its Head, Lord Canning, and his Commander-in-Chief. And on his arrival he found an Army which was gradually but gallantly surmounting the most stupendous difficulties, and an administration occupied in preventing the extension of a frightful rebellion, by efforts to the success of which a good patriot would naturally be inclined to give aid rather than opposition. Yet he, at the same time, found the European community glowing with the shame and sorrow of recent disaster and present suspense; and armed, by the instincts of their position, with the bitterest hatred towards the classes to whom they owed so much suffering. Here was a puzzling position for any man entrusted with such powers, and filled with a sense of responsibility to the public of England. The solution arrived at was the easiest, though not the most complete, of which the problem was capable. Lord Canning might be a noble creature, interposing the calm magnanimity of a British nobleman between the blind exasperation of an excited community, and the innocent compatriots of the rebels. But to prove this it was necessary to run down the Anglo-Indian community, who obstinately refused to accept this position, and who held the home Government and that of Calcutta responsible for the evils to which they had been exposed. Nor were there wanting plausible grounds which might appear, on a superficial view, to justify a stranger in taking this view of us. Certain acts of wanton rudeness, a few, perhaps, of actual violence and oppression, and a general feeling of contempt for Asiatics, which shock the dilettante susceptibilities of men to whom the whole is a matter of personal indifference—all this strikes the eye of the new-comer as he wanders through British India. The mistake, we hold, consists in the connexion of this state of things, as cause and effect, with the supposed instability of our rule. In all parts of the world, good men must have some scorn of bad ones; in all Asiatic countries the "ryot" is in hereditary bondage; all honest men have a feeling of mixed hatred and contempt, even for their own faults of character, without which they would never mend them. It was while the intercourse between Englishmen and the natives of India was new, and while the former were in the comparative state of moral callousness shewn in all that we know of eighteenth-century manners, that the natives were most kindly treated, and the association between them and their alien conquerors most intimate. If Mr. Thomas Jones, C. S., and Ensign Northington of the Indian military forces, associated with the natives, it was but meeting the males in the cockpit, and the females in the idle hours of retirement, and no wonder ; there was not such a very wide gulf between the two classes. But it will, we think, be obvious to all but very prejudiced per

sons, that this state of things was hardly worthy of a country holding such a mission as England's in the East; and it is the increasing earnestness of those whom she sends out to conduct her duties here which causes the present fermentation. Men as honest as Dr. Russell come out here in hundreds; they are mostly actuated by the purest philanthropy towards the people; on first landing they treat the native with the respect due to a man and a brother. But when they find that these men will neither own the brotherhood with their lips nor their lives; when they find their whole conduct influenced by principles diametrically opposed to those they themselves consider obligatory, their language always marked by the forecast and elaborate dissimulation of men whose ancestors have been oppressed from generation to generation, and the whole tenor of their intercourse with themselves marked by habitual cringing with rare interruptions of unprovoked hostility, the honest John Bull, conscious of entire innocence of all wish to enslave anybody, and fresh from the land where a man may speak the thing he will, naturally loses at times all patience with such subjects; and though nothing can excuse real cruelty or injustice, we do, in all sincerity, believe that a somewhat stern bearing is the necessary and proper result. What the Saturday Review* can see with regard to the people of the Ionian Islands he should learn to see of those of Hindostan, and then he would not be joining the clamour against an unfortunate band of exiles, who are, as a body, striving to do their duty towards England's Indian wards, amidst privations, dangers, and sufferings, of which the continued misconstruction of their brethren at home is one of the heaviest elements.

*"If their nationality were as strong, as genuine, and as developed [as it is assumed to be] the task of England as their guardian might more legitimately come to an end. It is because their weaknesses, vanities, and clevernesses are all those of children, that we are entitled to keep them in statu pupillari, and to stand between them and the evils they would suffer if we evacuated the Islands to-morrow." For the Islands" read "Hindostan," and the parallel is complete. Saturday Review, December 4, 1858, p. 550.

MARCH, 1859,

P

ART. VII.-1. Geological Papers on Western India, including Cutch, Sinde, &c., edited for the Government of Bombay. By HENRY J. CARTER, Assistant Surgeon, Bombay, 1857.

2. Description des Animaux fossiles du Groupe Nummulitique d l'Inde, par M. LE VICOMTE D'ARCHIAC ET JULES HAIME. Paris, 1853.

3. Memoirs of the Geological Survey of India. Parts I. and II. Calcutta. 1857-59.

4.

5.

Transactions of the Geological Society of London. 2nd Series, Vol. VII.

Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society. London. Various

years.

6. Journal of the Asiatic Society, Bengal.

7. Journal of Literature and Science. Madras.

8.

Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Asiatic Society.

9. Reports, Catalogues, &c. of the Government Central Museum. Madras.

10. Reports of the Juries of the Madras Exhibition, 1857.

11.

General Sketch of the Physical and Geological features of British India. By G. B. GREENOUGH, F. R. S. London. 1855.

