glish translation of La Marck's whole work. In geology generally, the English keep up at least an equality with the French philosophers, but in the particular department of the investigation and classification of fossil remains, and their reference to appropriate strata, they are certainly behind hand. The defence of the Mosaic account of the Creation, by the Rev. Mr. Townsend of Pewsey, has merit in this respect.

The voyage of discovery to Australasia, of which the account was drawn up chiefly by Peron, has added so many new facts to zoology, insects, fishes, and particularly in respecting land animals, reptiles, the tribe of moluscæ, to which M. Le Sueur on that voyage paid indefatigable attention, that we must wait for an opportunity of deliberately examining the second volume recently published and now daily expected here, before a satisfactory account can be given of this very interesting voyage. But one part of zoology the most interesting, that of our own species, has been enriched by Peron and Le Sueur with a more accurate account of the Boschesmen than has appeared before. Something of them we knew from Vaillant and Barrow, but we now know more from the descriptions of M. M. Peron and Le Sueur, and the accurate drawings of this last gentleman, who was designer to the expedition. What the unpublished travels in Africa of W. J. Burchell, Esq. will produce, cannot yet be known.

In the peculiarities of this species of the human race, the Boschesman has been confounded with the Hottentot; but the singularities of conformation ascribed to the latter, belong exclusively to the former.

The following description of the Houzewaana of Le Vaillant, and the Boschesman of Barrow, is compiled from the accounts of these writers, and of M. M. Peron, and Le Sueur, in a former volume of the Journal de Physique and in the Bulletin of the Societè Philomathique.

1. The Boschesmen, or people of the back woods, are only found in the country, north, north west, and north east of the Cape of Good Hope, in the great Karoo, the mountains of Shewberg, and the country of Candebo. They border on the Caffres or Hottentots, with whom they are generally at war. They occupy a large tract of country.

2. They have no cities or houses; or any well characterized marks of civilization. They live chiefly in caves, and holes in the rocks; but they herd together in kraals or villages, and hunt in packs; their arms are bows and arrows, and sticks; they have no language intelligible to, or acquirable by the European; they have no marks of religion or worship; they learn with difficulty when brought to the Cape, a few Dutch words; they have no sense of modesty, either as to their persons, or the gratification of their desires.

3. They are the most homely of the human species: their eyes are small, piercing, always in motion; their stature seldom exceeding fifty-two inches English; they have the leaden colour of the Malay, and are not so black as the Hottentots; their face appears to be all forehead, and has many characters of the monkey; they have properly no nose, their nostrils are broad but very slightly prominent above the face; their lips are very thick and projecting; their eyebrows are somewhat like the Chinese, and

join, being somewhat rounded and not terminating in an angle like the European; they have hair curled, but so short as to appear at first view as if they were shaved; they are active, but not equal to the white man in strength, though hardy, and capable of bearing much fatigue.

4. Their women have not, as commonly supposed, a “ tablier" or flap that covers the pudenda, but a funicular appendage attached by a strait peduncle, to the upper part of the labia pudendi, which increases in thickness as it descends, and in adults is about four inches and a half or five inches in length, covering the lower part of the labia: it is of a reddish colour, in substance like the skin of the dartos, it is somewhat like a large dependent penis, soft, extensible, wrinkled, devoid of hair, slit or bifid from about the mid length to its extremity, so that the two

halves can be thrown over the labia pudendi on each side, when the female lies down. This organ is not a clitoris, it is not a disease, for it is universal among them, nor is it the effect of mechanical handling or extension; young girls have it of size proportioned to their age. It covers the urinary passage, clitoris, and part of the entrance of the vagina. The females have their thighs rather thin, but their but tocks very prominent, large, and fat, and an adipose protuberance projects from behind on each but. tock, so large and prominent that the feet of their infants rest upon it. These characters are lessened by commixture with men of other species, as with the Hottentots. Their breasts in the adult, swell out from the sternum, are then drawn in toward the middle, and swell out again, so as to be of the form of a calibash or gourd. On

M. de Barbancois in remarking upon La Marck's division of animals into the two grand classes of Vertebral, and Invertebral, and then into the following subdivisions, viz. 1. Mammiferous. 2. Birds. 3. Reptiles. 4. Fishes. 5. Moluscas. 6. Cirrhipedes. 7. Annelides. 8. Crustaceous. 9. Arachnoids, (without wings.) 10. Insects, (having wings.) 11. Worms. 12. Radiaires. 13. Polypi. 14. Animalcula Infusoria;-offers in lieu the following division of animals:

Divisions.

Degrés.

Hommes

Classes.

Mammifères

Oiseaux

sang chaud.

{

9me.

8me.

Reptiles écailleux

à sang froid.

{7me.

Reptiles visqueux Poissons

Céphalopodes

6 me.

à système nerv. visible.

Annelides

5 me.

Sous classes.

intelligens.

bornés. terrestres. marins.

jamb. garn. de pl. jamb. dénu. de pl. avec pattes.

sans pattes. avec queue. sans queue.

osseux.

cartilagineux.

avec sac.

avec coquille. céphalés. acéphalés.

nus.

couverts

entomostracés.

malacostracés.

antennister

invertébrés.

This subject M. de Barbancois had before taken up in a memoir on the filiation of animals, from the polypus to the monkey, in the Jour. de Phys. for May preceding, in which he defends the very dubious opinion of La Marck, (Darwin's also,) that matter, by the properties naturally belonging to it, daily forms the lowest and commencing species of organic beings,

Insectes à métamorph.

Vers intérieurs

palpistes. broyeurs.

suceurs. intestinaux.

viscéraux. échinodermes. malacodermes.

libres. aglomérés. appendiculés. lisses.

| endowed only with the first and most necessary conditions of animality, as in the polypi and infusoria; without supposing that the laws of animation are distinct from, and opposed to, those which govern inorganic matter. But as there are no new facts in this paper, it demands no farther notice.

M. Cuvier's account of the zoological, anatomical, and physio