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AUSTRALIAN PATRIOTISM.

A young Australian, on being once asked his opinion of a splendid shop on Ludgate-hill, replied, in a disappointed tone, “It is not equal to Big Cooper’s,” (a store-shop in Sidney,) while Mrs. Rickards’ Fashionable Repository is believed to be unrivalled, even in Bond-street.  Some of them also contrive to find out that the English cows give less milk and butter than the Australian, and the choicest Newmarket racers possess less beauty and swiftness than Junius, Modus, Currency Lass, and others of Australian turf pedigree; nay, even a young girl, when asked how she would like to go to England, replied with great naivete, “I should be afraid to go, from the number of thieves there,” doubtless conceiving England to be a downright hive of such, that threw off its annual swarms to people the wilds of this colony.  Nay, the very miserable looking trees that cast their annual coats of bark, and present to the eye of a raw European the appearance of being actually dead, I have heard praised as objects of incomparable beauty! and I myself, so powerful is habit, begin to look upon them pleasurably.  Our ideas of beauty are, in truth, less referrable to a natural than an artificial standard, varying in every country according to what the eye has been habituated to, and fashion prescribes.—­Cunningham’s Two Years in New South Wales.

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THE LECTURER.

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MENTAL DERANGEMENT.

The term melancholia is applied to insanity, when attended with depression of spirits, arising commonly from some supposed impending evil; but sometimes it takes place without any such error of judgment, and is altogether unaccountable.  As far as I have seen, this depression of spirits is in no wise essentially connected with, far less dependent upon, bodily weakness, as its cause.  On the contrary, you will often find such patients to be of full habit, and complaining of throbbing headach, with flushing of the face, a full and strong pulse, though sometimes the pulse is preternaturally slow; the tongue is often white and dry, as in inflammation in general.  These symptoms, considered in themselves, would call for antiphlogistic measures, such as bleeding and purging; and these are not at all the less necessary because the patient is in a low and desponding state of mind.  In short, I know of no difference in the medical treatment of mania and melancholia, merely as such; you must look to the state of vascular action, both local and general, in order to lay down a proper plan of cure.