12. Geological Map of Part of Bengal. By Capt. W. S. SHERWILL. Calcutta.

RETURNING to Calcutta after a temporary absence, not very long since, we turned into one of those large bookselling establishments which grace the "city of palaces ;" and desirous of becoming acquainted with the more recent additions to our literature, we requested a copy of the latest catalogues. In reply, we received a number of separate lists of books carefully arranged under distinct headings. At our leisure, we commenced to ransack their treasures, and found much of great value and interest. We were however more particularly anxious to see what stores of literary wealth we could command, if desirous of extending our means of reference, or of study, in our own immediate pursuits; or what we could procure suited to our purpose, if we wished, as was not unfrequently the case, to interest some young friend, or some acquaintance resident at a distance, in the local phenomena of his neighbourhood. We turned, therefore, to the catalogue of Geological works. In our over-estimate of the importance of a favorite pursuit, we con

།

cluded that one at least of these catalogues we had received would be devoted to a carefully prepared list of valuable treatises illustrating the physical history of the earth.

But we sought for these, and found them not. Engineering, Medicine, Chemistry, Military Science, Poetry and the Drama, Cheap Literature, each had its own separate arrangement. We looked under "General Science" in vain-under "Miscellaneous Literature,” but no works on Geology had there found their place. At last we had nearly come to the conclusion that we could not have received all the separate catalogues. One at least had been omitted. In this we expected to find grouped by themselves into an imposing class, all those valuable works on Mineralogy and Geology, all those noble treatises on the physical structure of this earth, which had been among the brightest and grandest contributions to human knowledge that the human intellect had ever produced. Alas, our hopes were vain! Looking again over our lists, we found Geology-the science which Herschel, himself an astronomer, was yet compelled in the just estimate of his well cultivated intellect to confess was second only to Astronomy in the grandeur and boundlessness of its studies-Geology had been quietly "shoved into a corner" as it were to hide its naughty head from the public gaze, in company with such other highly intellectual pursuits, as "sporting horses, dogs Geology and Mineralogy."

* *

Now, we certainly had known several who were good sportsmen, as well as good geologists. We could ourselves keenly enjoy the stirring excitement of the chase, cheered by the deep baying of the hound, or the steady and cool determination with which the quick-eyed sportsman watches the spring of the deadly tiger. We have enjoyed both, and we hope to enjoy both again. We know too, how one of our greatest living geologists, the author of "Siluria," was often wont to attribute, and justly we think, his "keen eye for a country" in which, perhaps, he excels all other field geologists, to the early and continual practice of fox-hunting. We had also, before now, been wildly steeplechasing across country to the meet at "Shotover Hill" where the genial eloquence, and stirring spirits of Buckland could bring together his crowded class; and we could tell of some whose earliest initiation in the noble study of the earth dated from the excitement of these rides, when the moving passion was first perhaps to shew off" a bit of blood," or to display some "swell togs." But till now, we were certainly unaware of any intimate connexion existing between the literature of sporting and of Geology, of horses and dogs, and of Mineralogy. And we confess, we were amused at the classification which had been adopted. But having enjoyed our smile, we began to think there must

be some good reason for all this; and consequently to speculate on the position of geological knowledge in this country ; the progress which had been made in this pursuit; the facilities which existed for its cultivation; and the prospects of its advancing in general estimation. One thing was clear, the general public cared little for these things. No intellectual pursuit which claimed respect from the majority of thinkers; no object of study, which commanded the attention of even a fair proportion of those to whom the cultivation of their mental powers was an aim, could be, or would be, thus classed in lists intended to be of general service.

What then was the cause of this? Why, in a land, which certainly has never been characterized by intellectual lethargy, among a society, which experience had taught us was as fully alive if not more fully alive to, and as rapidly acquainted with, the ordinary triumphs of human intellect as any society in other lands, why should this higher study be neglected? why should that which is one of the most popular pursuits in Europe be, as it were, tabooed here, why should the most petty question of politics, or the most recent discovery of some charlatan be more thought of, and more enquired into, than the grandest and noblest discoveries of the changes affecting this globe on which we dwell, and exerting even a cosmical influence on the universe itself?

We by no means forget that much has been done in India. On the contrary, those who know best how much has been done, know best also how little of a connected story can be gathered from all this. There are two forces, by which geology has been enabled widely to extend the limits of her dominion. There are first the disinterested and ably executed labours of votaries, who, either singly or in associated societies, have devoted their unpaid and unsolicited energies to her service, and secondly the systematic and continuous labours of her regular army, who, either in connection with the geological surveys established by almost every civilized Government in the world, or with some of those great mining undertakings which in many countries are as truly a portion of the governmental establishments as are the troops of the State, have sworn allegiance to her sway. To the former noble group of volunteers the dashing sabreurs of our science, probably some of the greatest victories are due; to the latter the more regular troops, must, however, be fairly awarded the higher merit of the steady reduction to "law and order" of the provinces thus acquired.

India can boast of many belonging to either class. Volunteers in the cause have not been wanting, who amidst the difficulties of a stranger-land, and the many and great discomforts of ar