a phosphorie light; and although the flame on the ground is extinguished, yet glass tubes having their air exhausted, appear for some moments strongly illuminated. It should seem, that the mixture of this light is different from the species of vapour called Ignisfatuus; for this is of a dark-red colour, on the contrary the other is a whitish-blue light.

Hindoos come from India (Moultan) to pay their devotions, and perform austerities of various kinds, in the presence of these natural fires. The Dr.'s account of them is interesting; but we must attend rather to the natives of Caucasus than to foreigners from a distance.

The Ossi dress after the Tscherkassian manner. Their arms consist of a bow and arrows, sabre, gun, and dagger.

The men are well built, strong, active, cunning, addicted to robbing and stealing, indolent in work, great talkers, and very litigious. Nothing sounds more dreadful than their screams in quarrelling. They threaten each other with gun and dagger, and appear always ready to perpetrate murder; but when they have screamed and hallooed till they are satisfied, they are generally good friends again; and so much the sooner, if they are invited by a third person to drink a glass of brandy.

The women are short, unsightly, and dirty. The Tscherkassian dress gives them a tolerable appearance, only from their short snub nose; but as ugly as they are they completely govern their husbands.

Trade and manufactures are totally unknown amongst them. Respectable, and young, healthy and strong men are robbers. The lower class understand this business likewise, but many of them employ themselves, as long as they have strength for it, in promoting the trade of foreign merchants; and when the old and weak can no longer earn any thing in that situation, they are contented with any trifling employment; and resigned to black barley or millet bread, forget the bitterness of poverty.

Their agriculture and horticulture consist of barley, millet, horse-raddish, tobacco, onions, and turnips. They have always busa, brandy, and a not unpleasant flavoured beer at hand; they likewise make very good cheese of sheep and goats' milk, which is in repute every where. The cattle and sheep are small; and a full grown ram seldom weighs above five and twenty pounds.

The villages of the Ossi are mostly in a very pleasant situation. Their houses are partly built of mud walls, and partly of stone; the interior is dark, empty, and dirty. The chiefs and most respectable persons have their houses surrounded with a high, strong, stone

wall; and at each corner are small sentry boxes. On the upper part of the wall are fixed long, projecting, pointed pales, or palisades, on which hang horses' heads and other bones; behind and between the palisades there are also stone nooks, an ell in height, one above another, which may serve as a retreat in case of any unforeseen attack. Round the outside of the walls lay small heaps of stones, skeletons of horses, and other hones, to the breadth of ten or twelve ells, which afford only a narrow crooked path, that leads to the door of the house.

Her

When an Oss dies, he is accompanied to the grave by the women, with the greatest tokens of grief. During the astonishment and horrible moaning of the mourners, the widow tears off her hair, scratches her face, arms, and breast, without any appearance of feeling, and particularly if she is in years, and cannot hope for a second husband. violent grief is more to be compared to raging desperation, than to an affecting sorrow. She endeavours to wound herself with a stone or knife; she threatens to precipitate herself from the rocks, or into a river; but fortunately she is prevented by her companions, who never leave her. After three times repeated daily weeping and wailing, at last, on the evening of the third day, the dead man is forgotten. Then men, women, and children, as many as are at hand in the village, or belong to the family, go to the defunct's house, solace the survivors, and spend three days in eating and drinking at the expence of the dead, whose praise is always the substance of their conversation.

Part of the Ossi are Mahommedans, but most of them heathens, and very few profess Christianity.

The baptized and Mahommedan Oss still makes a secret of his former solemn and superstitious acts, and the heathen never discloses them. He will never show the sensible object of his veneration, under which his God or Spirit is represented, not even to his nearest relation; but when he swears by him, without naming him, he is never perjured. Their secret assemblies are mostly held in sequestered, and almost inaccessible places, where they first endeavour completely to lull themselves to sleep by the smell of the rododendron caucasium, by which more probable conjectures, or the fulfilment of their wishes are produced, according to their more or less lively imaginations,

Should an Oss be suspected of a crime, and wishes to clear himself by a very solemn oath, or to avow a truth by the greatest adjuration, he goes with a witness to a distant spring, or to the bank of a stream or river, digs a hole with a knife or dagger, runs it in and out with great earnestness, and exclaims: "So would I have the heart of iny father,

my brother, or my friend, pierced through "so would I do to the Holy One, to the "Spirit in whom I believe; and may it be "done to me, if I speak not the truth!"

The vengeance of blood is also become a necessary evil. From an old custom, which is become a law, the offended family alternately demands satisfaction, (according to their manner of speaking,) even to the thousandth generation, if the price of blood is not redeemed by money, and that is seldom the case; or the right of reprisals deferred, at least for a time, by frequent presents.

It was very striking the first time that I conversed on the subject with some Ossi, and they showed me the man who was exposed to the vengeance of blood. The person, likewise, who demanded vengeance, met him at the same time in company. No one could have supposed, from their conduct towards each other, which was not at all inimical, the least appearance of an intended murder; and yet the offended party only watched a convenient opportunity, which the other had hitherto avoided by his constant vigilance and liberality. Thus twenty years and more elapse, before vengeauce is satisfied, without either party having offended each other, even by words, during that period. Thus an Oss, named Bauto, in 1759, shot another called Mambed, and was assassinated for it in 1768, by Achmed, Mambed's eldest son. Scarcely had the muider taken place, when Achmed took Bauto's only son, Kaitugho, a boy of five years old, into his house, and brought him up with his own children. Kaitugho was grown up with Achmed's sons, accustoned to filial esteem and mutual brotherly friendship and love, was given out as Achmed's son, married and reinstated in all the household property of his murdered father; and yet, by such long continued protection and expence, Achmed had not yet paid the price of blood; for Kaitugho often assured me, that his ardent wish was to find an early opportunity of fufilling the mournful duty of murdering his foster father; so much was he inclined not to attack Achmed through gratitude, and also so convinced was he that Achmed's sons would pay him in the same coin. Now as Kaitugho was shot on the 21st of September, 1784, in a plundering party by the Ztschetschens, his cousin Tewo inherited, with the rest of the property, the vengeance which Achmed still endeavours to obviate by presents and marks of friendship; yet he never ventures to pass the boundaries of his village, without a more than sufficient guard. Should he even avoid the suares of his adversary, and die a natural death, yet the debt of vengeance

devolves on his eldest son.

