Whoever can regard the Wesleys, or the Wesleyans, without a feeling of respect and love, must have lived out of the sphere of their good principles and their good works. He must have been unacquainted with Methodists, or have known only those who either obscured the great doctrines of their founders, or violated them in practice. If there be among our readers who can look with indifference on the simple habitation of the Wesleys, we will venture to say, that they cannot have set side by side with men of their society in an Union Sabbath-school, or engaged with them in any of the other philanthropic enterprizes of our day.

The only good and proper way, perhaps, in cases in which it is possible, to form a decided opinion of the merits of any Christian denomination, is not to stop at an examination of their doctrines, or the reading of their plans or principles, but to meet

them in the open field of Christian labor; and, after trying our strength with theirs for a sufficient time, and bringing our zeal, self-denial and perseverance into comparison with theirs, sit down and deliberate by ourselves, whether, and in which of our former views we have become confirmed by that experience, and what correction, hint or new views we may derive from their example. Happy it is for this country, that many of its best inhabitants have been for years engaged in such coöperation. The good effects we may discover on every hand, even if we are not so happy as to feel and enjoy them within our own breasts, or to exhibit them in our lives.

Union, Christian union, must be the in. scription on the banner of America; and well may we pray for the success of those who are endeavoring already to raise that banner for the world.-See Vol. 1. p. 17.

SANDWICH ISLANDS.

It

Molokai is a little island near the centre of the Hawaiian group. Twenty years ago the inhabitants were all heathen; and sometimes murdered their infant children. They lived like the brutes. Much of their conduct was too shameful to be described. is only twelve years since a missionary, (Mr. Hitchcock,) setted on the island. Before that time they had only heard a sermon occasionally from a passing missionary, or on their visits at Maui, a neigboring island. Now there are over six hundred church members, many of whom appear to be truly pious. They have built a strong and neat stone meeting-house; one hundred feet by forty-five, with a gallery that will contain two hundred persons. The floor is the earth made smooth and hard, and is covered with strong clean mats. And the house is nearly filled with comfortable settees, which the people have made for them. selves. On the Sabbath it is usually filled.

--

Some months ago, there was an examination of most of the schools on the island.The day after the examination, according to a notice previously given, the children assembled, and many of their parents with them, to organize a juvenile temperance society. The church was crowded. We had seven short addresses, (five of them from natives,) and four temperance songs, in which many of the children united; and I have seldom heard sweeter music than some of these children made.

The parents knew how to make strong drink out of the juice of sweet potatoes, sugar-cane and various kinds of roots.And although this is now forbidden by their laws, yet as many of them were once drunkards, perhaps some of them make it still secretly, and offer it to their children. Moreover, many of them go off to Lahaina, where many ships come, (sometimes forty at once,) chiefly American; and some of them bring these deadly poisons and try to sell them to the natives. There too they find many beer shops. Since the meeting, there has been another held in a different part of the island; and now nearly all the children and youth from four years old to eighteen, about one thousand,-have joined the society.

More than two hundred of them belong to the station school, near our residence, which I daily superintend. In the morning after reading a portion of the New Testament and prayer, those who can read, recite a verse of Scripture. In the afternoon the

school is opened by singing a hymn, and prayer; and many little ones who cannot read, join in singing. And their voices are So sweet, and they sing so well, that I am often delighted by hearing them, and reminded of those beautiful words, "The desert shall rejoice," "even with joy and singing." There are also more than four hundred of this army who belong to a Sabbath school which I superintend. In the morning they assemble an hour before public worship; and, after prayer and singing, they recite the verses and hymns learned through the week, and hear the Scripture, which they have recited, explained to them; then, after a short recess, they go to church, where they again unite in singing the songs of Zion.-Letter from P. J. Gulick in the Dayspring.

"Most of those who attend the school," says Mr. Hitchcock, "have during the past year, been in the habit of contributing, for benevolent pursoses, one stick of wood each per month. And I can assure you it is no uninteresting sight to see men, women, and sometimes children, bringing their humble offerings on their shoulders from the distance of one, two or more miles, The men go into the mountains, and get the sticks, both for themselves and their wives; but the latter bring and present their own. Though the people are superlatively poor, yet their contributions for one year in this way will amount to not far from twenty dollars."

The Circumplar.-This is the name of a new machine for cutting down trees, &c. It caa be fixed, it is said, in a minute and a half, and will cut through a tree at the rate of three inches per minute, without causing the waste the woodman makes with his axe, leaving a groove of only one and a half inches around the tree. It is applicable for other purposes, such as the cutting of stone or iron, for cutting iron piping any size, or in any position, likewise for turning the mouldings of columns.

