I take pleasure in persuading myself, that scientific subjects may be treated of in language at once dignified, grave, and animated, and that those who are restricted within the circumscribed limits of ordinary life, and have long remained strangers to an intimate communion with nature, may thus have opened to them one of the richest sources of enjoyment of which the human mind is capable. HUMBOLDT. NATURAL SCIENCE. ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE. THE aim of science is the knowledge of the laws of Nature, whereby we acquire a dominion over Nature, and are thereby able so to apply her powers as to advance the well-being of society and exalt the condition of mankind. God has given to man a capacity to discover and comprehend the laws by which the universe is governed; and man is impelled by a healthy and natural impulse to exercise the faculties by which that knowledge can be acquired. Agreeably with the relations which have been instituted between our finite faculties and the phenomena that affect them, we arrive at demonstrations and convictions which are the most certain that our present state of being can have or act upon. In regard to the period during which the globe allotted to man has revolved in its orbit, present evidence strains the mind to grasp such sum of past time with an effort like that by which it tries to realise the space dividing that orbit from the fixed stars and remoter nebula.* Yet, during all those eras that have passed since the Cambrian rocks were deposited which bear the impressed record of creative power, as it was then manifested, we know, through the interpreters of these "writings on stone," that the earth was vivified by the sun's light and heat, was fertilised by refreshing showers, and washed by tidal waves. No stagnation has been permitted to air or ocean. The vast body of waters not only moved, as a whole, in orderly * Nebula, glittering white clouds, considered to be a system of stars. oscillations, regulated, as now, by sun and moon, but were rippled and agitated by winds and storms. The atmosphere was healthily influenced by its horizontal currents, and by ever-varying clouds and vapors, rising, condensing, dissolving, and falling in endless vertical circulation. With these conditions of life, we know that life itself has been enjoyed throughout the same countless thousands of years; and that with life, from the beginning, there has been death. Geology demonstrates that the creative force has not deserted this earth during any of her epochs of time; and that in respect to no one class of animals has the manifestation of that force been limited to one epoch. Not a fish that now lives but has come into being during a comparatively recent period; the existing species were preceded by other species, and these again by others still more different from the present. No existing genus of fishes can be traced beyond a moiety of known creative time. So the creation of every class of animals, reptiles, birds, or beasts, has been successive and continuous, from the earliest times at which we have evidence of their existence; creation ever compensating for extinction. The science of chemistry, which gives us an insight into the hidden operations of Nature's laboratory, is daily advancing; and the present tendency of higher generalisations seems to be towards a reduction of the number of those bodies which are called "elementary;" it begins to be almost more than suspected that certain groups of socalled chemical elements are but modified forms of one another. Already natural processes can be more economically replaced by artificial ones in the formation of a few organic compounds, the "valerianic acid," for example. It is impossible to foresee to what extent chemistry may not ultimately, in the production of things needful, supersede the present vital agencies of nature "by laying under contribution the accumulated forces of past ages, which |