Foudai church. During its progress, the melancholy toll of the village bell mingled with the chanting of the school-children; the burying-ground was surrounded by females of the Roman Catholic church, habited in mourning, and kneeling in silent prayer. The body was carried into the church, where a paper was read, which had been prepared by Oberlin in anticipation of the occasion, in which he gave an outline of his career, committed his children to the protection of his people, and concluded with a solemn exhortation to remember his admonitions. After other impressive exercises, the body was committed to the earth.

Respecting the present state of Steinthal we have no account, further than that a number of benevolent individuals in England and the continent have undertaken to raise a charitable fund to bear the name of Oberlin, and which shall be devoted to the support of the various seminaries he established.

The compiler of the interesting and well-written biography, from which we have gleaned this article, is a female, who, by withholding her name, modestly declines the honor that is due to her, of having introduced to the world a character of rare lustre in its annals. The philanthropy and piety are above suspicion, which animated a young man of ambition, possessed of talents which would have gained him a respectable eminence in the pursuits of literature, to consign himself to a life of labor in an obscure corner of the world, among a race whose manners and minds were destitute of refinement. It was in such a situation, unknown abroad, and with no resource but in himself, that he persevered for years in the ungracious contest against native prejudices. His persistence, however, was rewarded; and insignificant as the peaceful region which sprung up under his reforming energies may be deemed by history, the example is colossal, and abounds in lessons useful to the world.

ART. IX.-Geology.

Geological Text Book. By AмoS EATON, A. M. Albany.

1830.

Truth has had to contend, in all ages, rance. Nor is the conflict yet over. impotently opposing nature and reason. for the result; the light of knowledge

with bigotry and ignoA few are still found But we have no fears is beaming upon the

civilized world, almost as steadily as the light of day; and the time appears not to be far distant, when ignorance will lose its character of boldness, and timidly seek the obscurity, where no one will take the trouble to notice it. A new physical deluge, to be sure, might bring our affairs into a very small compass again, but we feel exceedingly comforted at no longer apprehending a deluge of intellectual darkness. We look back with horror upon those times, when hypocrisy, and.cant, and mystery, and quackery, and all the ministering attributes of ignorance, were so successfully engaged in weaving a shroud for the human mind. We turn from the picture of those times with disgust, and rejoice in the present enjoyment of our own fair day of existence, when justice and reason are precious in the eyes of men, and bigotry and ignorance are only found lurking in corners.

It is to the study of the great book of nature, that we owe most of those triumphs which reason has achieved. Nothing has more clearly marked the progress of the human mind, than the extraordinary advances which have been made, and which are now in more vigorous progress than ever, in that noble study, the revelation of God to man, by his works. What a bound the human mind has made since the days of Galileo, and what respect and veneration do we owe to his memory! Persecuted and oppressed as a heretic, because the laws of natural bodies, as he taught them, appeared, to the ignorant eyes of his contemporaries, inconsistent with the phenomena of those bodies, as described in the Record consecrated to our moral government; he is nevertheless gratefully honored in our memories, whilst his oppressors are thought of but to be abhorred. Galileo may be said to have laid the corner-stone of natural science, upon which succeeding generations, freed from the fantastical prejudices of an age of darkness, have almost finished a temple consecrated to the harmonies of nature. We were never more forcibly struck with the great distance at which those benighted times have been left, than when on a visit to a friend at the University of Oxford, in England, in 1827. It was upon the occasion of Dr. Buckland's annual geological lecture on horseback. This very novel mode of explaining the great geological features of a country being peculiar to that eminent man, we shall, we hope, amuse our readers, by giving a brief account of it.

About the hour of noon, near a hundred noblemen and gen

tlemen on horseback left the city with the Professor, and following the London road at a very animating pace, halted at some gravel pits in the valley. Here Dr. Buckland, dismounting, and gaining a small eminence, addressed the assembly of equestrians in his agreeable, colloquial manner, on the causes which had accumulated the beds of gravel and oyster shells, on which they were standing; he then went rapidly, but very eloquently, into the consideration of great bodies of water in motion, of the abrasion and ruin of the strata, the accompanying denudation of vallies, and the deposit of the detritus; illustrating the subject from time to time, by pointing to the inequalities of the surrounding country, showing where the gorges had been left on the retreat of the waters, and how the contemporaneous valleys were bounded by the once continuous strata. Having touched upon every prominent feature of the country around, the Professor remounted his horse, and proceeded at a hand gallop over the plain for the Shotover hills, the cavaliers pressing around him, bridle in hand, that no observation which fell from him might be lost. At the foot of the hills he again stopped at a moist, springy place, and took occasion-in adverting to the atmospheric water received by the porous, superficial soil, being here resisted in its descent, and thrown out by a bed of clay-to explain the origin and nature of springs of a particular character. After visiting the pits of Kimmeridge clay, famous for the Deltoid oyster, this equestrian lecture was most worthily concluded by a very eloquent account of the secondary beds in the vicinity of Oxford, and the Saurian and other organic remains found in them; the whole delivered by the Reverend Professor on horseback, receiving the most profound and grateful attention from every person present. At the conclusion, he uncovered his head, and bowing to his auditors, they dispersed, leaving him with his private friends, who, after some further investigations, returned slowly to the city to finish the day at his hospitable board. It was in the course of that evening, that a venerable cleryman, of whose octogenarian life, more than sixty years had been passed in immediate connexion with the University, in answer to a remark we made, that natural science appeared to be cherished at Oxford as much as at the sister University, observed;

