Prepositions, for the most part, immediately precede the consequent noun, whose relation to a given antecedent noun requires to be expressed. The following table contains an attempt at a new arrangement of some of the more important prepositions, according to the predominating notion of relation implied in each. TABLE OF PREPOSITIONS. EXERCISE XXXVIII.—Distinguish the prepositions in the following extracts by underlining, and marking by a figure above, the class in the table to which each belongs :— "Hopes and fears Start up alarmed, and o'er life's narrow verge Look down-on what?-a fathomless abyss."-Young. "Upward steals the life of man, as the sunshine from the wall From the wall into the sky, from the roof along the spire. Ah! the souls of them that die are but sunbeams lifted higher."-Longfellow. "Harmless mirth is the best cordial against the consumption of the spirit; wherefore, jesting is not unlawful, if it trespasseth not in quantity, quality, or season."—Fuller. EXERCISE XXXIX.-Insert fitting prepositions in the blank spaces of the following passages: "Hope uplifted foot set free earth, Our thoughts very seldom, if they ever, arise in us detached or isolated. Much more frequently they are linked and bound together. Speech must express these conjunctions of thought with thought, and a class of words must exist to fulfil that office in the act of converse or writing. Conjunctions form a class of words which show how words and sentences are connected with each other. They are of four kinds, corresponding to the four laws of mental association (vide “ Art of Reasoning," chaps. V. and XX.), viz., Juxtaposition, Resemblance, Contrast, Succession; and may be thus tabulated: EXERCISE XL.-Underline the conjunctions contained in the following extracts, and indicate by a number to which of the four species in the above arrangement each belongs:— "Men would be gods in their unchanging bliss, Ifjoy's midsuminer zenith could be still Unshadowed by a passing cloud of ill, And the high worlds unseen for light of this."-F. Tennyson. "On trembling wings let youthful fancy soar, Nor always haunt the sunny realms of joy; Though many a sound and sight of woe annoy, And many a qualm of care his rising hopes destroy."-Beattie. "If there be a royal solitude, it is a sick bed. How the patient lords it there! What caprices he acts without control! How king-like he sways his pillow, tumbling, and tossing, and shifting, and lowering, and thumping, and flatting, and moulding it to the ever-varying requisitions of his throbbing temples."-Churles Lamb. EXERCISE XLI.-Supply conjunctions of the kind denoted by the figures in brackets in the passages that follow : "How clouded man Doubts first, (1) from one doubt doth soon proceed (3) shall we e'er truth's perfect highway see, Till dawns the day-break of eternity."-Old Play 1673. "Oh! the cursed devil, Which doth present us with all other sins Thrice candied o'er. Despair, with gall (1) stitrium, "There is a deep nick in Time's restless wheel For each man's good; when which nick comes it strikes (2) rhetoric, (3) works not persuasion. (2) no man riseth by his real inerit, (3) when it cries clink in his raiser's spirit."—John Chapman. EXERCISE XLII.-In the following extract distinguish the adverbs by marking one above them; the prepositions by two, the conjunctions by three:— For now six years, dear reader, we have been co-labourers. In these pages it has been our privilege and duty to say many words of hope and love. Ever with gladness did the hour, which was to bring us into communication, find us, and we have often coined the silent hours of night into golden thoughts of you. As friends we met in converse, and, “as iron sharpeneth iron," strove to whet each other's aspirations. Time smiled upon our intercourse, and it ripened-into what fruit, let each answer for himself. May we, then, with the license of long and true friendship, bespeak you for a little before this year also departs into "the past eternity," and yet once more mingle the farewells of the closing year with sober thought? If so, to one and all we bear the same mission; namely, make Life an earnest, truthful activity-a reality. Study to know its duties and to do them, and aspire, by industry, perseverance, and true speaking and acting, to rise to that state in which the performance of duty is not only possible, but pleasurable. It is quite true that we cannot know "How various are the events that may depend Upon one action, yet the end proposed Not follow the intention;" but we do know that pure motives are the safeguards of men. Let us become, then, pure in heart, as well as earnest in action. Let us believe that life is a gift, that duty is the supreme purpose of life, that purpose is the soul of system, that system is the highway of success; and may each of us resolve to devote all our energies, capacities, opportunities, &c., to the fulfilment of some purpose commensurate with our Duty, Destiny, and Power, so that our future years may each be happier than we hope. This day for each of us "divides eternity in twain "-the Past with all its acts and memories, the Future with all its purposes and hopes. This day the urn of fate is again placed before us, that we may choose whatsoever we will. To each such choice Heaven has affixed a definite award, so that there is no lottery in human life, but a dire certainty that as we make the option, so shall it befall. May each choose discreetly, wisely, and well, and hereafter perfect up his life in the Great Taskmaster's eye! Adieu! S. N. Philosophy. IS REASON CONFINED TO MAN? NEUTRAL ARTICLE. No small amount of the obscurity which exists with regard to the relative predominance of the reasoning and instinctive powers in the different members of the Vertebrate kingdom, has arisen from the looseness with which these terms have been applied; in many cases both of them having been used indiscriminately by different persons to indicate the nature of the same mental function. It would be no difficult matter, by a little special pleading, and the aid of this ambiguous phraseology, to prove to superficial observers the truth of either side of this question; but it would be but a poor triumph for the advocates of the restriction of intelligence to the human race to know that they had exalted their idol only by confusing the very phrases, the import of which it should have been their object to determine; and, on the other hand, would be easy, by insisting on the strict interpretation of the term "instinct," for the champions of the brute creation to show that the actions which owe their origin to that principle are not only common to man as well as to the lower animals, but that there are in addition a great many faculties of the latter which cannot, with any propriety, be called instinctive, thus leaving their opponents on the horns of a dilemma, from which their only escape could be by adopting the alternative of the more extended diffusion of the intellectual powers. Nothing throws so much light upon this question as an investigation into the functions which experiment and induction have led modern physiologists to attribute to different portions of the