cisco, the traffic through these seas is likely to increase. In such a dangerous navigation we need not say what casualties are likely to occur; but woe betide the ship's company which is thrown into the hands of these savages! Last winter the ship Porcupine, of Liverpool, was passing through the Straits of Magellan on her way to California, when she grounded. Next morning she was surrounded by numerous canoes, full of natives, carrying lighted pine-branches, who endeavoured to set the ship on fire; and it was not till after a desperate conflict, in which two emigrants were killed and others severely wounded, that the assailants were repulsed, and the disabled vessel was floated off and worked back to the Falklands. And it is only five or six years ago when the captain and crew of the brig Avon were murdered by the same barbarians, and two English gentlemen whom they had inveigled ashore were carried off and put to death, and their bodies, it is believed, were devoured.* Similar casualties are too certain to recur; and even although the governments of England and America should send war-steamers to the station, they cannot be ubiquitous; and, on the coercive system, nothing short of an extirpation of the wretched natives can secure the castaway from the knife of

* The dangers of a detention on these coasts are vividly described in a rough but romantic book published in America during the present year: "The Captive in Patagonia; or Life among the Giants. By Benjamin Franklin Bourne." Boston: Gould and Lincoln.

the cannibal. worthy of a Christian country, and how much cheaper to reclaim and civilise them! This the missionary, with God's blessing, alone can accomplish; but the same agency which, all through the Southern Archipelago, has secured for the merchant and whaler depots of provisions and refitting stations, and the assistance of clever mechanics, where formerly the war-club was his only welcome,-this agency may soon stud with gardens and farms and industrious villages these inhospitable shores. The church-going bell may awaken these silent forests; and, round its cheerful hearth and kind teachers, the Sunday-school may assemble the now joyless children of Navarin Island. The mariner may run his battered ship into Lennox Harbour, and leave her to the care of Fuegian caulkers and carpenters; and after rambling through the streets of a thriving seaport town, he may turn aside to read the papers in the Gardiner Institution, or may step in to the week-evening service in the Richard Williams Chapel. When that day arrives, a grateful population will survey Cook's River and Pioneer Cove, if not with emotions as sacred as those with which our Old-World pilgrims visit St Paul's Bay in Malta, and the Grotto in Patmos, at least with feelings as tender as the Christian Briton has often confessed on the rocks of Lindisfarn, and among the ruins of Iona.

How much better-how much more