jected, and the regular lives they lead, in these united causes a sufficient reason will be found for the beauty which has always distinguished the women of Pelopon nesus. The models which inspired Apelles and Phidias are still to be found among them. They are generally tall and finely formed; their eyes are full of fire, and they have a beautiful mouth ornamented with the finest teeth. There are, however, degrees in their beauty, though all in general may be called handsome. The Spartan woman is fair, of a slender make, but with a noble air; the women of Taygetes have the carriage of Pallas when she flourished her formidable ægis in the midst of a battle. The Messenian woman is low in stature and distinguished for her embonpoint; she has regular features, large blue eyes, and long black hair. The Arcadian, in her coarse woollen garment, scarcely suffers the regularity of her form to appear; but her countenance is expressive of great purity of mind, and her smile is the smile of innocence. Chaste as daughters, the women of the Morea assume as wives even a character of austerity. Rarely after the death of a husband whom she loved does the widow ever think of contracting a new engagement. Supporting life with difficulty, deprived of the object of her affections, the remainder of her days are often passed in weeping her loss. Endowed with organs sensible to melody, most of the Greek women sing in a pleasing manner, accompanying themselves with a tetrachord, the tones of which are an excellent support to the voice. In their songs they do not extol the favours of love, they do not arraign the coldness and inconstancy of a lover; it is rather a young man who pines away with love, as the grass is withered on the house-tops; who complains of the cruelty of his inflexible mistress,-who compares himself to a bird deprived of his mate, to a solitary turtle dove ;-who requires all nature, in short, to share in his sorrows. At this long recital of woes, the companions of the songstress are often melted into tears, and quit her with warm expressions of delight at the pleasure they have received. If the Greek women have received from the hand of nature the gift of beauty as their common dower, and a heart that loves with ardour and sincerity, they have the defects of being vain, avaricious, and ambitious; at least this is the case with those in the higher ranks of society. Totally destitute of instruction, they are incapable of keeping up a conversation in any degree interesting, nor can supply their want of education by a natural playfulness of imagination which gives birth intuitively to lively sallies, and often charms in women more than cultivation of mind. It may be said in general that the Greek women know nothing: even those who are born in the higher ranks are ignorant of the art of presiding in their own houses; an art so well known, and so well practised in our own country, that a woman destitute of real knowledge has often by this means drawn around her a circle of the most cultivated and most amiable among the other 13 ab other sex. As a proof of the total want of education among the Greek women, I cannot help adding that I have often heard at Constantinople, even from the mouths of those who bore the title of princesses, the grossest language used towards their servants, such as would not be endured among us but from the very lowest dregs of the people. It is not difficult, from this specimen, to form an idea of the charm which such sort of female society presents to Europeans of polished countries. A belief in sorcery or witchcraft, that great stumbling-block of the human understanding in all ages and climes, is exceedingly prevalent in modern Greece. A number of old Sibyls, withered sorceresses of the race known among us by the name of Bohemians or Egyptians, the refuse of Thessaly, a country celebrated in all times for female magicians, are in high repute in every part of the Morea. They explain signs, interpret dreams, and all the delirious wan derings of the imagination. Reverenced, feared, caressed, nothing is done without consulting them; nor is it difficult to conceive how unbounded an empire these impostors obtain over imaginations as ardent, united with minds as little cultivated as characterize the Grecian women. A young woman wishes to know what sort of a husband she is to have. She consults one of these oracles of fate, who gives her a pie seasoned with mint and other aromatic herbs gathered from the mountains. This she is to eat at night without drinking, and go to bed immediately, first hanging round her neck, in a little enchanted bag, three flowers, one white, another red, and the third yellow. The next morning she puts her hand into the bag and draws out one of the flowers: if it be the white, she is to marry a young man; if the red, one of a middle age; if the yellow, a widower. She is then to relate what she has dreamt in the night, and from her dreams the Sibyl draws omens, whether the busband is to be rich, and whether the marriage is to prove happy or not. If the predictions be not accomplished, no fault is ever ascribed to the oracle; either her orders were not exactly observed, or the Evil-eye, has rendered her divinations abortive. This Evileye, the Arimanes of the ancients, is a dæmon the enemy of all happiness, the very name of whom terrifies even the most courageous. According to the Greeks, this spirit or invisible power is grieved at all prosperity, groans at success, is indignant at a plentiful harvest, or at the fecundity of the flocks, murmurs even against heaven for having made a young girl pleasing or handsome. In consequence of so strange a superstition, no one thinks of congratulating another upon having handsome children, and they carefully avoid admiring the beauty of a neighbour's horse, for the Evil-eye would very probably at the same instant afflict the children with a leprosy, or the horses with lameness. The power of this genius even extends to taking away treasures of every kind from those by whom they are possessed. If however, in complimenting the beauty of the chil dren After having shown how much the modern Greeks are given up to superstition, and the degree of debasement to which their minds are reduced by the slavery under which they have so long languished, another feature of their character will appear the more extraordinary; this is the vanity which all have more or less of being distinguished by the most pompous titles. Nothing is heard among them but the titles of archon, prince, most illustrious, and others equally high-sounding; the title of His Holiness is given to