is astonishing how little imagination there is in the world, in matters not affecting men's immediate wants and importance. People seem to require a million thumps on the head, before they can learn to guard against a head-ache. This would be little; but the greater the calamity, the less they seem to provide against it. All the fires in this great metropolis, and the frightful catastrophes which are often the result, do not show the inhabitants that they ought to take measures to guard against them, and that these measures are among the easiest things in the world. Every man who has a family, and whose house is too high to allow of jumping out of the windows, ought to consider himself bound to have a fire-escape. What signifies all the care he has taken to be a good husband or father, and all the provision he has made for the well-being of his children in afterlife, if, in one frightful moment, in the dead of night, with horror glaring in their faces, and tender and despairing words swallowed up in burning and suffocation,-amidst cracking beams and rafters, sinking floors, and a whole yielding gulf of agony,—they are all to cease to be !-to perish like so many vermin in a wall! Fire-escapes, even if they are not made so already (as we believe they are), can evidently be constructed in a most easy, cheap, and commodious manner. A basket and a double rope are sufficient; or two or three would be better. It is the sudden sense of the height at which people sleep, and the despair of escape which consequently seizes them, for want of some such provision, that disables them from thinking of any other resources. Houses, it is true, generally have trap-doors to the roof; but these are not kept in readiness for use; a ladder is wanting; or the door is hard to be got up; the passage to it is difficult, or involved in the fire; and the roof may not be a safe one to walk over; chil

dren cannot act for themselves; terror affects the older people ; and therefore, on all these accounts, nothing is more desirable than that the means of escape should be at hand, should be facile, and capable of being used in concert with the multitude below. People out of doors are ever ready and anxious to assist. Those brave fellows, the firemen, would complete the task, if time allowed, and circumstances had hitherto prevented it; and handle the basket and the little riders in it, with confidence, like so many chickens. A time, perhaps, will come, when every window in a high bed-chamber will have an escape to it, as a matter of course; but it is a terrible pity, meanwhile, that for want of a little imagination out of the common pale of their Mondays and Wednesdays, a whole metropolis, piquing themselves on their love of their families, should subject themselves and the dearest objects of their affection to these infernal accidents.

In an honest state of society, houses would all communicate with one another by common doors; and families destroyed by fire would be among the monstrosities of history.

CHAPTER XIII.

A Battle of Ants.-Desirableness of Drawing a Distinction between Powers common to other Animals, and those peculiar to Man.

TAKING up, the other day, a number of the Edinburgh Journal of Science, we met with the following account of a battle of ants. It is contained in the notice of a memoir by M. Hanhart, who describes the battle as having taken place between two species of these insects, "one the formica rufa, and the other a little black ant, which he does not name (probably the fofusca)." In other respects, as the reviewer observes, the subject is not new, the celebrated Huber having described a battle of this kind before; but as natural history lies out of the way of many readers (though calculated to please them all, if they are genuine readers of anything), and as it has suggested to us a few remarks which may further the objects we have in writing, the account shall be here repeated.

"M. Hanhart saw these insects approach in armies composed of their respective swarms, and advancing towards each other in the greatest order. The Formica rufa marched with one in front, on a line from nine to twelve feet in length, flanked by several corps in square masses, composed of from twenty to sixty individuals.

"The second species (little blacks), forming an army much. more numerous, marched to meet the enemy on a very extended line, and from one to three individuals abreast. They left a detachment at the foot of their hillock to defend it against any unlooked-for attack. The rest of the army marched to battle, with its right wing supported by a solid corps of several hundred individuals, and the left wing supported by a similar body of more than a thousand. These groups advanced in the greatest order, and without changing their positions. The two lateral