derived from a comparison of the telescope and microscope:"The one led me to see a system in every star; the other leads me to see a world in every atom. The one taught me that this mighty globe, with the whole burden of its people and of its countries, is but a grain of sand on the high field of immensity.* The other teaches me, that every grain of sand may harbor within it the tribes and the families of a busy population. The one told me of the insignificance of the world I tread upon. The other redeems it from all insignificance; for it tells me that

“In the leaves of every forest, in the flowers of every garden, in the waters of every rivulet, there are worlds teeming with life, and numberless as are the glories of the firmament."-Rev. Dr. Chalmers.

Nothing more perfectly demonstrates the power of Nature to effect her vast designs through apparently feeble and insufficient agents, than the coral formation. It requires, indeed, ocular proof of the labors of the madrepores, to credit what stupendous submarine reefs and islands, many miles in compass, are indebted for at least a great part of their structure to the secretory economy of these minute artificers.

The coral insects are abundant in the Mediterranean, where corallines of beautiful forms and colors are produced; but it is in the Pacific Ocean and its branches that these

*Sir John Herschel, in an Essay on the Power of the Telescope to penetrate into space," a quality distinct from the magnifying power, informs us that there are stars so infinitely remote as to be situated at the distance of twelve millions of millions of millions of miles from our earth; so that light, which travels with a velocity of twelve millions of miles in a minute, would require two millions of years for its transit from those distant orbs to our own; while the astronomer who should record the aspect or mutations of such a star, would be relating, not its history at the present day, but that which took place two millions of years gone by. And when we reflect that if it were possible for us to attain to those distant spheres, we should look, not on the limits, the blank wall of Creation, but only into fresh fields of Creation, Power, and Wisdom, we feel that our earth and all that it inherits is a mere speck in space, an atom amid the vast Universe.-(See Appendix.)

tiny workmen are effecting those mighty changes, which far exceed the most remarkable labors of man.

"Millions of millions thus from age to age,
With simplest skill, and toil unweariable,
No moment and no movement unimproved,
Laid line on line, on terrace terrace spread,

To swell the heightening, brightening gradual mound,
By marvellous structure climbing towards the day.
Each wrought alone, yet altogether wrought,
Unconscious, not unworthy, instruments,

By which a hand invisible was rearing
A new creation in the secret deep.

Omnipotence wrought in them, with them, by them;
Hence what Omnipotence alone could do
Worms did. I saw the living pile ascend,
The mausoleum of its architects,

Still dying upwards as their labors closed:
Slime the material, but the slime was turn'd
To adamant, by their petrific touch;

Frail were their frames, ephemeral their lives,
Their masonry imperishable. All

Life's needful functions, food, exertion, rest,

By nice economy of Providence

Were overruled to carry on the process
Which out of water brought forth solid rock.
Atom by atom thus the burthen grew,
Even like an infant in the womb, till Time
Deliver'd ocean of that monstrous birth-
A coral island stretching east and west.”

That those infinitesimal forms of existence, whose presence in our lakes, rivers, and streams, can only be made manifest by the aid of the microscope, should be detected in a fossil state, and that their aggregated skeletons should be found to constitute the chains of hills, and the subsoil of extensive districts, and that the most stupendous monuments erected by man, should be composed of rocks resulting from the mineralized remains of animalcules, invisible to the unassisted eye, are among the most marvellous of wonders.*

*If we apply our vision to the microscope, we behold in every leaf and blade of grass, and every drop of water in which these substances have

Every walk we take offers subjects for profound consideration-every pebble that attracts our notice, matter for serious reflection; and contemplating the innumerable proofs afforded us of the incessant dissolution and renovation which are taking place around us, we feel the force and beauty of the exclamation of the poet,

My heart is awed within me, when I think
Of the great miracle which still goes on

become decomposed, a world of life and being, unknown, unseen by the feeble human eye. We have only to cut a little hay into small pieces with a pair of scissors, put the pieces into a saucer full of water, and let them stand for a week, when a film will appear on the surface, which we have but to take off with a spoon, put it under the microscope, and we have then before us in the mere drop of water a world of animated beings of high order of organization, possessing heads, eyes, with systems nervous, circulatory, respiratory, and digestive, yet the creatures themselves so infinitely minute as to be perfectly invisible to the most acute and perfect sight. The animalculæ form, in fact, one of the most important realms in the vast empire of Nature, and so vast are their numbers, their species and the diversified phenomena of their existence, that, as with the vast and unnumbered orbs above us, the mind is lost in the immensity of the contemplation; we find that the infinitely minute, like the infinitely magnificent, transcends our powers of observation, and we are left to admire, to wonder, and adore!

CHAPTER II.*

"Let the moon

Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain winds be free
To blow against thee; and in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be a dwelling place

For all sweet sounds and harmonies, oh! then

If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief

Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts

Of tender joy wilt thou remember me
And these my benedictions!"

1

WORDSWORTH.

In walking over the surface of a country, we witness its undulations, its mountains, and its rivers, and are apt to conclude that hill and valley, river and lake, may have existed in nearly the same condition since time began its ceaseless course. But when we come to examine the structure of the mountain, the causes of undulation, the alterations which have taken place in the water courses, nay, even in the general configuration of the globe itself, or of any particular region of it, we naturally exclaim, "the hills themselves are the daughters of time, the waves of the present ocean played in past ages on other shores, and the rivers which supply it are derived from surfaces, which in ancient days were below the level of the deep-all that is now land, is but the debrist of continents and islands now unknown; the wreck of a former world—the spoils and the sport of time."

Effects have been produced, which, if attributed to the

*See chapter v., p. 45.

†The waste of other rocks.

ordinary agencies of Nature, require the imagination to stretch its visual glance through the vista of a past eternity, or at least through a lapse of ages, as inconceivable in duration, as the distances of the spheres are in the field of space.

"Were we to assert," says the Rev. Dr. Buckland, "that the present continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, were once wholly immersed under the waters of the ocean, and that after rising at different spots in low newborn islands,* they gradually acquired their present configuration; nay, that the whole materials of which both the present continents and their islands are composed, have resulted from the denudation of continents and islands which have been worn away, or finally sunk under the all

One circumstance may well surprise us, and that is, to find in the Bible mountains distingushed in two classes, very nearly in the manner as they are distinguished by science into primitive and secondary. Thus in the 104th Psalm, a composition of incomparable poetical beauty, the prophet gives us an idea of the formation of the earth; he represents it to us as still covered with the waters of the deep as with a garment. The waters stood above all the mountains, but many of these eminences became elevated, and rose above their level; the waters then retired and fled. New mountains then appeared, and valleys, and plains; the lowest parts of the globe were formed at their feet. Two principal epochs, then, must have been in the mind of the prophet, from the time of the rising up of the heights which appear on all parts of the globe; these two epochs correspond to the formation of primitive and secondary mountains.

Reference is even made to the force by which they have been elevated: it is represented as proportionate to the elevation to which their eminences have been raised, being most powerful when employed in elevating the mountains properly so called, and weaker when its efforts were limited to the raising of the hills above the valleys. In its figurative style, it compares the elevation of the former to the skipping of rams, and that of the latter to the leaping of lambs. Newton esteemed the Bible "the most authentic of all histories;" Hale said, "none was like unto it for excellent wisdom, learning, and use;" Boyle considered it "a matchless volume, impossible to be too much studied or too highly esteemed;" and Locke pronounced it as "consisting of Truth without any mixture of Error for its matter."