their debentures from hand to hand, shall look
for a steady and certain payment of interest—
under guarantee as it were. The holders of new
Threes, shifting every day, yet know that the
stream of interest flows surely and securely at
the Bank of England. The holders of Mr.
Styles’s new Fives (land stock) must always feel
an uncertainty whether they will not have to
apply at that gentleman’s residence for their
annual interest; or whether it will be left waiting
for them at some undetermined region; or
whether it may not be forgotten altogether, even
with pains and penalties impending, analogous to
the protest of a bill. Again, it would be scarcely
reasonable to expect that Mr. Styles should
personally keep his eye on each debenture as it
changes owners, and have to trace out the last
holder on the day the interest falls due. This
difficulty is met in foreign countries by the
agency of the bank, a conspicuous and notorious
institution, which guarantees the interest at the
fixed date, whoever be the holders. It has dealt
directly with Mr. Styles, advancing him moneys,
and receiving in return his debentures. These
it endorses and sells again to buyers from the
public, guaranteeing, as has been stated, the
interest; receiving the interest from Mr. Styles
in the regular way, or enforcing it by process of
law. Such a bank, therefore, it would be
necessary to have in this country.

Another and more serious objection would be
its tendency to encourage a gradual and
excusable, yet not the less fatal, extravagance in
proprietors of estates. Not that vulgar lavishness
which consumes the idle and the thriftless,
but that irresistible temptation, either from
reason of temporary difficulty or real pressure,
which at times visits the prudent and industrious.
It must be a prodigious self-denial which, in the
face of a pressing want or pecuniary trial,
should prefer to do battle with a heap of
thousand-pound notes (or what is equivalent to
such) lying in one’s drawer waiting only to be
changed. So would the treasure melt away by
slow and insensible degrees. That this would
be one result, is undeniable; yet it may be
doubted whether a perverse moral tendency
however to be deplored, should have much
weight in a broad question of political economy
But it is only to one portion of the British
Islands that the swift operation of the Happy
Despatch has been applied. The broadlands of
England and Scotland are, for the most part
handsomely incumbered with mortgages, charges
and incumbrances of all sorts; quite forestalling
the possibility of fastening on any of these light
debenture sheets. To have an assured value
these latter must be first-comers, so as, in
matters of interest payment, to be first served. Any
amount, therefore, of such indentures fluttering
about the country, unless in the priority of this
valued and enviable position, would be of poor
estimation. Still, something might be done in
the way of a diluted principle. The old encumbered
hulls might be taken into dock to be
scraped clean of all mortgage molluscs and
crustacea adherent, and this bright new vellun
sheathing substituted. Or, if this is impossible,
there are surely plenty newly launched barks
in port, not by any means foul, and who have
never been out upon the great Atlantic of
incumbrances. To such favoured craft what
is to hinder this new sheathing being
applied. But, after all, a mere partial operation
of such a system would only depreciate the
value; and a want of precise uniformity in all
the debentures would lead to doubt and
uncertainty, which would lead to suspicion, and to
a fatal embodiment of that suspicion in a
pecuniary shape. It is to be feared that no wholesale
adoption of the principle can be thought of
in England without either an Incumbered
Estates Act by way of general purge, or else an
universal conversion of the load of mortgages
into debentures of corresponding value.

                   TURKEYS.

THAT etymology cannot always be depended
on, is a fact which the name of the estimable
fowl, the subject of my present discussion,
additionally illustrates. “A name,” says Buffon,
“is not always a proof, particularly a popular
name, applied by uneducated persons, nor even
a scientific one sometimes, for learned men are
not free from prejudice.” The French word
“Dinde” points directly to an Eastern origin,
and French lexicographers, with national
hardihiood, coolly call the bird in question “Poule
d’Inde,” as if there were no doubt about it;
while the more precise Germans, with a
precision which would do them honour, if it were
only accurate, say, “Kalekutische Hahn,” thus
fixing Calicut, on the western shore of the
Indian peninsula, as its birthplace. We
English, without going so far afield, content
ourselves with the wholesale adoption of the name
of a country which has no connexion whatever
with the plumed biped. Originally, the
Spaniards gave to the Turkey the name of “Pavon
de las Indias” (“Peacock of the West Indies”),
and Buffon agrees that it was then well applied,
on account of the manner in which it spreads its
tail; but their modern descendants, too
indolent to inquire into what concerns them more
nearly than any other people, quietly tell us
that it is “a domestic fowl, brought from
Turkey” (“Ave domestica traida de Turquia”).
It is true that we are indebted for all our
traditions to the East, but this tradition we cannot
accept; and Turkey, whether in Europe or in
Asia, has no more to do with the Turkey of the
farm-yard and the kitchen than it has with the
potato. The fact is, that the bird, like the
esculent, comes to us from the West. It is
indisputably the production of the New World,
and perhaps the most satisfactory production
that has ever reached us from that quarter of
the globe.

The time of the first appearance of the Turkey
in our hemisphere, is doubtful. Brillat Savarin,
and other French writers, attribute its introduction
to the Jesuits of Paraguay, and the above-
named learned gastronomer adduces in proof of