writers of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans, and Boston. *

In the printed reports of the Post Office department very just and reasonable remonstrances have been made against the exorbitant charges made by Railway Companies, and in some cases by Steamboats, for the conveyance of the mails. It has been truly observed that railways from their very nature are monopolies, and that in many instances competition between steamboats is insufficient to protect the Post Office from injurious and fraudulent combinations, the effect of which is to extort from the General Government a rate of freight many times greater than that which is charged to private individuals. This is an abuse which ought to be put down by the supreme power of the law, and it is happily one in the suppression of which the whole body of the enlightened public will zealously concur. The rate at which private individuals and companies can carry freight upon railways and in steamboats is generally known, and it is within the legitimate power of the general government, aided and countenanced by Congress, to exact from all public carriers the transport of the mails at equally reasonable rates. To maintain that such parties may with impunity exercise an arbitrary power of fixing one tariff for the government mails and another for private freight, so as to set at defiance the power of the general legislature, would involve an admission of a degree of feebleness in the Constitution which would render it unfit to promote the wellbeing of the nation for which it was framed. The observation which has been made in one of the Post Master General's reports, that certain companies seize the pretext of the mails being required to be dispatched at particular hours, as the ground of an exorbitant demand for their transport, is really so puerile that it hardly deserves to be seriously considered.

The Post Office service, in England, is executed upon the railways, at a greater cost than was ever incurred on any main lines of common roads, but the nature of this service, and its superior efficiency, amply compensates the public for the increased expense. These great lines of internal communication are vast channels of social and commercial intercourse, into which smaller tributaries, in the form of branch railways and common roads, pour their streams in countless number and unbounded quantity. Each main line thus drains an entire Province; the quantity of Post Office business, therefore, transacted upon it is greater, incomparably, than ever was executed on any common road; but it is even more remarkable for the superior efficiency of its execution than for its increased quantity.

A house of considerable dimensions, constituting a locomotive Post Office, is actually erected on wheels and transported over the railway at the rate of thirty miles an hour. In this house are well lighted rooms properly furnished with the apparatus requisite for the Post Office functionaries; at the stations, as they pass, the letter-bags are received and delivered; the processes of sortation, weighing, stamping, and bagging are executed in this moving mansion between station and station, so that no inconsiderable part of the entire business of the Post Office is here performed while the letters are in the very act of being transported. But ingenuity is not exhausted even here. Post Offices are established at small and thinly peopled stations, where the flying mail could not afford to pause in its rapid course. such cases, an apparatus is attached to the locomotive office, on which the letter-carrier or guard hangs the bag to be delivered as the train approaches the station. The bag to be received, is, in like manner, suspended to an arm, projecting from a post erected on the side of the railway, awaiting the expected ar

In

Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. New York: Wiley & Putnam, 141 Broadway. 1845.

It was well, perhaps, that the incognita of this book should be carefully guarded. It is "full of matter for quarrels as an egg is of meat;" but, with all its heterodoxy, it bears, from the first line to the last, such evidences of profound learning and subtlety as cannot fail to impress with respect those who are most startled by its boldness. It has that in it which will set the Philosophico-Theological world together by the ears, for there are thousands who will think the book as full of errors as any of modern times. This nominis umbra joins issue with grave and revered doctrines which lie at the very core of the existing Christian theory of things. He professes, though, with a fair seeming of impressive logic, to enter the field only as a new interpreter. Without aiming at the vitality of the Mosaic record, he merely waives its authority under the received version as inconsistent with the stubborn facts of Analytical Science; while, his interpretation being accepted, all in congruities are done away with by a recognition of "the doctrine of Creation by Law," in place of the supposed" antiquated and insufficient one of Creation by special exercise," or act. These are to be the great points at issue between the " New," or progressive Philosophy, as it styles itself, and the "Old." It will be a war of tomes and folios, for a vast deal hinges upon the result. But it must be acknowledged, that with whatever reserve he may be approached, if his great postulate "of Creation by Law" be once admitted, his deductions, pregnant and subversive as they are,

growth of laws, which in their steady march out from the eternity of chaos have compelled all elements into the forms they wear now, whether of suns and worlds, or stocks, stones and things that move. Heat and electricity are the great modifying agents, which, together with gravitation, hold within themselves, as a medium, that creative energy which has heretofore been considered an immediate and active attribute of God. Creation, then, subjective to these laws, must be through a prospective eternity progressive-its types forever pushing on and up towards the perfect.

