strain
At either end of the marriage-chain,
The gossips say, with a knowing shake
Of their gray heads, "Look at the Double Snake!
One in body and two in will,
The Amphisbaena is living still!"

A PLEA FOR THE FIJIANS;

OR, CAN NOTHING BE SAID IN FAVOR OF ROASTING ONE'S EQUALS?

It is with a feeling of no mean satisfaction, that, in this year of
1859, the philosopher can calmly propose the investigation of a subject,
the mere mention of which would have created universal disgust, and even
horror, at a period not long past. Thanks to the progress of liberal
ideas and sound criticism, we are able, in the middle of the
ever-memorable Nineteenth Century, serenely to examine anew those
questions which for entire centuries stolid prejudice and narrow
dogmatism considered settled, and adjudicated in the High Court of
Humanity for all times to come. However signal the progress of our age
may be in the useful arts and in aesthetics, especially in upholstery,
in chemistry, in the government of large cities, and in the purity of
commerce, in pottery, pills, and poetry, and in the dignity of politics,
nothing, we may venture to say, will so distinctly and so broadly
characterize the period in which we happily live, when the future
historian shall sweep with his star-seeker over the past, as the
joyful fact, that we, above all others, have divested ourselves of
long-cherished errors, hugged by our forefathers as truths full of life
and vigor, and have, indeed, so to speak, founded a Novum Organon in
fact and reality, while the great Bacon proposed one in mind and theory.
To our enlightened age it was reserved to return to polygamy, after
nearly three thousand dragging years of dull adhesion of our race to
tiresome monogamy, leaping back by one bound over the whole European
Past into ancient and respectable Asia. _Ex Oriente lux; ex Oriente
gaudia seraglii!_ It is in our blessed epoch that atheism, by some, and
pantheism, by others, are boldly taught and vindicated, as once they
were by Greeks or Orientals, and with an earnestness and enthusiasm very
different from the sneer with which Encyclopaedists of Voltaire's time
attacked Christianity and Deism. To prove, however, the magnificent
many-sidedness of our noble times, it is we that have returned once more
to pictures of the Virgin Mary with winking and with weeping eyes, or
to her apparitions talking _patois_, as that of La Valette, and to a
hundred things i