The connoisseur who visits these sculptured marbles is certain that hẻ looks upon many of those precious works which, conceived and directed by Phidias, and in part executed by his chisel, constituted during upwards of seven centuries the wonder of the ancient world, and in Plutarch's time were held inimitable for grace and beauty."

In Paris he continued to prosecute his antiquarian studies, and to write and publish their result, until the year 1818, when

On the 7th of February, after long and severe sufferings, under which he was supported by his beloved wife, his two sons, imitators of their father's virtues, and many faithful friends, Visconti expired."

We now come to Volta, with whom we shall conclude. He is one of the illustrious individuals already mentioned as belonging more to the eighteenth than to the nineteenth century, and therefore misplaced in a volume of literary history, professing to treat only of those who have graced the first thirty-two years of the latter, But, as we do find him in the volume now under review, the profound respect we have long entertained for this great benefactor of science compels us to extract and abstract the information herein afforded respecting him, whether misplaced or

not.

"Alessandro Volta was born at Como in the year 1745, of an illustrious family, highly distinguished amongst the Como patricians. From his earliest years he discovered an eager inclination for physical and chymical science, the principal phenomena of which, together with the Latin poem, that still remains unpublished. But it was to the latter subject that he principally applied himself, and upon it he published two memoirs, the one in 1769, addressed to P. Giovanni Beccaria, the other in 1771, addressed to the Abate Spallanzani. * In consequence of these writings, Count Firnian, then governor of Lombardy, appointed

discoveries in electricity, then in progress, he developed in a with the

Lord Elgin has been so bitterly and generally censured for removing those mar bles from Athens, that we cannot refrain from here inserting Canova's opinion of the act, as we find it recorded by Maffei, who, in his account of the great sculptor, tells us

From the banks of the Seine Canova repaired to those of the Thames, in order to gaze upon the Parthenon marbles, respecting which he wrote as follows to Lord Elgin, on the 10th of November, 1815; Permit me, my Lord, to express to you my delight at having beheld in London the precious ancient marbles which you have brought hither from Greece. I cannot satisfy myself with again and again gazing on them, and, short as my stay in this capital is to be, I consecrate every possible minute to the contemplation of these celebrated relics of ancient art. I admire in them truth to nature, conjoined with the selection of beautiful forms. In them every thing breathes life with admirable distinctness, with exquisite artifice, but without the least affectation, the pomp of art being veiled with the most perfect mastery. The nude is real and most beautiful flesh. I esteem myself fortunate in having been permitted to contemplate with my own eyes these excellent performances, and should hold this sufficient recom pense for having journeyed to London. Great is the obligation and the gratitude, my Lord, that amateurs and artists owe you for having brought within their reach these magnificent, these stupendous, sculptures. I, for my own part, beg to offer you my thousand cordial thanks for the act.'"

him at first regent of the schools of his country, then professor of physical science at Como, whence, in 1797, he was promoted to the same chair in the University of Pavia."

We pass over Maffei's somewhat minutely detailed account of Volta's earlier researches, discoveries, and inventions relative to electricity, hydrogen gas, and the like, not because we esteem them of slight merit or value, but because at the present day, after the immense progress of physical science, in great measure through his instrumentality, and with the actual well-nigh universal diffusion of knowledge, we conceive the progress of information fifty or sixty years ago to be interesting only as matter of history. We must state, however, that, at the time, the fruit of Volta's labour was esteemed of such value, that, upon his visiting England in 1792, he received from the Royal Society a medal struck in honour of his invention of an electricity condenser. We now proceed at once to that which Volta's learned biographer, Biot, has well termed

"The great discovery of the development of electricity from the nutual contact of bodies; a principle absolutely new and unsuspected, which Volta, through his consummate sagacity, discerned, which he established by a series of experiments skilfully and judiciously conducted, and from which he deduced an application so happy and so extraordinary, that this is, if possible, a yet greater discovery than the very principle whence it is derived."

The manner of Volta's discovering this new and important principle requires that the circumstances which led to it should be briefly mentioned.

**

"Luigi Galvani, born at Bologna on the 9th of September, 1737, dedicated himself to medical science, in which he made such proficiency that he was named professor of anatomy to the renowned Bolognese Scientific Institute (Istituto delle Scienze). He especially practised the difficult art of experimenting judiciously. In the prosecution of his experiments, it chanced that some skinned frogs lay upon a table near the conductor of an electrical machine, and, one of the experimenters having accidentally touched the crural nerves, of one of the frogs with the point of a knife, the muscles of the dead animal moved convulsively. Galvani, noting this phenomenon, repeatedly tried the experiment, and believed that he had discovered a new species of eleetricity, which he denominated animal. He maintained it to be an animal law, and the discovery to belong rather to physiology than to any other branch of natural philosophy. But Volta undertook to prove, by admirably conceived and executed experiments, that this peculiar electricity was no other than the ordinary electricity, produced or excited by the contact of the metals employed in the experiment.

*

*

"Not only were the two Universities of Bologna and Pavia divided upon

this question, but the whole of scientific Europe took part with either Galvani or Volta, and this last, unabashed by the great names enrolled amongst his adversaries, including that of Humboldt, demonstrated beyond dispute that, so far from the electric fluid being generated by the animal organization, it was merely a powerful stimulant, altogether extraneous to the nerves and purely metallic."

Maffei here enumerates all the papers, pamphlets, &c. that Volta wrote in defence of his own theory and in opposition to Galvani's; and this it is right that Maffei should do, inasmuch as he professes to write the history of the literature, not of the science, of Italy. But for ourselves, who are bound by no such ties of our own weaving, we care more for what the philosopher did, and to that we turn.

