tion, determined not to return to the country while she lived. With the utmost composure, she dictated to him her wishes with regard to her burial, and the arrangements she wished to make for her servants, and for some poor persons in whom she was interested. She had already disposed of the bulk of her fortune in favor of her sister's children. To M. de Falloux she confided the papers from which the work before us has been compiled, and from which, as we are glad to learn, he has just given two other volumes, containing her letters, to the public.

Throughout her whole illness, which lasted nearly three weeks, and which caused her great suffering, she was constantly serene and patient, ready to converse, whenever the effort was not too painful, with those intimate friends who surrounded her, and at all times full of faith and resignation. One evening, she requested to have her arm-chair moved near the window, and, after expressing her admiration of the beauty of the sky, the purity of the air, and the smiling aspect of the garden, she said, "If God should leave me here, I could still enjoy life; but if he calls me hence, what other feeling could I have but gratitude?"

On the 8th of September she breathed her last, rewarded, even in this world, for a life of purity and good works, by

"that which should accompany old age,

As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,"

and leaving behind her an example of moral and intellectual worth such as has rarely been surpassed.

ART. V.-1. The Seven Sisters of Sleep. A Popular History of the seven prevailing Narcotics of the World. By M. C. COOKE, Director of the Metropolitan Scholastic Museum. London: James Blackwood.

2. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, and Suspiria de Profundis. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.

3. The Hasheesh-Eater: being Passages from the Life of a Pythagorean. New York: Harper and Brothers.

THE Seven Sisters of Sleep are by Mr. Cooke somewhat fancifully styled Morphina, Virginia, Gunja, Sisaboa, Erythroxylina, Datura, and Amanita. By these euphonious titles -hybrids, born of botany and chemistry-are meant the seven principal narcotics used and abused by the human race. In more homely English, they are called Opium, Tobacco, Hemp, the Betel, Coca, Stramonium, and the Siberian Fungus. While all of these narcotic substances are largely used by certain races, yet there are three more prominent than the others, from their power, or their almost universal employment by many semi-barbarous and some civilized nations, namely, Opium, Hemp, and Tobacco. To these three we propose to devote our chief attention. It may even be objected that two of them are of little direct consequence to this people and time, and that we should confine ourselves to tobacco, if we would treat practically of things near home. This, however, is but a narrow view of so important a subject; and statistics and authenticated individual cases warrant us in asserting, that the abuse of such powerful narcotics as opium and hemp concerns us more closely than we may be willing to acknowledge.

In 1857, England imported between 80,000 and 90,000 pounds of opium, of which 42,000 pounds were retained for home consumption; while during the same year she raised in India, and carried to her best customer, China, 70,000 chests of opium, equal to 10,800,000 pounds. In 1858, the United States imported 71,839 pounds of opium, worth $304,910; and retained of this within her borders about 65,000 pounds. It is impossible to obtain exact data of the consumption of

hemp; but it must be very large. The annual crop of opium is estimated at 20,000,000 pounds, and that of tobacco, throughout the world, at 4,480,000,000 pounds. We are told, also, that it may be questioned whether many more people are employed in raising the common necessaries of life, than in cultivating and preparing these apparently unnecessary indulgences. Certainly no other crops, except corn and cotton, represent more capital, employ more shipping and other means of transportation, are the subject of a more extended and unfailing traffic, and the source of greater commercial wealth. From a careful estimate by the best authorities, it is believed that tobacco is used by 800,000,000 persons throughout the globe, opium by 400,000,000, and hemp by from 200,000,000 to 300,000,000 souls. Thus about two thirds of the whole human race employ tobacco; one third, opium; and one fourth, hemp, as narcotic indulgences.

We may well feel ourselves concerned in such a consumption; for if it be not absolutely our own interest which demands our consideration, it is the nearly allied interests of our common race, for whom we should, as Christians, feel at least an equal sympathy with that which the Roman expressed in his broad maxim of philanthopy, humani nihil alienum. But we have also more selfish and personal incentives. The quickened locomotion and facilitated intercourse of the present day bring us weekly to the doors of the Eastern nations; increased familiarity is producing its natural effects in the imitation of Oriental habits; the Caucasian races, no longer content with tobacco, coffee, and tea, are beginning to crave and use the stronger narcotics; books of personal experience are written by enlightened Christians on these pagan delights; and, finally, the over-wearied brains, as well as the corrupt hearts, of this busy world of competition demand them, or something analogous to them.