A boy about twelve years of age, met with a singular, and probably fatal accident, on Boston Common on Wednesday last. He was playing with a bow and arrows, and having shot an arrow, with a heavy steel barb, perpendicularly in the air, it descended and hit him upon the head with such force that it penetrated his cap and sunk deeply into his scull. The arrow was drawn out by the force of a lever, and the little fellow is so badly injured that he is not expected to recover.-Boston paper.

SKETCHES IN OHIO.

From the Cincinnati Daily Gazette.

What could be more strange, than that in a little jaunt into the interior of our State, I should have encountered a person who, twenty-nine years ago, threaded the same thoroughfare, then little more than a dim wagon track, on horseback, bound for Mississippi, where he has lived ever since, this being the first time he has re-traced his steps to Pennsylvania-the State from which, the same year and the same season of the year, I myself came to Ohio, though by a different channel.

In 1816, the person to whom I allude, passed directly through the southern part of the State, on horseback, from Wheeling -threading intermediate forests, laboring through extensive morasses, and meeting only here and there, at such spots as Zanesville and Chillicothe, with anything beyond the wilderness and its natural inhabitants, the prairies and their wild rovers-with occasional farms in a rude state of cultivation, "deadenings" here and there that diversified the landscape, in the midst or on their edges smoke curling aloft from the cabin of the settler, or the wagon-camp of the emigrant. Only twenty-nine years had passed, but the heavy forests had disappeared, the wagontrack had been changed to a Macadamized road, huts and hamlets had given place to flourishing towns, the little villages of that day were the enterprising young cities of this, and what was then the naked prairie and the dense wilderness, were now some of the garden spots of a great State. The feelings of my new acquaintance were quite overwhelming, and he would remain for half an hour at a time, gazing out of the coach upon the highly cultivated region through which we were passing, without uttering a word.

Hillsborough is a beautiful place-beautifully located, and elegantly built up, numbering at this time only about 1,000 inhabitants. It is, however, the seat of elegance and refinement, and is destined to be that of learning. It has a fine Female Academy in it, pupils being sent from Cincinnati and places still more distant; and a handsome large brick building for a Male High School, which numbers nearly one hundred students.

The ride from Hillsborough to Chillicothe, is in great part over the bottom lands of Paint creek, famous for their great corn, and mem. orable for their Indian Mounds and other vestiges of a long-lost race.

The Old Metropolis impresses me most favorably. It has a population of about 6,000 persons, and has some marks of taste beyond any, but one or two interior towns, in the State. The building used for the sittings of the Courts is the old State House, in which our State Constitution was adopted, and our earlier laws enacted. It is a very substantial building, as was the race by whom it was put

up, that of the Pioneers,-and if let alone will much outstand the last survivor of them.

Several of the principal towns on the Miami canal are rejoicing in their "hydraulic works."-Chillicothe can also boast of hers. Not far from these is, perhaps, the largest and best slaughter-house in the United States, not even excepting those of Porkopolis; and

a murderous bloody business" is to be carried on within its walls the coming season, among the swinish multitudes of the Scioto Valley.

Chillicothe is very beautifully situated, within an amphitheatre of hills hardly second to those of the Queen City. And there is so fine a rural taste among its inhabitants, that, standing on one of these eminences, the houses of the town can barely be seen through the tops of the numerous trees that rise from the streets and the yards. Entire squares, and a good many of them, are paved with admirable sandstone from the surrounding hills, quarried in large blocks and squared. But when I asked for her library, it had failed, and the books been suffered to go to auction ;-her historical society, it had died of syncope ;-her literary associations, her reading room, her higher institutions of learning, they were not to be found.

The extent of fine farms, however,-500, 800, and 1000 acres in a single one,-is the greatest check to the growth of the town that could be imposed upon it.

sure.

I find this region rich, even beyond expectation, in remains of the lost race of Aborigines. Within a circle extending not more than six miles around Chillicothe, these remains can be counted by hundreds. Some of the "fortifications or "walled towns" are of great extent, containing as many as ten to fifteen large mounds within a single encloA number have recently been surveyed and plotted by two or three public-spirited gentlemen here, whose names will be honorably mentioned hereafter in connection with the Antiquities of the West. The same gentlemen have also opened some of the most remarkable of the mounds, and been rewarded for their labor by procuring large numbers of antiquities, several of them rarer than any I have heretofore seen. The most singular of them are made of a very hard and heavy stone, such as is not found anywhere in this region, nor in the Mississippi valley, so far as I am informed, and wrought into mathematical forms of exquisite finish, with an art now lost. Some of these have been found at the bottoms of the mounds, on the line of the surface of the adjacent plain, encased in copper, mingled in with skeletons, some of which bear upon their sculls the marks of sanguinary conflict.