"Volta having ascertained by his experiments that this law of the development of electricity by simple contact was not confined to the metals, but applicable to all heterogeneous bodies, although in very different degrees of intensity, according to their several natures, availed himself of this principle most ingeniously to construct a new apparatus, which, through merely its immediate application, prodigiously increased the effects produced. This apparatus is called the Voltaic pile, or the electric column, or still better, the electromotive apparatus; and is capable of exciting a continuous electric current through all conducting bodies interposed between its poles; which current, being most potent to combine and decompose, is of the utmost use to chymical science.'

It was with this pile of Volta's invention, but magnified and multiplied into a battery of intense, of even tremendous, power, that our own illustrious countryman, Sir Humphrey Davy, decomposed and reduced to their primitive elements the metals, the gems, the earths, the gases, indicated the identity of electricity and magnetism,* cleared up innumerable errors, and, it may be said, evolved the primitive elements of nature from their multifarious combinations and modifications;-discoveries that have, indeed, given a new character to physical science, and immortalized his own name, and of which the writer of this paper was an admiring though unscientific spectator in the theatre of the Royal Institution,-but discoveries which, however honourable to the genius that conceived their possibility, and by admirably devised and executed experiments elicited them from the bosom of obscurity, must have remained unattainable without the means furnished by Volta. To him from this, surely not irrelevant, digression we return.

"This portentous machine was first described by its inventor in a French letter to Sir Joseph Banks, in which he shows the analogy between the new apparatus and the torpedo. * And afterwards

*

Since so ably followed out and established by Mr. Faraday.

*

*

in a memoir upon the identity of the electric with the Galvanic fluid. Galvani could not read all these refutations of his hypothesis, having died on the 4th of December, 1798." [So that he, though celebrated in the volume on the nineteenth century, did not even see that century's dawn.]

"France, in some measure severed from the rest of the world by her external wars, knew nothing of the great discovery of Volta, until Buonaparte had, in the year 1801, triumphed anew over Italy. Then was Volta summoned by the conqueror to Paris, where he repeated his experiments upon the development of electricity by contact, in presence of a numerous commission from the scientific class of the Institute, deputed to witness and judge them. The experiments and their results were received with the admiration they deserved. * The

First Consul proposed to confer a gold medal upon Volta, and one, was, in fact, struck in his honour, bearing a bust of Minerva, with appropriate legends.

"Elected deputy to the Comiccs of Lyons, Volta left the banks of the Seine for those of the Rhone. Again he returned to Italy, there to receive all the honours and emoluments with which his native land sought to guerdon his merit. He was named a knight of the Iron Crown, a member of the Legion of Honour, a senator, a count. After the fall of the kingdom of Italy, the Austrian government appointed him director of the Physico-Mathematical Faculty of the University of Pavia. In the last years of his life Volta's mind was impaired, so that he could no longer advance or enrich his favourite science. On the 5th of March, 1827, he died, at the age of 82, lamented not only by his own country, but by all Italy, by all Europe."

And here we take our leave of Maffei; but cannot lay down the pen without expressing our earnest wish that he may cast aside his scruples about writing of those who may be capable of reading his opinion of them; or, what would be still more desira ble, that Camillo Ugoni may give us a few more volumes, including the living literature of this nineteenth century.

ART. IX.-Erinnerungs-Skizzen, aus Russland, der Türkei und Griechenland, entworfen während des Aufenthalts in jenen Ländern in den Jahren 1833 und 1834, von Legationsrath Tietz. (Reminiscences of Russia, Turkey, and Greece, sketched during a residence in those countries in 1833 and 1834, by Tietz, Councillor of Legation.) 2 vols. 12mo. Coburg and Leipzig, 1836.

"

IN giving some account of this work we shall take the same course with the author, and begin with Russia, because, notwithstanding all that has been written on that mighty empire, the subject is one of daily increasing importance, involving questions deeply affecting the future destinies of the civilized world. Without troubling our readers with half a dozen pages of commonplace, which it would be as easy for us to write as unprofitable for them to read, without even giving on this occasion our own opinion of the reality of the assumed projects of Russian ambition, of the facility, or the difficulty, of carrying them into effect, of the real, or affected alarm with which they are viewed by some, and the unbecoming levity with which they are treated by others, we will merely observe, that, as the probability of such projects being entertained and attempted, and the chances of success, depend on the character of the sovereign whose uncontrolled will directs the energies of that assemblage of a hundred nations, differing in laws, languages, manners, and customs, but agreeing in unbounded veneration and implicit obedience to their prince, whom they almost regard as a Deity on earth; it is indispensably necessary towards forming a correct idea of the matter, to be acquainted with the moral and intellectual qualifications, the talents and the weaknesses, the virtues and the vices, of him who wields, whether for good or evil, so tremendous a power, and of those who are the elements of which that power is composed. Every account, therefore, coming from a respectable source, whether confirming or refuting preceding statements, is worthy of attention, and we shall quote from our author, (premising that he is a warm admirer of the Russians and of their present emperor,) various anecdotes and observations, illustrative of his opinions of both.

His first impressions at the view of the magnificence of St. Petersburg resemble those of most preceding travellers.

"On the summit of the winter palace a white flag, with the crowned double eagle, was hoisted, as an indication that the sovereign of the cast, the eagle that, with protecting wings and piercing eye, watches over the seventy millions of subjects in his immense empire, is in the capital; when the emperor leaves Petersburg the flag is struck.'