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By Root 15897 0

off to the sea. The first glance of this scene hurries our senses into the opinion that the mountains were formed first, that the rivers began to flow afterwards, that, in this place particularly they have been dammed up by the Blue Ridge of mountains, and have formed an ocean which filled the whole valley, -- that continuing to rise, they have at length broken over at this spot, and have torn the mountain down from its summit to its base. The piles of rock on each had, but particularly on the Shenandoah -- the evident marks of their disrupture and avulsion from their beds by the most powerful agents of nature, corroborate the impression. But the distant finishing which nature has given to the picture, is of a very different character; it is a true contrast to the foreground; it is as placid and delightful as that is wild and tremendous, -- for the mountain being clover asunder, she presents to your eye, through the cleft, a small closet of smooth blue horizon, at an infinite distance in the plain country, inviting you, as it were, from the riot and tumult roaring around, to pass through the breach and participate in the calm below. Here the eye ultimately composes itself, and that way, too, the road happens actually to lead. You cross the Potomac just above its junction, pass along its side through the base of the mountain for three miles, its terrible precipices hanging over you, and, within about twenty miles, reach Fredericktown and the fine country around that. This scene is worth a voyage across the Atlantic."

Enthusiastic as Jefferson is in this description, he does not exceed the truth. Foreigners have borne ample testimony to the splendor of the prospect from the top of the ridge at Harper's Ferry, admitting that there are few scenes in Europe which surpass it.

It is time to do justice to American scenery. Hundreds of our citizens annually cross the Atlantic for the purpose of visiting the scenery of Europe, under the mistaken supposition that their own country affords nothing to compensate them for the trouble of a visit. This ignorance is less general than formerly, but it still prevails to a considerable extent. Yet no country affords finer or more magnificent scenery than American. Go up the Hudson, travel along the banks of the Susquehanna, cross the Alleghanies or ascend the Catskill, loiter over the fairy-like waters of lake Horicon, and you will cease to believe that America affords no scenery to reward the traveller. We say nothing of Niagara or Trenton falls, or of the mountain scenery scattered all over the south. We say nothing of the vast prairies of the west, of the boundless melancholy expanse of the Mississippi, of the magnificent scenery on the route to St. Anthony's Falls. Let our people visit these before going abroad. Let them learn to do justice to the country of their birth.

INSTINCT VS REASON — A BLACK CAT

The line which demarcates the instinct of the brute creation from the boasted reason of man, is, beyond doubt, of the most shadowy and unsatisfactory character — a boundary line far more difficult to settle than even the North-Eastern or the Oregon. The question whether the lower animals do or do not reason, will possibly never be decided — certainly never in our present condition of knowledge. While the self-love and arrogance of man will persist in denying the reflective power to beasts, because the granting it seems to derogate from his own vaunted supremacy, he yet perpetually finds himself involved in the paradox of decrying instinct as an inferior faculty, while he is forced to admit its infinite superiority, in a thousand cases, over the very reason which he claims exclusively as his own. Instinct, so far from being an inferior reason, is perhaps the most exacted intellect of all. It will appear to the true philosopher as the divine mind itself acting immediately upon its creatures.

The habits of the lion-ant, of many kinds of spiders, and of the beaver, have in them a wonderful analogy, or rather similarity, to the usual operations of the reason of man — but the instinct