I have little doubt, from the recent discoveries, that this immediate region is richer in Indian Antiquities than any that has yet been explored. Some of the remains to which I have referred, are beautifully carved, and others have doubtless been used as imple

ments of manufacture. The indications are strong, that the present inhabitants of this central part of the Scioto Valley.

"Are but a handful to the tribes that sleep Beneath its surface." PROBUS.

ARACEÆ.

THE ARUM TRIBE, No. 20. Symplocarpus fætidus-Skunk Cabbage. Place. America. Quality. Fætid. Power. Nervine, acrid. Use. Drowsy, spasms, rheumatism.

BOTANICAL ANALYSIS.-Natural Order.Araceæ. Aroideæ.-J. Piperitæ.-L.Class IV. Tetrandria. Order-Monogynia.

Natural History of the Skunk Cabbage. SYMPLOCARPUS FOETIDUS is a common plant, growing in swamps, meadows and ditches, renowned for its odor, which is scarcely less offensive than that of the animal whose name it bears. It is remarkably volatile, and cannot be retained by any menstruum. The plant is exclusively a native of North America, and delights in shade. It seldom appears sporad ically, and where found at all, it is generally in abundance. An extremely humid and rich soil appears necessary to its luxuriant growth.

The plant is subaquatic, flowering and leafing from the root, which consists of a vast number of verticillate cylindrical thick fibres, many of which are near a fourth of an inch in diameter. They diverge from their point of cincture, and penetrate the earth or mire to the depth of two feet, and sometimes more. The fibres are whitish, colored, with brownish-red rings.

The flowers appear before the leaves, or at least when these make their appearance they are closely convoluted. The leaves are preceded by colored sheathing stipules, and about the end of April, or beginning of May, are fully developed, when they are very large. They are commonly twelve, fifteen and eighteen inches long, and nine or ten broad; they are sometimes seen in favorable situations, more than two feet long, and twelve inches broad. They are oblong, ovate, heart-shaped, at the base smooth, strongly veined, and have a large succulent middle rib projecting below.

The flowers are concealed in a singular, spongy, ovoid spade, acuminated and depressed, obliquely at the apex, and auriculated at the base. These spathes have the appearance, and are not unaptly compared to some kinds of shells. Upon opening them the flowers are found situated upon a globose pedunculated spadix. They are destitute of petals, have a four-parted calyx divided at the base. Segments hooded, flattened and notched at the apex. There are four stamens situ ated opposite to the divisions of the calyx, having flat, awl-shaped filaments, with short oblong anthers. The style is thick, and foursided, stigma shorter than the stamens. The

seeds are numerous, large, naked, irregularly roundish, and speckled with purple and yellow; they are immersed in a large spongy receptacle near to the surface.

Chemical and Medical Properties.

Every part of this curious plant, even the seeds, is strongly imbued with the peculiar alliaceous odor, which has given rise to the vulgar name expressive of the obnoxiousness of the plant. The odor emanating from the broken spathe and the bruised seeds resembles the smell of asafoetida. The leaves have, perhaps, a more disagreeable smell than any other part of the plant. Their odor has been compared to that thrown off by the skunk, or pole-cat, and like that, it may be perceived at a considerable distance.

The smell from the spathe and flowers is pungent and very subtle. The pungency is probably concentrated and increased by being shut up and confined in a close room; but in the open air has certainly no pernicious effect, and the ridiculous tales of its deadly influence have no foundation.

Various experiments seem to show that this plant contains a volatile acid principle, readily dissipated by heat, a resinous substance, and a gummy or mucous principle.The seeds contain a considerable quantity of fixed oil. The root as well as every part of the plant possesses very powerful antispasmodic powers, similar to those of asafoetida, and other fœtid gums. It has been highly recommended as a palliative in spasmodic asthma, and it is reputed to have effected very considerable relief, when other means had failed. Thirty or forty grains of the dried pulverized roots are recommended to be given during the paroxysm, and repeated as often as circumstances may require. After the fit has gone off it is necessary to persevere in the use of the medicine; its continuance is recommended till the patient is entirely cured. The practice is said to be imitated from that of some of the Indians (who call this plant shoka) in their treatment of this complaint.

Two tea-spoonfuls of the powdered root of this plant, given in spirits and water, have procured immediate relief in cases of violent hysteria, after the ordinary remedies for such affections, musk, and other antispasmodics had been ineffectually tried. On repeating the use of the medicine, it afforded more lasting relief than any other remedy had given. It has also afforded very considerale benefit in chronic rheumatism, in wandering spasmodic pains, and in hooping-cough, in chronic coughs of patients having a cold and phleg matic habit.

The bruised leaves are frequently applied to ulcers and recent wounds, with very good effect. They are also used as an external application in cutaneous affections, and the expressed juice of the leaves is successfully applied to different species of herpes. Among the people in the country the leaves are com