Whoever takes the trouble to read a paper in a late _Edinburgh Review_ on the _Nervous System_, will doubtless find that much of our predilection for hanging and drowning is to be attributed to this "insular situation." Every man and woman of us is indeed a self _pluviometer_, or rain-gauge; or, in plain terms, our nerves are like so many musical strings, affected by every change of the atmosphere, which, if screwed up too tight, are apt to snap off, and become useless; or, if you please, we are like so many barometers, and our animal spirits like their quicksilver; so "servile" are we to all the "skyey influences." Take, for example, the same man at three different periods of the year: on a fine morning in January, his nerves are braced to their best pitch, and, in his own words, he is fit for any thing; see him panting for cooling streams in a burning July day, when though an Englishman, he is "too hot to eat;" see him on a wet, muggy ninth of November, when the finery of the city coach and the new liveries appear tarnished, and common councilmen tramp through the mud and rain in their robes of little authority--even with the glorious prospect of the Guildhall tables, the glitter of gas and civic beauty, and the six pounds of turtle, and iron knives and forks before him--still he is a miserable creature, he drinks to desperation, and is carried home at least three hours sooner than he would be on a fine frosty night. Then, instead of fifteen pounds to the square inch, atmospheric pressure is increased to five-and-forty, not calculating the _simoom_ of the following morning, when he is as dry as the desert of Sahara, and eyes the pumps and soda-water fountains with as much _gout_ as the Israelites did the water from Mount Horeb.