their papas. The child accustomed to forget the most endearing of all appellations, the wife forgetting that which she ought most to cherish, salute the father and the husband with the title of Signor, at the same time kissing his hand. This name, which is only a term of submission, is by the pride of the Greeks preferred to all others, for the very reason that it seems to acknowledge superiority in the person to whom it is addressed. It is from this, sentiment of vanity that those Greeks who have acquired any knowledge of the history of their country, speak with so much pride of the ancient relics still scattered over it. According to the affinity which may be found in their names to any of those celebrated in antiquity, they call themselves the descendants of Codrus, of Phidias, of Themistocles, of Belisarius. The same sentiment leads them to hoard up money, that they may be enabled at last to purchase some situation which shall give them the power of domineering over their brethren; and this achieved, it is by no means unusual to see them become more insolent and tyrannical towards them than the Turks themselves. They justify in this respect but too fully the common saying, that the Turk has no better instrument for inforcing slavery than the Greek. NATURAL NATURAL HISTORY. EARTHQUAKES AND THEIR CAUSES. [From A. de Humboldt's personal Narrative of Travels, translated by Helen Maria Williams.] Tis a very old and commonly received opinion at Cumana, Acapulco, and Lima, that a perceptible connection exists between earthquakes, and the state of the atmosphere that precedes these phænomena. On the coast of New Andalusia, the inhabitants are alarmed, when, in excessively hot weather, and after long droughts, the breeze suddenly ceases to blow, and the sky, clear, and without clouds at the zenith, exhibits, near the horizon, at six or eight degrees elevation, the appearance of a reddish vapour. These prognostics are however very uncertain; and when the whole of the meteorological variations, at the times when the Globe has been the most agitated, are called to mind, it is found, that violent shocks take place equally in dry and in wet weather; when the coolest winds blow, or during a dead and suffocating calm. From the great number of earthquakes, which I have witnessed to the north and south of the equator; on the continent, and in the basin of the seas; on the coasts, and at 2500 toises height; it appears to me, that the oscillations are generally very independent of the previous state of the atmosphere. This opinion is embraced by a number of enlightened persons, who inhabit the Spanish colonies; and whose experience extends, if not over a greater space of the globe, at least to a greater number of years than mine. On the contrary, in parts of Europe where earthquakes are rare compared to America, natural philophers are inclined to admit an intimate connection between the undulations of the ground, and certain meteors, which accidentally take place at the same epocha. In Italy, for instance, the sirocco and earthquakes are suspected to have some connection; and at London, the frequency of falling stars, and those southern lights, which have since been often observed by Mr. Dalton, were considered as the forerunners of those shocks, which were felt from 1748 to 1756. On the days when the earth is shaken by violent shocks, the regularity of the horary variations of the barometer is not disturbed un der der the tropics. I have verified this observation at Cumana, at Lima, and at Riobamba; and it is so much the more worthy of fixing the attention of natural philosophers, as at St. Domingo, at the town of Cape François, it is asserted that a water barometer was observed to sink two inches and a half immediately before the earthquake of 1770. In the same manner it is related, that, at the time of the destruction of Oran, a druggist fled with his family, because, observing accidentally, a few minutes before the earthquake, the height of the mercury in his barometer, he perceived that the column sunk in an extraordinary manner. I know not whether we can give credit to this as sertion: but as it is nearly impossible to examine the variations of the weight of the atmosphere during the shocks, we must be satisfied in observing the barometer before or after these phænomena have taken place. In the temperate zone, the aurora borealis does not always modify the variation of the needle, and the intensity of the magnetic forces. Perhaps also earthquakes do not act constantly in the same manner on the air that surrounds us. We can scarcely doubt, that the earth, when opened and agitated by shocks, spreadso ccasionally gaseous emanations through the atmosphere, in places remote from the mouths ofvolcanoes not extinct. At Cumana, as we have already observed, flames and vapours mixed with sulphurous acid spring up from the most arid soil. In other parts of the same province, the earth ejects water and petroleum. At Riobamba a muddy and inflammable mass, which is called moya, issues from crevices that close again, and accumulates into ele vated hills. At seven leagues from Lisbon, near Colares, during the terrible earthquake of the first of November, 1755, flames and a column of thick smoke were seen to issue from the flanks of the rocks of Alvidras, and, according to some witnesses, from the bosom of the sea. This smoke lasted several days, and it was the more abundant in proportion as the subterraneous noise, which accompanied the shocks, was louder. Elastic fluids thrown into the atmosphere may act locally on the barometer, not by their mass, which is very small, compared to the mass of the atmosphere; but because, at the moment of the great explosions, an ascending current is probably formed, which diminishes the pressure of the air.I am inclined to think, that in the greater part of earthquakes nothing escapes from the agitated earth; and that, where gaseous emanations and vapours take place, they oftener accompany, or follow, than precede the shocks. This last circumstance explains a fact, which seems indubitable, I mean that mysterious influence, in equinoctial America, of earthquakes on the climate, and on the order of the dry and rainy seasons. If the earth generally act on the air only at the moment of the shocks, we can conceive why it is so rare, that a sensible meteorological change be. comes the presage of these great revolutions of nature. The hypothesis according to which, in the earthquakes of Cumana, elastic fluids tend to escape from the surface of the soil, seems confirmed by the observation of the dreadful noise, which is heard |