AUDUBON AND WASHINGTON IRVING—THE PLAGUE OF RAILROADS.—The voyager up the Hudson will involuntarily anathematize the invention of the rail, when he sees how much of the most romantic beauty has been defaced or destroyed by that tyranny which, disregarding all private desire and justice, has filled up bays, and cut off promontories, and leveled heights, to make way for the intrusive and noisy car. But the effects of these so-called "improvements," upon the romantic in nature will be forgotten if he considers the injury and wrong they cause to persons, and particularly to those whose genius has contributed more to human happiness than all the inventions in oeconomical art.
The Nestor of our naturalists, and in his field, the greatest as well as the oldest of our artists, AUDUBON, with the comparatively slight gains of a long life of devotion to science, and of triumphs which had made him world-renowned, purchased on the banks of the river, not far from the city, a little estate which it was the joy as well as the care of his closing years to adorn with everything that a taste so peculiarly and variously schooled could suggest. He had made it a pleasing gate-way to the unknown world, with beautiful walks leading down to the river whose depth and calmness and solemn grandeur symboled the waves through which he should pass to the reward of a life of such toil and enviable glory. He had promise of an evening worthy of his meridian—when the surveyors and engineers, with their charter-privileges, invaded his retreat, built a road through his garden, destroyed forever his repose, and—the melancholy truth is known—made of his mind a ruin.
WASHINGTON IRVING—now sixty-seven years of age—had found a resting-place at Wolfert's Roost, close by the scenes which lie in the immortal beauty that radiates from his pages, and when he thought that in this Tusculum he was safe from all annoying, free to enjoy the quietness and ease he had earned from the world, the same vandals laid the track through his grounds, not only destroying all their beauty and attraction, but leaving fens from which these summer heats distilled contagion. He has therefore been ill for some weeks, and as he had never a strong constitution, and has preserved his equable but not vigorous health only by the most constant carefulness, his physicians and friends begin to be alarmed for the result. Heaven avert the end they so fearfully anticipate. He cannot go alone: The honest Knickerbocker, the gentle Crayon, and the faithful brother Agapida, with Washington Irving will forever leave the world, which cannot yet resign itself to the loss of either.
Mr. SEBA SMITH, so well known as the author of the "Letters of Major Jack Downing," and to a different sort of readers for his more serious contributions to our literature, has just completed the printing of an original and very remarkable work, upon which he has been engaged about two years, entitled "New Elements of Geometry," and it will soon be published in this city by Putnam, and in London by Bentley. It will probably produce a sensation in the world of science. Its design is the reconstruction of the entire methods of Geometry. All geometers, from the dawn of the science, have built their systems upon these definitions: A line is length without breadth, and A surface is length and breadth, without thickness. Mr. Smith asserts that these definitions are false, and sustains his position by numerous demonstrations in the pure Euclidean style. He declares that every mathematical line has a definite breadth, which is as measurable as its length, and that every mathematical surface has a thickness, as measurable as the contents of any solid. His demonstrations, on diagrams, seem to be eminently clear, simple, and conclusive. The effects of this discovery and these demonstrations are, to simplify very much the whole subject of Geometry and mathematics, and to clear it of many obscurities and difficulties. All geometers heretofore have claimed that there are three kinds of quantity in Geometry, different in their natures, and requiring units of different natures to measure them. Mr. Smith shows that there is but one kind of quantity in Geometry, and but one kind of unit; and that lines, surfaces, and solids are always measured by the same identical unit.
Besides the leading features of the work which we have thus briefly described, it contains many new and beautiful demonstrations of general principles in Geometry, to which the author was lead by his new methods of investigation. Among these we may mention one, viz., "The square of the hypothenuse of a right-angled triangle equals four times the area of the triangle, plus the square of the difference of the other two sides." This principle has been known to mathematicians by means of arithmetic and algebra, but has never before, we believe, been reduced to a geometrical demonstration. The demonstration of this principle by Mr. Smith is one of the clearest, simplest, and most beautiful in Geometry. The work is divided into three parts, I. The Philosophy of Geometry, II. Demonstrations in Geometry, and III. Harmonies of Geometry. The demonstrative character of it is occasionally enlivened by philosophical and historical observations, which will add much to its interest with the general reader. We have too little skill in studies of this sort to be altogether confident in our opinion, but certainly it strikes us from an examination of the larger and more important portion of Mr. Smith's essay, that it is an admirable specimen of statement and demonstration, and that it must secure to its author immediately a very high rank in mathematical science. We shall await with much interest the judgments of the professors. It makes a handsome octavo of some 200 pages.
M. FLANDIN, an eminent dilettante and designer attached to the French embassy in Persia, has published in the last number of the Revue des Deux Mondes an interesting memoir of the ruins of Persepolis, under the title of "An Archaiological Journey in Persia." On his route to the ruins he witnessed melancholy evidence, in the condition of the surface and population, of the improvidence and noxiousness of Oriental despotism. He tells us that the remains of the magnificent palace of Darius are dispersed over an immense plateau, which looks down on the plain of Merdacht. "Assuredly, they are not much, compared with what they must have been in the time of the last Prince who sheltered himself under the royal roof. Nevertheless, what is now found of them still excites astonishment, and inspires a sentiment of religious admiration for a civilization that could create monuments so stupendous; impress on them a character of so much grandeur; and give them a solidity which has prereserved the most important parts until our days, through twenty-two centuries, and all the revolutions by which Persia has been devastated. The pillars are covered with European names deeply cut in the stone. English are far the most numerous. Very few, however, are of celebrated travelers. We observed, with satisfaction, those of Sir John Malcolm and Mr. Morier, both of whom have so successfully treated Persian subjects."
EMILE GIRARDIN states in his journal that he paid for the eleven volumes of Chateaubriand's Posthumous Memoirs as they appeared, piecemeal, in his feuilleton, the sum of ninety-seven thousand one hundred and eight francs. They occupied a hundred and ninety-two feuilletons, and cost him thus more than a franc a line. Alfred de Broglie has made these memoirs the test of a paper entitled "Memoirs de Chateaubriand, a Moral and Political Study," in the Revue des Deux Mondes. It is a severe analysis of the book and the man. He concludes that Chateaubriand was one of the most vainglorious, selfish and malignant of his tribe. He, indeed, betrayed himself broadly, but surviving writers, who knew intimately his private life—such as St. Beuve—have disclosed more of his habitual libertinism. The Radical journals, and some of the Legitimists, turn to account the portraits left in these memoirs of Louis Philippe, Thiers, Guizot, and other statesmen of the Orleans monarchy. They are effusions of personal and political spite. Chateaubriand hated the whole Orleans dynasty, and has not spared the elder Bourbons.