Is this vengeance of blood" a dictate of nature? Wherefore is it so indelible from the human heart? Why do we find

it prevail among so many nations, people who have not, who never had, any intercourse with each other? We trace it in the most remote times; and the utmost that deity itself seems to have expected to effect, was a controul, but not an annihiWe lation of it, among his own people. agree with the writer of the FRAGMENTS to Calmet's Dictionary of the Bible, in thinking that the rules laid down among the Hebrews for limiting the avenging of blood, were most salutary, political, and merciful.

It might have been expected from the intimacy of Dr. R. with Zaar Herakleus, that some light should have been thrown on the political situation and history of this government of late years. We do, indeed, meet with a slight account of the Zaar himself, who had been an adherent of Nadir Shah, and one of his officers; but on what principles, or under what terms, Russia patronizes this prince we are not informed. It seems that Dr. R's papers, after his death, came into the hands of the German editor in a mutilated and disarranged state; and this may account for the omission of several matters that would have been gratifying to the intelligent reader. We should have been pleased to have been introduced to the court of the Zaar, and to his attendants; and if a part, at least, of the veil which now covers the strength, the revenues, the amount, and the nature, of the commerce, of this country, &c. had been withdrawn, we should have felt our obligations tothe writer. We ought rather, perhaps, all circumstances considered, to say-to superior permission.

He

The second volume contains the remarks of Marshall Biberstein on the same country. They appear to be intended in some degree, as a kind of supplement to the observations of Gmelin. They contain many curious facts; much mineralogical information; and sundry miscellaneous remarks, which do honour to this officer's attention and intelligence. formerly commanded a Russian army on He adds the notice of some experiments an expedition among these mountains. made on the inflammable air of Baku: describes, though slightly, the Natural History of the country and furnishes a copious list of the plants it produces. Mr. W. has completed his work, by valuable, amusing notes: A good Map, &c.

is to

let me be allowed; then, to dedicate one sentence to him, even if it should be deemed dowed with genius, and panting after eternal misplaced! Mild, diffident, studious, enrealities, he had received from nature a constitution not formed to detain him long from heaven, whither he took his flight fourteen months after the date of his first letter, written to me from school.

The title of the Christian Heroine pleased vation of a good writer and distinguished me in another point of view. It is the obserspeaker, of one whose praise is to be traced to a higher source than flows from the pen or the tongue; "that if all the peculiarities of christianity had never existed, or had been proved to be false, the circumstance would scarcely create the necessity of altering a single syllable in any of the most celebrated of these performances;" that is-novels, Here, then, is a novel, which it would be necessary to alter in almost every page, if the peculiarities of christianity had never existed, or had been proved to be false. Such a novel appeared to me to deserve the title I have given to it, and which I had long cherished with a view of bestowing on a com

I was pleased with it in more points of view than one. I have long harboured the design or rather the wish, of composing a novel founded entirely on the spirit of christianity; but the more I considered the subject, the more difficult the execution of it appeared to me. To give dignity to humility, and spirit to meekness; to make power, and wealth, and honour bow their gigantic heads before faith, hope, and charity; to pluck the laurel from the hand of victory and substitute promises of an invisible crown of glory, and to bury the sword at the foot of the cross, appeared to me to be very possible; but I also conceived that it required the eloquence of a Rousseau, the endowments of a Fenelon, and the mystic spirituality of à Berkley, not to say the pen of an apostle. Whenever, therefore, I have thought of the design, I have looked with a longing eye at the delightful consciousness that would repay the successful author, and abandoned it as beyond my grasp. I can imagine the unlimited delight of such a consciousness, by the pleasure which I felt at the effect that was produced on the mind of a youth of eighteen by my attempt to give an elevated view of a christian priest in my novel of Aubrey. He had chosen the Church as a profession: "The view of it," said he in one of his letters, "is now rendered awful to me; but I contemplate it with some hope and with entire sincerity of intention." Amiable young man! I know not that I shall ever-find a better opportunity to pay him a tribute of love and admiration:

my feebleness first, and now this publication, has rendered useless to me. Not, however, that my imagination would have led me to a similar plan or a similar style. The talents of the authoress have been long known and appreciated: I cannot add to their fame, and it is not for her translator to point out faults if he found any. I do not, however, think I should have been prudent in adopting a differeut plan and style; because, perhaps romantic situations and glowing pictures are generally necessary to keep attention alive. I should have thrown my heroine into an every day suit; she should have depended more upon herself; and I should have made her faulty at least if not guilty. The incidents of the piece I would have endeavoured to make new, but they should have been at hand;-they should have been the occurrences of common life, and of the nineteenth century. My Clara would not have been a catholic: I would have bestowed upon her a fervid imagination, but would have drawn a strong line of demarcation between the solid persua sion of providential interferences which daily strike the eye of reason, and those ecstasies which embody unreal forms in oecasional miracles to the senses. The authoress, I see, treads altogether upon more captivating ground than I should have been able to take under my management, and I am but

A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious Systems, &c. contrasted with Real Christianity. By William Wilberforce, Esq. page 396 of the sixth edition.