The love of narcotics is universal. A survey of the whole world shows that no nation is so poor, barbarous, or obscure as not to have found and adopted its favorite and peculiar luxury of this sort. The Chinese sink under the soft but adamantine chains of opium; the races of India, the Persians, and the Turks stimulate the imagination to frenzy with hemp;

other Asiatic nations, as well as the Malays and Pacific Islanders, chew the Betel-nut; the South American ascends the weary slopes of the Andes with lighter step and freer breath under the influence of Coca; the same tribes, as well as some castes in India, make an intoxicating beverage with the thorn-apple, or Stramonium; and even the poor Siberian, or Kamtchatkan, gratifies his longing for narcotic indulgences with an humble toadstool, the Siberian Fungus. The hop is the narcotic distinctive of England, coffee the nervous stimulant of France, tea of Russia, and all three of the United States. Tobacco is so common a narcotic, that it is used also by those who resort to more powerful substances of the kind; and so far do these soothing habits penetrate unsuspected into our daily diet, that the dozing matron has her afternoon nap prolonged, if not occasioned, by a narcotic principle-Lactucarium - which she absorbs from the lettuce of her salad.

Whence this universal passion for sedatives or narcotics? We know no better explanation of the rationale of this proclivity than the following:

"In ministering fully to his natural wants and cravings, man passes through three successive stages. First, the necessities of his material nature are provided for. Beef and bread represent the means by which, in every country, this end is attained. And among the numerous forms of animal and vegetable food a wonderful similarity of chemical composition prevails. Second, he seeks to assuage the cares of his mind, and to banish uneasy reflections. Fermented liquors are the agents by which this is effected. Third, he desires to multiply his enjoyments, intellectual and animal, and for the time to exalt them. This he attains by the aid of narcotics."

Be the reasoning as it may, the fact remains of an almost instinctive craving for narcotics, nervous stimulants, and sedatives, and of their consequent immense consumption and abuse by all races of men. Alcoholic stimulants will not satisfy this longing; and stimulants are not only inapplicable to many delicate feminine organizations, but they are openly employed and deemed consistent with good morals by but a few. Tobacco supplies the needed sedative to very many; yet many, also, among the tobacco consumers, practically deny

that it is enough, by itself. In civilized countries, indeed, coffee and tea are largely used to fill the constant vacuum incident to the waste of nervous power, and its imperfect reparation by an enfeebled vitality and morbid habits of life. But coffee and tea are nervines, rather than narcotics, in the real sense of the word. And although we must remember that narcotics like opium are taken for their primary stimulant or exhilarant effect, and not for their somniferous or anodyne qualities, yet the peculiar admixture of mild stimulative and sedative influences caused by coffee, tea, and tobacco differs in kind, as well as degree, from the effects produced by opium or hemp. It seems, indeed, as if man might be content with these gentler stimulants to his brain; and so, perhaps, the majority of the most civilized people are. But the number is immense, who, from barbarous habits of thought, from tropical and sensuous imaginations, or even, as we are told of the Chinese, from mere want of occupation, lapse almost insensibly into the dangerous use of the true narcotics.

The antiquity equals the universality of their employment among mankind. All history bears witness to this. The poppy was sacred to Ceres, and was one of her emblems. This was because its seeds were first used as food, equally with the grains of wheat, to which that deity has given the name of Cereal. There is nothing strange in this. The capsule enclosing the seeds contains the narcotic principle, and the seeds themselves hold stores of starch and gluten, like other vegetable germs. The same seeds yield much of the oil used as olive oil in France at this day. But the other name of the poppy (Papaver somniferum) proves that its narcotic properties were as well known as its nutritive uses. Under this title it was sacred to Somnus, the god of sleep; and such terms as the "drowsy poppy" were used by the earlier Latin poets, whence they have descended, like many a richer legacy of unconscious plagiarism, to modern verse. The properties of the tropical hemp, too, seem to have been fully understood. The much-abused and but lately credited father of history tells us: