and seventy-three feet, which cost $8,000. The church, which is inclosed and in process of comple tion, is sixty feet wide by one hundred and one feet in length, including the circular vestibule. The style, as will be seen, is what is termed the Roman Corinthian. The material is brick, "rough cast," with brown stone trimmings, the dome and lantern being of wood and tin. The brick are painted outside, in imitation of brown stone, and the roof is of tin. The Corinthian capitals are of terra cotta. The basement is entirely above ground, its floor being two feet above the pavement. It is twelve feet between floors, and is divided into a vestibule, a lecture-room thirty-five feet by fifty-seven, two class-rooms fourteen feet by twenty-four, and four others twelve feet by fourteen each. The arrangement of the classrooms, &c., will be fully understood by the accompanying diagram, and it strikes us as exceedingly convenient and tasteful. Half the seats in the lecture-room have revolving backs, to accommodate the Sabbath-school. There is a cellar under the whole building for furnaces and coal. The outside entrances are shown in the engravings. The main audience-room, which is fifty-seven feet by sixty-four, is entered by flights of stairs from the vestibule, and a small stairway in the rear near the pulpit. It has three aisles and one hundred and ten pews, and will seat five hundred and fifty persons. The gallery, which extends around three sides, and is four pews deep, has some sixty pews more, including the seats for the choir, and will seat from three to four hundred more. The building has ventilators in the ceiling and side-walls, and is warmed by furnaces in the cellar. It is painted white inside and glazed with flint glass. The side-walls are forty-four feet high, and the ceiling of the main room thirty. We regret that our limited space forbids the insertion of the beautiful plans of the gallery and main audience-room, furnished us by the gentlemanly building committee. 12X14 12X14 15.0 CLASS ROOM CLASS ROOM 12X14 12X14 27X57 VESTIBULE. 15.0 BASEMENT PLAN. 80.0 If we are not greatly mistaken, this is the first Methodist church with a dome or spire in the great city of Philadelphia; and though, to a person fond of spires and partial to the Gothic style, this church will look rather academic, it gives promise, nevertheless, of being a fine church, and an honor to the enterprising brethren who have reared it. The interior arrangement is very fine, and few churches of its size will accommodate as many hearers. It is to have no organ or bell, (except in the pulpit,) and the pews are all to be free. It is a kind of mission church, and has risen up in spite of the most strenuous efforts of the Papists in the vicinity to prevent it. Long may it stand and flourish, a terror to the man of sin! a blessing to the neighborhood in which it stands, and the future birthplace of thousands who shall glorify God on earth, and praise him forever beyond the grave. The estimated cost of the building and site is about $30,000. S. D. Button, architect, RUSH & BINDER, contractors. THE ORIENTAL YAM. remain in the ground several years without degenerating, but, on the contrary, it TTENTION, as all men know, has increases in size, weight, and nutriment, ATTENTION, 18 all min ky vir hed toward the discovery of a plant capable, in whole or in part, of forming a substitute for the precarious potato-crop. Many have been suggested. The tuberous oxalis, the arracacha, the lesser celandine, and many more, have from time to time been brought into notice; but each in turn, when weighed in the balance of practical agriculture, has been found wanting. The star of hope to which the eye of hungry Europe is now directed is an Oriental yam, which the combined labors of the "Allies" have suddenly brought forth from its inglorious obscurity. Like the East and West Indian yams already known, it belongs to the genus dioscorea; but is very different from these in its specific characters. M. Decaisne's experiments lead to the conclusion that it would speedily become a plant of real agricultural importance in France. The plant has large perennial rhizomes or roots, the top-ends of which are as thick as the fist, and which taper downward to the thickness of the finger, descending perpendicularly to the depth of a yard, if the soil is loose enough to allow them. The haulm is annual, as thick as a goose-quill, cylindrical, entwining from right to left, two yards in height, of a violet color, with small whitish specks; and when not artificially supported, it trails on the ground, rooting freely at the joints. In China, this plant has long been in extensive cultivation, under the name of Sain-In; and M. Montigny, through whom it was introduced from Shang-hae to Paris, reports it to be highly productive, and consumed as largely by the Chinese as the potato is by Europeans. The French horticulturists, who have been at much pains to inquire into its merits, have arrived at the following conclusions:-1. That in point of flavor and nutritive properties it is equal to the potato, and, in the opinion of Professor Decaisne, superior. 2. That the yield is greater, while its freedom from disease renders the crop more certain. 3. That it will grow upon sandy, and what are usually considered barren soils; and thus affords an excellent means of turning waste-land to profit. 4. That it can be propagated with facility. 5. That it may furnishing at all seasons of the year an aliment within the reach of every one." 6. That when harvested, it may be preserved in cellars or sheds, without vegetating, for many months after the potato has become useless for food. 7. It requires a shorter time in cooking than the potato; ten minutes' boiling being sufficient. M. Decaisne, in detailing his experiments, observes: "If a new plant is to have a chance of becoming useful in rural economy, it must fulfill certain conditions, in the absence of which its cultivation cannot be profitable. . . . Now, the Chinese yam satisfies every one of these conditions. It has been domesticated from time immemorial; it is perfectly hardy in the climate of France; its root is bulky, rich in nutritive matter, eatable when raw, easily cooked either by boiling or roasting, and then having no other taste than that of flour (feculé). It is as much a ready-made bread as the potato, and is better than the batatas or sweet potato." 66 The system of cultivation recommended is the following, namely: For propagation, the smallest roots are set apart, and pitted to keep them from frost. In the spring, they are taken out and planted in furrows, pretty near each other, in wellprepared ground. They soon sprout and form prostrate stems, which are made into cuttings as soon as they are six feet long. As soon as the cuttings are ready, a field is worked into ridges, along each of which is formed a small furrow, in which the pieces of the stem are laid down and covered with a little earth, the leaves being left bare. If rainy weather follows, the cuttings strike immediately; if dry, they must be watered until they do strike. In fifteen or twenty days the roots begin to form, and at the same time lateral branches appear, which are carefully removed from time to time, to facilitate the swelling of the roots. In general, one plant produces two or three tubers, (rhizomes,) which are of a coffee-color externally, but consist internally of a white, opaline, very friable, slightly milky, cellular mass, filled with flour, which softens in cooking till it acquires the taste and quality of a potato, "for which it might be mistaken”—possibly in taste, certainly not in appearance. Many of these, covered by the castings of We have no better illustration of the importance of apparently insignificant things than in the worm. Whoever beholds the creature delving and winding through the mold probably has thought how useless a place it occupies in the scale of creation; and yet, what will our readers who are unacquainted with the fact think when we assure them that the common earth-worm is at once shovel, plow, harrow, and manure? Of all that soil which is the richest and most adapted for the gardener's purpose there is scarcely any which has not passed through the intestines of the worm, and the earthy casts which are seen lying about after its burrowings are little patches of rich mold which have derived an extraordinary nu-gree the exquisite contrivance of nature trition from the cause we have mentioned. It is only recently that science has devoted much attention to this interesting subject; but the fact to which we have alluded was placed beyond dispute some years ago by Charles Darwin, Esq., in a paper on the formation of mold, read before the Geological Society of London. The work performed by each individual | worm may seem so insignificant as to place almost in doubt the possibility of an achievement so considerable; but this idea is refuted by the immense number of earth-worms constantly plowing their way, and especially when driven by dry weather to a considerable depth below the surface. It is satisfactorily ascertained that no plow could reach so deep as the worm in many instances; and Mr. Darwin remarks that it would sometimes be much more consistent to speak of animal mold rather than vegetable. It is both amusing and beautiful to contemplate how, by the agency of this little creature, nature buries stones, pebbles, and the rough earth which was too near the surface. The Reverend William Kirby slightly alludes to them in his Bridgewater Treatise on the "Wisdom of God in the Creation of Animals;" but since this volume was written the earth-worm, as well as the whole class of worms to which it belongs, namely, the Annelida, has undergone a very lengthy and popular examina-, tion by Dr. Williams, who has published the result of his observations in a paper of some hundred and twenty pages in the report of the British Association for 1851. That paper unfolds in a remarkable de in her most unobserved works, or, rather let us say, the wonderful wisdom of God in the most unobserved of his creatures. The very name by which this class is distinguished by naturalists, the Annelida, is given to it from an early perception of the marvelous contrivance of its rings; for if the reader observes it, which he may very easily do either by watching its movements in the mold, or placing it before his eyes on the table, he will see that its coil of blood-red rings are marked very plainly, and he will further notice, too, how all these assist it in the act of moving. The grace of the snake and the serpent has often been referred to; the proud beauty of that creature, so shunned by man, has been repeatedly made a subject of comment; but the beauty of the worm, to an eye capable of perceiving it, is no less remarkable; and although we would not place the serpent or the snake beyond the circle of the useful purposes of creation, yet the impression made upon | the mind by the worm in this particular is much more interesting. We have watched .t, industrious little peasant! hard-work- feet: it is a constant marvel. Like the human hand, it unites in itself the most opposite and various faculties: by the sense of touch it seems to supersede the necessity for other faculties. In all the contrivances connected with its formation, ing little plowman! as it has moved on, swiftly shooting its way through the soil, and we have wondered that it has not been a theme for poets. Its movements surely illustrate the poetry of motion; and, indeed, one of our later poets, Walter Savage Landor, has made the worm the subject of his song. The following lines are as just as they are beautiful in homage of the subject of our paper : "First-born of all creation yet unsung, watch'd The nightingale, that most inquisitive Such were some of our reflections the other day while wielding the spade in our garden; and then we very naturally turned from the worm to other characters in the scale of moral creation, slighted like the worm, fulfilling a round of lowly duties unnoticed and unperceived. How many there are in society, the delvers, the diggers, and plowmen, nay, even the unseen Might play with it. Alas! the young will play philosophers, who work silently and ob Reckless of leaving pain and death behind. scurely in the dark beneath the mold, FIRST-BORN I call'd thee at the opening of my song; seems evident gh that nothing has been omitted conducive to its happiness; it bounds to and fro with a merriment of motion which assures us that it is capable of enjoyment in its little circle of sensation and small world of action. Those who have anatomized it, speak of the exquisiteness of its mechanism; with rapture they laud the muscular feats of the Annelida as wonderfully distinguished by their complexity and harmony; and yet it is allowed to pass long without a chronicler and a historian, though no single creature in the whole compass of creation more illustrates the marvelous excellency of divine arrangement, or the dependency of man for his happiness upon the meanest of God's creatures. There is another remarkable fact concerning the worm. No organs of sense have been discovered, and yet it is all sensation; it sees without eyes, hears without ears, as truly as it walks without recur to the often uttered but never sufficiently felt truth, that nothing useful is mean or contemptible. How much soever the employment seems to stamp with contempt, let us constantly remember that not employment, but motive and object, are the foundations of real dignity; nay, that sometimes workers may be engaged in really dignified employment, important in itself and its results, although they may be entirely ignorant of the magnificence of the foundation they are preparing. The humblest action, it is pleasing to remember, is dignified, if done to the glory of God. [For the National Magazine.] REVIEWS EXTRAORDINARY. BY ONE OF OUR STATED CONTRIBUTORS. A NO. III. STRENGTHENING THE LANGUAGE. S on former occasions, so now, in making my third quarterly appearance, I must be indulged in a few personal reflections. If the editor deems them deficient in gravity they need not be printed; or, if printed, the reader who has nothing in view but food of the most substantial quality may skip over to the next page, where I promise him he will find mental aliment that will tax his profoundest digestive organs, even though he may have, to speak metaphorically, the gizzard of an ostrich. And first, to those who object to my use of A DAGGER as the distinguishing signature of these papers, I have only to say that I was well aware that Archbishop Hughes has already appropriated that expressive symbol. But I do not admit his right to monopolize it. I am not sure that there is any of the blood of the Puritans flowing through my veins, yet I stand up for the right of private judgment. If Protestant Christians choose to abandon the expressive figure of the cross because Roman Catholics use it, that is their business and not mine. And if it seem good unto them, the Protestants aforesaid, in deference to the papal power, to put weather-cocks upon their own churchsteeples, I am willing to leave them in the full enjoyment of all the happiness arising from such fickleness. It is certainly no good reason why I should give up my DAGGER. I repel with scorn the unmanly insinuation that I use it for the purpose of inveigling any of the archbishop's sheep into my pasture. If that had been my object, two tobacco-pipes crossed diagonally, or the picture of a punch-bowl with a ladle in it, or even a black bottle, would have been more efficacious. At least so I think, judging from that portion of his reverence's flock which I saw hanging round the purlieus of Saint Patrick's Cathedral last Sunday morning. Those readers of the NATIONAL who expected to hear from me last month, or even the month previous, need to be informed, it seems, that the idea of a REVIEW is essentially QUARTERLY. It was so from VOL. VIII.-10 the beginning, and so it shall be, so far as I am concerned, in secula seculorum. I deal in no kickshaws nor syllabubs. Three months is little time enough for the healthy inward digestion of a review worthy of the name. The victims of mental dyspepsia, occasioned by indigestion, are sufficiently numerous without my incurring the fearful hazard of adding to the number by crowding upon the public such solid food with too great rapidity. I must be permitted to say, too, that while I can stand a little flattery, provided it be laid on smoothly, yet my modesty revolts at it when it requires explanations. Hence I demur to the sentiment, kindly as it was meant, that my talents are too great, my erudition too profound, or my attainments too vast, for this species of literature. It may, or may not be true that some men are too full of ministerial talent to be spared for the episcopal bench. I shall not pretend to decide that question, although I have patiently weighed the arguments on both sides, and have my own opinion. I have no hesitation in saying, however, that a compliment which not only exalts my qualifications at the expense of my elder brethren of the reviewing craft, but by implication seems to derogate from the dignity of this highest style of literature, is not exactly in accordance with my views of propriety and good taste. If it be your candid opinion that I am the greatest review-writer the world has ever seen, why, say so. I can hear it without wincing. But if you love me I beg of you not to deal in any hyperbolical assertions which, unexplained, will be supposed by common readers merely to mean that you think me too big for my inexpressibles, or, in other words, too long for my continuations. I have but one more preliminary remark. In my first article, the review of the NEW-YORK DIRECTORY, I pursued the analytic method; and in my second, the PILGRIMAGE OF PILGARLIQUE, I devoted my powers to what may be called the exhaustive style. In each, my object was to give an adequate idea of the volumes reviewed; and with reference to the latter, I venture the assertion that the patient reader knew as much about it when he had finished the article as I did myself. There is a third variety of this species of literature, upon which I now propose to |