'The character of this University has been misrepresented; it has at all times given, and yet continues to give, great men to the

nation. Had Oxford never existed, English history would not have been what it now is, and the English character would, perhaps, have been materially different. This, to those who value the moral power of this country, is a sufficient answer to the harsh assertions which have been made, in relation to its supposed monastic habits, by men who perhaps had an interest in debasing the English character to their own conceptions of the dignity of man. To be sure, the lectures you have heard from my nephew this day, on the modern science of geology, are at so great a distance from the ancient scholastic manners of the University, that they have apparently something revolutionary in their character; and it is true, that this science is hardly out of its cradle, and here at Oxford, has been exclusively rocked and nursed by Dr. Buckland, who seems to have been brought forward himself, at the right point of time, by nature and education. Yet Oxford has never, at the most distant periods, been insensible to the progress of intellectual improvement, although she has been slow to convince herself that every innovation was an improvement. When Blackstone prepared to deliver his Law Lectures, he too was considered an innovator, and was made to feel in various ways the influence of established opinions. In an introductory lecture of his, which unfortunately has not been published, he turned the tables very successfully upon his opponents by the following sally; "In those scholastic days, when the inquisitive and original mind of Bacon was directed to the investigation of nature's laws, the theological animus conspired against him, and he was accused of holding communion with evil spirits. Upon a particular occasion, when he intended to exhibit some curious experiments to a few select friends, the secret having got out, the whole town, and all the colleges of this University were in an uproar. Priests, and fellows, and students, were seen flying about in every direction, with their gowns streaming behind them, screaming out, "No conjuror, no conjuror." The cry of "No conjuror" resounded from hall to hall, from cell to cell. At a later day, Galileo was condemned by men, whose names are now only remembered as parts of the rubbish upon which the pedestal of his fame is raised. And in our own times, there are men who seek to raise the cry of "No conjuror" against me. I tell you, you will soon find out, that these good people are at least no conjurors themselves."

The contrast, to be sure, is very striking, between Friar Bacon, secretly exhibiting his curious experiments in physics to an initiated few, in his cell, and Dr. Buckland teaching on horseback, aperto campo, the noblest of all subjects, the order and design of creation.

In applying terms of such unqualified praise, to a science comparatively so little known as Geology yet is, we desire to offer, in justification, some observations for the information of those, who have not yet turned their attention towards it. We would not detract, if we were disposed to do so, from the value of the astronomical truths which were taught by Galileo; he gave the greatest blow to the prejudices of men, and macadamized the road of right reason for posterity. It was his example, which led Newton to investigate the motions of the planets and other heavenly bodies, and to measure their revolutions around their common centre. Newton thus became the immortal discoverer of the law of gravity; to the influence of which, all the known circumstances connected with celestial dynamics, have since been successfully referred. It is to astronomical science, that the human mind owes the consideration of the sublimest propositions of the planetary motions; the most profound refinements of mathematical analysis; and the most comprehensive conclusions in regard to the government of the universe, and the power and wisdom of its Creator. But while the beautiful harmony of these movements creates an intensity of feeling in us, beyond the power of language to express; while we are satisfied that the very irregularities and eccentricities of the system—which made even the great mind of Newton doubt its permanency-are periodically compensated, and thus know, what reason would teach us to believe, that the work of an Almighty hand cannot contain within itself the principles of destruction, but that the fiat which is to precede its dissolution, must spring from that great Source whence so much order first proceeded; we nevertheless rise from our all-absorbing contemplations unsatisfied; feeling the subject to be super-human, lost in the consideration of space without dimensions, of motions without beginning or end. Such is the result of the labors of the philosophical geometer; the elevation and purification of his mind, in these lofty and aspiring pursuits, may, indeed, be thought to prepare him for a more perfect state of existence, but here, however his spirit may be cheered by views of illimitable intelligence and power, he is lost, as it were, in the extent of his subject.

Without pretending to compare what is only a part, with the whole, we must nevertheless say, that Geology is to us a more attractive study than Astronomy. The phenomena are more within the reach of personal investigation,