The use of Morse’s telegraph is by no means confined to the small clique who possess or who understand electrical batteries.  It is not only the torpedo or the Gymnotus electricus that can send us messages from the ocean.  Whales in the sea can telegraph as well as senators on land, if they will only note the difference between long spoutings and short ones.  And they can listen, too.  If they will only note the difference between long and short, the eel of Ocean’s bottom may feel on his slippery skin the smooth messages of our Presidents, and the catfish, in his darkness, look fearless on the secrets of a Queen.  Any beast, bird, fish, or insect, which can discriminate between long and short, may use the telegraphic alphabet, if he have sense enough.  Any creature, which can hear, smell, taste, feel, or see, may take note of its signals, if he can understand them.  A tired listener at church, by properly varying his long yawns and his short ones, may express his opinion of the sermon to the opposite gallery before the sermon is done.  A dumb tobacconist may trade with his customers in an alphabet of short-sixes and long-nines.  A beleaguered Sebastopol may explain its wants to the relieving army beyond the line of the Chernaya, by the lispings of its short Paixhans and its long twenty-fours.

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LITERARY NOTICES.

Etudes sur Pascal.  Par M. VICTOR COUSIN.  Cinqieme Edition, revue et augmentee.  Paris:  1857. pp. 566. 8vo.

We render hearty thanks to M. Cousin for this new edition of a favorite work.  No library which contains Pascal’s “Provinciales” and “Pensees” should be without it.

“Of all the monuments of the French language,” says M. Cousin, in the Avant-propos to this new edition, “none is more celebrated than the work ‘Les Pensees,’ and French literature possesses no artist more consummate than Pascal.  Do not expect to find in this young geometrician, so soon consumed by disease and passion, the breadth, surface, and infinite variety of Bossuet, who, supported by vast and uninterrupted study, rose and rose until he gained the loftiest reaches of intellect and art, and commanded at pleasure every tone and every style.  Pascal did not fulfil all his destiny.  Besides the mathematics and natural philosophy he knew scarcely more than a little theology, and he barely passed through good society.  It is true, Pascal passed away from earth quickly; but during his short life he discerned glimpses of the beau ideal, he attached himself to it with all his heart and soul and strength, and he never allowed anything to leave his hands unless it bore its lively impress.  So great was his passion for perfection, that unchallenged tradition tells us he wrote the seventeenth ‘Provinciale’ thirteen times over.  ‘Les Pensees’ are merely fragments of the great work on which he consumed the last years of his life; but these fragments sometimes present so finished a beauty, that we do not know which most to admire, the grandeur and vigor of the sentiments and ideas, or the delicacy and depth of the art.”