New Publications
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NEW PUBLICATIONS.
BLACKWOOD1 for June has been received from the American publishers, Leonard Scott &Co.2 This is a more than usually solid number and is full of elaborate articles, philosophical and critical. There are two Indian articles—one entitled the "Poorbeah Mutiny" and the other "The First Bengal European Fusileers after the Fall of Delhi." "The Cost of Whig Government" and "The Defeat of the Factions," are the two political articles. The article on "Blood" is full of instruction. From it we extract a paragraph or two:
Arterial blood is everywhere the same: it is one stream perpetually flowing off into smaller streams, but always the same fluid in its minutest rills as in its larger currents. Not so venous blood. That is a confluence of many currents; each one brings with it something from the soil in which it arises; the streams issuing out of the muscles bring substances unlike those issuing out of the nervous centres; the blood which hurries out of the intestine contains substance unlike those which hurry out of the liver. The waste of all the organs has to be carried away by the vessels of the organs. Wondrously does the complex machine work its many purposes: the roaring loom of Life is never for a moment still, weaving and weaving.
Difficult it is for us to realise to ourselves the fact of this incessant torrent of confluent streams coursing through every part of our bodies, carrying fresh fuel to feed the mighty flame of life, and removing all the ashes which the flame has left. Sudden agitation, setting the heart into more impetuous movement, may make us aware that it is throbbing ceaselessly; or we may feel it beating when the hand is accidentally resting on it during the calm hours of repose; but even then, when the fact of the heart's beating obtrudes itself to consciousness, we do not mentally pursue the current as it quits the heart to distribute itself even to the remotest part of the body, and thence to return once more—we do not follow its devious paths, and think of all the mysterious actions which attend its course. If for a moment we could with the bodily eye see into the frame of man, as with the microscope we see into the transparent frames of some simpler animals, what a spectacle would be unveiled! Through one complex system of vessels we should see a leaping torrent of blood, carried into the depths, and over the services of all the organs, at the rapid rate of one foot in every second, and carried from the depths and services through another system of vessels, back again to the heart: yet in spite of the countless channels and the crowded complexity of the tissue, nowhere any failure. Such a spectacle as this is unveiled to the mental eye alone, and we cannot contemplate it, even in thought, without a thrill.
Bulwer's3 Novel "What will he do with it" is continued and the number is in all respects a good one.
Notes:
1. Blackwood's Magazine, or Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, was a monthly magazine created by William Blackwood in 1817. Though it was published in Scotland it quickly attracted a wide readership in Great Britain and the U.S., especially for its fiction offerings. For more information, see David Finkelstein, The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Age? (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002). [back]
2. Leonard Scott & Co. was a New York publishing company created by Leonard Scott (1810–1895) that focused on reprinting British magazines. [back]
3. Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873), was an English writer and politician. His novel The Caxtons: A Family Picture (1849) was a breakout hit at the time. Whitman once accused Lytton of plagiarizing a book titled Zicci, stating it was the exact same as the novel Zanoni. Both novels, however, were written by Lytton. Whitman described the controversy in a number of Aurora editorials. See "The Great Bamboozle!—A Plot Discovered!" (March 28, 1842), and "More Humbug" (April 4, 1842). [back]