"The whole train of animated beings, from the simplest and oldest up to the highest and most recent, are, then, to be regarded as a series of advances of the principle of Development, which depend upon external physical circumstances, to which the resulting animals are appropriate." "Is our race, then, but the initial of the grand crowning type? Are there yet to be species superior to us in organization, purer in feeling, more powerful in device and art, and who shall take a rule over us? There is in this, nothing improbable on other grounds. The present race, rude and impulsive as it is, is perhaps the best adapted to the present state of things in the world; but the external world goes through slow and gradual changes, which may leave it, in time, a much serener field of existence. There may, then, be occasion for a nobler type of humanity, which shall complete the Zoological circle on this planet, and realize some of the dreams of the purest spirits of the present race!"

An induction as novel as the process has been ingenious! But the book has too much matter of parlance in it to be thus cursorily dismissed. We shall endeavor to take it up again.

Room. By EZEKIEL BACON. N. York: John Allen, 139 Nassau-street. 1843.

THE poems contained in this little volume seem to be the productions of a man of sensibility and sense, but of less imagination. It would not appear, indeed, that he aimed at displaying the latter faculty, or to startle the world with studied flights

of the Muse. He has rather pleased declining days, and the solitude of chamber hours, with the expression in verse of thoughts that belong to one who has not suffered himself to be hardened by a long professional life. Most of the pieces are written in Cowper's favorite measure, taken from one of the old ballad forms, and are marked with something of the simplicity of that delightful poet. 66 Departing joys," "The Early Lilac," "The Dying Lilac," and "Man's, Common Lot, "are pleasant moral reflections, quiet and flowing. The blank verse is of less merit.

A Chaunt of Life, and other Poems, with Sketches and Essays. By the REV. RALPH HOYT. In Six Parts. Part I. New York: Piercy & Reed, Printers. 1844.

THE author of this little book has doubt less felt that he was a poet--as undoubtedly, we think, the severest critic would agree with him. But we suspect the author, like greater poets before him, does not altogether know wherein his best vein lies. The amount published at present consists--a small instalment, by way of experiment upon the public taste--of six pieces. The first is a short canto of the "Chaunt of Life"-to be continued in each number, and giving name to the one in hand. On this, we make no question, the author would rest his claims to a share of Apollo's countenance. Bu the real poet does not always know when the god smiles most propitiously-looking gloriously out, as it were, from many-colored clouds--but is even apt, at times, to take an ungracious scowl for a glimpse of favor. The "Chaunt of Life" has considerable merit, an unexceptionable melody and flow, and something of Young's profoundly solemn and melancholy strain; and when the whole poem appears, we shall be willing to make some extracts, to show that it has many excel lences. But the two striking pieces of the present little collection, and far more certain evidences of the true poetic element, are, "Snow," and "The World for Sale." The former of these is a picture of a winter morning in the country, when a sudden and heavy fall of snow, in the night, has covered up everything familiar, and the

children, tumbling out of bed, clap their hands with delight to see the world so strangely and beautifully transformed.

If any Hyperborean, who has roved away (sad wanderers we are apt to be "circumvagi patria carentes"), and has lived so long towards "the Line," among constant spring odors, as to have forgotten the smell of frost, wishes to recall how his father's farm looked-house, barn, sheds, hencoop and all, with fields and rail-fences on every side, up to the leafless great woods," magically covered at once with a dazzling sheet of utterly unspotted white, while the winds have sunk, and the low sun, risen, gleams level through the keen atmosphere over a new world-every crystal angle on every bush, stump, and house-ridge, and the long lines of distant forest-tops, "glinting" back a sunbeam of its own-he has here a part of the clear memory, felicitously given, and the rest he can fill out for himself. Those, indeed--dwellers of "Orinoco and the Isles"-who have looked always upon the primeval and dark verdure of the tropics, would hardly get from the sketch an idea of that subdued and sombre power that belongs to our wide Northern scenery at this season; but of the appearances of things around a New England farm-house, when Ursa Major (whom we take to be a white bear) has donned his winter covering, they can form to themselves a very exact picture. We need, in fact, some such remembrancer for ourselves this season. We had really forgotten the looks of a snow-storm. No Northern Soracte "stands white," unless it be hoar "Mohegan," and some wild ranges towards the forests of Fundy-and our heavy woods, battling often enough with wind and rain, have had no burden to "labor" under.

Here come in the triumphs of philosophy. Mons. Arago is said to have prophesied that Europe would undergo one of the severest winters she has ever known, while the Western Hemisphere would enjoy one proportionably mild. The event proves your philosopher "even with the Fates." While Winter seems to have forgotten our Continent from Cape Cod to Oregon, the vallies of Italy are filled with snowwolves, driven down from the mountains by