What has chiefly tended to take mind, in the eyes of learned and unlearned, out of the range of nature, is its apparently irregular and wayward character. How different the manifestations in different beings! how unstable in all!—at one time so calm, at another so wild and impulsive! It seemed impossible that anything so subtle and aberrant could be part of a system, the main features of which are regularity and precision. But the irregularity of mental phenomena is only in appearance. When we give up the individual, and take the mass, we find as much uniformity of result as in any other class of natural phenomena. The irregularity is exactly of the same kind as that of the weather. No man can say what may be the weather of to-morrow; but the quantity of rain which falls in any particular place in any five years, is precisely the same as the quantity which falls in any other five years at the same place. Thus, while it is absolutely impossible to predict of any one Frenchman that during next year he will commit a crime, it is quite certain that about one in every six hundred and fifty of the French people will do so, because in past years the proportion has generally been about that amount, the tendencies to crime in relation to the temptations being everywhere invariable over a sufficiently wide range of time. So also, the number of persons taken in charge by the police in London for being drunk and disorderly on the streets, is, week by week, a nearly uniform quantity, shewing that the inclination to drink to excess is always in the mass about the same, regard being had to the existing temptations or stimulations to this vice. Even mistakes and oversights are of regular recurrence, for it is found in the post-offices of large cities, that the number of letters put in without addresses is year by year the same. Statistics has made out an equally distinct regularity in a wide range, with regard to many other things concerning the mind, and the doctrine founded upon it has lately produced a scheme which may well strike the ignorant with surprise. It was proposed to establish in London a society for ensuring the integrity of clerks, secretaries, collectors, and all such functionaries as are usually obliged to find security for money passing through their hands in the course of business. A gentleman of the highest character as an actuary spoke of the plan in the following terms:—“If a thousand bankers’ clerks were to club together to indemnify their securities, by the payment of one pound a year each, and if each had given security for 500_l._, it is obvious that two in each year might become defaulters to that amount, four to half the amount, and so on, without rendering the guarantee fund insolvent. If it be tolerably well ascertained that the instances of dishonesty (yearly) among such persons amount to one in five hundred, this club would continue to exist, subject to being in debt in a bad year, to an amount