of granite, such as no human enginery could heave, and partly of gravel formed by the grinding up of smaller rocks, in the descent of the glacier. And where in some narrower pass, the whole force of the travelling ice has been applied to the rocky side of the valley, it has ploughed it out and excavated it, in a fearful manner. The materials thus collected are thrown up and piled together, with no other order, than a general rectilinear direction; and in order to reach and traverse the sea of ice, on the way to the Jardin Vert, which travellers occasionally visit, it is necessary to climb over this wall of desolation. Mr Simond was prevented from ascending the Montanvert, which is a sight never to be forgotten by the traveller, who may chance to see it at midnight, by the full moon shedding its quiet beams on the cold and desolate summits of the surrounding needles and the wild and terrific waves and dreary ridges of the sea of ice, while nothing is heard but the tinkling of the cow bell from a few droves, that pass the summer on this almost inaccessible elevation, and the solemn roaring of the Arveiron that gushes from beneath, from the lower extremity of the glacier.

Mr Simond takes occasion of a visit made from Switzerland to Lyons to describe this latter city, of which he appears to be himself a native; as he informs us that his father perished on the ramparts, the day before the surrender of Lyons, and that a brother belonged to the devoted troop, that, under the Count de Precy, cut its way through the besieging army, the morning of the surrender. Returned to Geneva, a considerable portion of the volume is devoted by our author to an account of this city ;-an account remarkably judicious and instructive in itself, but protracted perhaps beyond the limits due to a single city. One sentence in this part of the work conveys, in expressive words, an image of what it is almost worth a voyage to Geneva to behold. The Rhone, of a brighter blue than the heavens, and perfectly transparent, darts through the town with a swiftness, which the eye can scarcely dwell upon.' If instead of the ordinary bridge and the mills which disfigure this most enchanting spot, such a bridge as that of the Trinity at Florence were thrown across the outlet of the lake of Geneva, it would certainly be the most beautiful sight in Europe.

To illustrate the excellence of female education in Geneva, our author gives us the following striking anecdote. Mr de Candole, professor of botany, at Geneva, but whose reputation

is European, made use, in a course of lectures of a very valuable collection of drawings of American plants, entrusted to him by a celebrated Spanish botanist, Mr Mosino, who having occasion for this collection sooner than was expected, sent for it back again. Mr de C. having communicated the circumstance to his audience, with the expression of his regrets, some ladies who attended the lectures offered to copy, with the aid of their friends, the whole collection in a week, and the task was actually performed. The drawings, eight hundred and sixty in number, and filling thirteen folio volumes, were executed by one hundred and fourteen female artists. One indeed of the ladies alone did forty of them. In most cases the principal parts only of each plant are colored, the rest only traced with accuracy; the execution in general very good, and in some instances quite masterly. There is not perhaps another town of twenty-three thousand souls, where such a number of female artists, the greatest part of them of course amateurs, could be found. Notwithstanding the wide dispersion of the drawings, there were not any lost, and one of them having been accidentally dropped in the street, and picked up by a girl ten years old, was returned to Mr de Candole, copied by the child, and is no disparagement to the collection. On another occasion several drawings were carried to a wrong house, but there too they found artists able and willing to do their part. This taste for the arts and for knowledge in general, is universal. I noticed a very good drawing at a watch maker's that is my sister's, said the man. Old Spon [Histoire de la ville de Geneve] lay on the table: his wife was reading it.'

Mr Simond gives a very interesting account of the inundation in the Val de Bagne, in the year 1818, occasioned by the bursting out of a lake formed by the accumulation of the Dranse, behind a barrier of ice. A still more detailed account, however, of the same catastrophe, translated from one of the numbers of the Alpen Rosen, was published last year in a newspaper in Boston, and we forbear to repeat it.

The following anecdote is much to the credit and good sense of the present emperor of Austria. Joseph,' says Mr Simond, 'when in Switzerland shewed much ill humor and an old grudge of five hundred years, against the unfranchised vassals of his family. But the present emperor, on a similar occasion, behaved very differently. "Vraiment (he observed at the sight of the

ruins of the castle at Hapsburg) je vois que nous n'avons pas toujours été grands seigneurs." We do not know why Mr Simond should make the emperor of Austria speak French, nor why, on the same leaf, he should call the language at Berne a dialect of German, or say that the German literature is less cultivated or known to the Bernese than the French. This statement appears to us wholly gratuitous. Well educated men in this, as in other parts of Switzerland, may be something more likely than the Germans in general to understand French, but German is their language, their children are sent to German universities, and the prejudices against every thing French, particularly since the overthrow of Bonaparte, are bitter. Mr Simond moreover is inaccurate in calling Wyttenbach_the_contemporary of Haller, and saying that he is ranked in Germany among the greatest humanists of the eighteenth century. Wyttenbach was educated, it is true, in Germany, but acquired all his reputation in Holland, and as he died within two years, can scarcely be spoken of as a contemporary of Haller, who died in 1777.