nervous system; and assuredly nothing would so unfit a man for entering into this controversy as ignorance of these fundamental facts in the science of metaphysics. Yet it is almost impossible, in so limited a space as a paper in the Controversialist must necessarily occupy, to give to readers whose minds are unfamiliarized with the study of physiology, an idea even of the verbal meaning of the terms which are applied to different portions of the nervous system; and how much more so, to indicate the relative amount of development which each of these constituents of the brain of man undergoes in the ascending scale of animal life. We have been, however, induced to make the attempt, rather with the view of drawing general attention to the material source from which much of our knowledge of the spiritual portion of our nature is to be gathered, than with the expectation of bringing conviction or light to the minds of our readers. Let us see, first, what is strictly meant by the term "instinct;" for should we be able to show that there are numberless actions, not only of the higher Mammalia, but even of the lowest members of the Vertebrate group, which cannot be comprehended under that head, the advocates of the exclusively instinctive character of brute life will be non-suited, at least so far as the verbal nature of the question is concerned, for we never heard in popular discussion any tertium quid between instinct and reason assigned as a cause of these actions. The truth, as in many cases of a far more practical nature than this, lies between the two extremes. If the defenders of the instinct theory will widen their premises sufficiently to admit under that title those automatic processes of reasoning which are constantly going on in their own heads, whilst their opponents will but confine the term 66 reason to those volitional acts of intelligence which necessitate such a power of abstraction, as to be able to form general ideas, and which evince, not only an adaptation to certain ends, but a designed one on the part of the agents, there is every reason to believe that they may yet find themselves in the position of those three great logicians, who "nearly came from words to blows" about the colour of the chameleon, and who were somewhat astonished to find that they were all in the right, and at the same time all in the wrong. Man is sufficiently exalted in the pre-eminence which the faculty of speech and the possession of a moral instinct gives him, to be able to concede with grace a moiety of what has too often been considered as his exclusive attribute, to the "beasts that perish," whilst, on the other hand, the dignity of the plan of creation is much increased by the establishment of the fact that although there is a hiatus between the lowest of the human species and the most developed of the inferior animals which no Lamarckian theory can fill up, yet that the germs of those mental processes which elevate man amongst the denizens of the unseen world, and even draw him near to the throne of God himself, may be distinctly traced in the various stages of the animal series, though performed under instinctive rather than volitional agency.* The term "instinctive" should, in strict propriety, be confined to those automatic actions which are essential to the life and well-being of the animals who exhibit them, of which we find the highest manifestations in the class of insects, and which are technically known to physiologists as (a) excitomotor and (b) sensorimotor-words which may be paraphrased respectively as, (a) sensations excited on the nerves of the general surface, or some special part of the body, which cause muscular action in those members to which corresponding motor nerves are distributed,-e. g., the compulsion to swallow, which the propulsion of a pellet of food down the throat produces, and (b) as sensations excited on the nerves of special sense, such as the eye, ear, &c., which also give rise to muscular action in those parts to which the corresponding motor nerves are directed-e. g., the compulsion to close the lids, which the sudden approximation of a foreign body to the eye excites, the tendency to sneeze, which an instantaneous bright flash of light sometimes produces, &c. It will be remarked that these actions are truly * "A very close correspondence may be traced between the gradual development of the Intelligence and the progressive acquirement of Volitional dominance in the ascending series of Vertebrate animals, and in the advance of man from the mental state of childhood (which is permanently retained, as to all its essential characters, in many adults, and even in whole races of the least cultivated order) to the highest elevation which his nature is capable of displaying in his present sphere of existence."-Dr. Carpenter, "Principles of Human Physiology, 1853, p. 667. automatic, and in no way amenable to the will, except that some of them, under certain circumstances, can be for a time suspended or modified, as in the forced cessation from breathing, which a diver practises. And why this is so is clear, if we remember that they are all highly necessary to the continuance of the individual or of the species, and that many of them, being not only devoid of pleasure, but even productive of discomfort, if they were placed under the sole control of the power of volition, would stand a good chance of being frequently omitted. It should also be remarked that no previous experience can give them force, nor can any amount of practice confer improvement, for they are as perfect as the Designer of nature originally intended them to be. Now, all the apparatus that is necessary for the performance of these automatic functions is a central nerve station, or ganglion, as it is technically termed, with afferent and efferent nerves to bring to it sensations, and convey volitions to the parts to be moved; and such a system exists in those portions of the nervous axis, which are known as the Spinal Cord, Medulla Oblongata, and Sensory Ganglia, with their respective sensory and motor nerves. To this category, then, of purely instinctive or automatic actions, we must refer all those instances of apparent contrivance and refined ingenuity which the lower animals so abundantly supply, and which have been the astonishment and delight of the curious in all ages. A bee cannot help building a hive, if provided with wax; an ant cannot help storing grain; a beaver cannot help constructing a dam; a snail cannot help "dragging its slow length along" to its accustomed food, because, in the words of the divine and moral rhymester, "it is their nature so to do." The phrase, however unsatisfactory in a philosophical point of view, is the nearest approach which we can make to an explanation; and we should be doing little more than trifling with words, if we imagined that we had found a more satisfactory clue, by referring the actions of these animals to a 66 their organization." physiological necessity of Still it is competent for us to offer some such hypothesis as this, that there is a kind of nervous irritation excited by a variety of external circumstances in the animals, which compels them |