Under the head of Geneva, Mr Simond describes a very curious feature of their society, which we shall give somewhat at length, in his own words. A stranger,' says he, when first admitted to some sort of familiar intercourse at Geneva, soon takes notice of certain endearing epithets, which women of all ages are in the habit of bestowing on each other, such as mon cœur, mon choux, ma mignone, mon ange. The objects of this interchange of endearment, I was told, are women of some Sunday society. This explanation only increasing my curiosity, I made further inquiries, of which the following was the result. Both boys and girls are from their birth associated to other children of the same age and sex. Treaties of marriage for their children are concluded finally between parents before the children are born, and negotiations have been known to take place in regard to those that never were born. The boys, under the designation of the same volée, and the girls of the same Sunday society, meet at some of the parents' houses every Sunday; but neither fathers nor mothers nor even brothers or sisters, unless of the same society, are present. A goûter, or sort of light supper, is given to them, composed of fruit, pastry, &c. of which, being left to their own control, they partake at discretion, and do and say what they please. A sort of natural subordination soon establishes itself among

them. The cleverest and most good natured, the strongest and the wisest, soon acquire an influence over the others, which increases gradually with age. Young men of the same volée remain as such united at college, and until their dispersion over the world; but even then they retain always a strong predilection in favor of their early companions. They feel no jealousy of a superiority insensibly established and acknowledged by themselves. It reflects credit on the whole volée or société; the merits of one member are the boast of all; and thus twelve individuals are led to take the best among them for their model. There have been examples of young female orphans extremely well educated by their société ; others have there found means to counteract the bad education they received at home; but there is not one instance of a whole association being contaminated by the vicious propensities of an individual. Young women, left to their own guidance under the safeguard of their innocence and mutual protection, at the age of fifteen, as well as at five, go out where they please, unattended, without any questions being asked or any inconvenience found to result from the liberty given them. There are very few instances indeed, of women above the very lowest class, married or not, whose conduct is suspected. Women, generally doomed to live and die where they are born, and whose friendships are rarely interrupted by any long absence, being gentler, more affectionate, and caressing than men, retain habitually through life, in speaking to one another, those youthful expressions of fondness, which had attracted my notice but men as well as women always make a great difference between friends of their société and those who are not. It has been said of Geneva, that however long a stranger may live there, or be of all the soirées, he never will get farther. This must be explained. Not being of any man's volée, he will not be treated with the familiarity of an object of intimate association, from the earliest infancy. These are the friendships described by Montaigne, which the stranger would not probably have met with in his own country, and may therefore dispense with at Geneva. Young women meet by themselves till one of them marries. The husband becomes ipso facto of the Sunday society of his wife; other men not married are from that moment admitted; each of the girls designates those which she wishes to invite, who are admitted, if none of the rest have any objections. This is a great change. New Series, No. 12.

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The young people of the two sexes now learn to know each other, and most marriages originate in this manner, being seldom the result of mere prudential arrangements made by the parents. Some matches occur unequal in point of fortune, but very few between persons of unequal and incompatible tempers. Husbands are, as we have seen, of the society of their wives, quitting those to which they had previously belonged; the wife therefore determines the caste of the husband. It is not uncommon for men of the haute société of Geneva to be seen there no more, after they have married beneath them. This is not an exclusion, but a voluntary estrangement, of which the motive does them credit.'

Some very curious anecdotes are told of Voltaire and Rousseau toward the close of Mr Simond's volume, but we have not space to quote them, and we are compelled to draw our notice of the work to a conclusion, without having said any thing of the second volume, which contains the history of Switzerland, or having alluded to very many interesting topics in the first. Considering it the work of a native Frenchman, it is a miracle of good writing; few English books of the day being better written. We venture to commend it accordingly, to the gentlemen on the other side of the Atlantic, who talk about the American language; Mr Simond having learned his English, as much more nervous and genuine for instance than Eustace's as can be imagined, some where between Pearl street and St John's, in New York. We cannot but recommend it in the highest terms to the public, and assure them they will find it not at all unworthy Mr Simond's high reputation; and a very reputable accession to the literature of America.

ART. XVIII.-Message from the President of the United States, transmitting the information required by a resolution of the House of Representatives of the 16th of February last, in relation to Claims set up by Foreign Governments, Territory of the United States upon the Pacific Ocean, north of the forty-second degree of latitude, &c. April 17,

1822.

to

THE measures lately adopted by the Russian government, in relation to the northwestern coast of the American continent, are of so extraordinary a character, that we cannot re