The human frame, up to the period of five years, grows so rapidly that it has attainedn early as great a height as it does in sixteen years afterward. With man, as with all other objects, time never assumes the attitude of repose. His life resembles a ship that never anchors. For whether he eats, drinks, walks, speaks, slumbers, or meditates, time with him is ever on the wing. And as those objects are the most sublime which are only partially visible to the eye, time is one of the most mysterious subjects on which the mind can meditate; since, constituting what has been called "a movable image of immovable eternity," the solitude of interminable space seems the only mansion for its residence. Still time is only an imaginary quality; to two persons differently situated, it has the wings of an eagle or the feet of a snail. To a man in expectancy, a day appears a week, a month a year. To one in possession, the sun seems no sooner risen than it goes down, and summer has scarcely arrived before autumn seems ready to appear. Infants count by minutes, children by days, men by years, comets by revolutions of ages, Nature by revolutions of systems. The Eternal exists in a perpetual present. Who shall presume to calculate the respective ages of the fixed stars? No one! Yet when it may be proved by the velocity of light, that when we look at Sirius, the rays which enter the eye cannot have been less than six years and four months and a half coming from that star to the observer, it follows that when we see an object of the calculated distance at which some of the nebulæ may be perceived, the rays of light which convey their images to the eye must have been nearly two millions of years on their way. So old, therefore, at the least, must be the stars composing those nebulæ, viz., two millions of years! How much older need not be conjectured. The records of our own globe do not exceed six thousand. Though Nature appears to suffer some of her works to decay, yet, delighting in variety, and in resolving matter into new creations, she is only varying her attitudes, nothing being permitted actually to be lost. Ever attentive to her interests, she replaces in one spot what she has displaced in another. Ever attentive to beauty, and desirous of resolving all things into their original dependance on herself, she permits moss to creep over the prostrate column, and ivy to wave from the time-worn battlement. Time, with its gradual but incessant touch, withers the ivy and pulverizes the battlement. But Nature, ever magnificent in her designs, conceiving and executing in one and the same moment; whose veil no one has been able to uplift; whose progress is more swift than time, and more subtle than motion, and whose theatre is an orbit of incalculable diameter; jealous of her prerogatives and studious of creation, expands, as it were, with one hand what she compresses with the other. Always diligent, she loses nothing; for, were any particle of matter absolutely to become lost, bodies would lose their connexion with each other, and a link in the grand chain be dropped. From the beginning of time not an atom has been annihilated; not the minutest particle of what we denominate element; nor one deed, word, or thought of any of his creations has ever escaped the knowledge, or will ever escape the memory, of the Eternal Mind: that Mind which knows no past, and calculates no future! MAN COMPARATIVELY A RECENTLY In the surveys hitherto made by geologists, it has been observed that no organic remains have been discovered in the interior substances of which the stones of the primitive mountains are composed, they being found only in those mountains called secondary, which rest on the sides, and sometimes even cover the summits of primitive ones. It has also been observed, that all fossil remains of viviparous land animals have been found in alluvial soil, or near the surface of the earth; and as no remains of the human species have yet been discovered in ancient alluvial ground, it has been inferred that the geological changes already alluded to took place before the present race of man was formed. Skeletons have been dug up in various places, but from no situation invalidating this supposition, they having been evidently imbedded and agglutinated at no very distant period. In the Villa Ludovici, near Rome, is a skeleton incrusted with stone; and in the British Museum is a fossil human skeleton, found in Guadaloupe, imbedded in limestone. At the founding of Quebec, a savage was dug up, petrified, from the lower strata, with his arrows and his quiver. A skeleton was also found in a lead-mine, mixed with stags' horns, in 1744; and in a mine at Falun, in Sweden, two human bodies were at different times found, impregnated with vitriol of iron; at Andrarum, impregnated with sulphur; and in Norway, impregnated with copper, on a bed of loadstone. Others have likewise been found in mines, having a mineralized appearance. Whether the changes that have taken place on this globe took place prior or subsequent to the formation of man, it is impossible to determine. What is now sea was probably once dry land, and what is now land in great part an ocean. This supposition involves difficulties of the first importance; but it is the only rational one that, in the present state of geological science, can reasonably be entertained. Future discoveries will doubtless afford more correct data; and time, and unwearied application to the general subject, may render that evident which is now mysterious, this science being still in its infancy. That vast deluges, and mountains rising from the bed of the sea, have occurred at distant epochs, seems certain. The last great change is supposed to have occurred about six thousand years ago. But what are six thousand years? Mere days! being little more than seventy summers and winters of the planet Uranus. And here a fine passage occurs to my mind from Berkeley's Minute Philosopher: "Though I cannot with eyes of flesh behold the invisible God, yet do I, in the strictest sense, behold and perceive by all my senses such signs and tokens, such effects and operations, as suggest, indicate, and demonstrate an invisible God." Man would seem to have been comparatively but a recent sojourner on the earth! "Between the first creation of the globe," says an eminent philosopher, "and the day in which it pleased God to place man upon it, who shall dare to define the interval?" Of all the animal species, man is supposed (and the idea is in a great measure confirmed by geology) to have been created last. That man is only of comparatively recent existence may also be deduced from the comparative infancy of his present mind. The swallow travels and the bee builds just as they travelled and built in the days of Job, Moses, and Sanchoniathon. But manhis capabilities and acquisitions are all progressive, not only as an individual, from infancy to age, but as a species, from the beginning of time to the end of it. This, I think, is shown by every discovery he makes, and by every new invention. What treasures of capability lie hid, yet to be developed, in the human mind, who can determine? The present disposition of things has had an existence of only about six thousand years; that is, a fraction only of the time that light takes in passing from Arcturus to our vision; or, as we before said, only seventy summers and winters of the planet Uranus; and yet we all speak of the antiquity of things! MEN are in possession of ages, but MAN is only in his infancy of faculty. If NATURE-and when I speak of Nature I (ALWAYS) mean and have meant by that term the general and particular fundamental laws of the DIVINITY, operating throughout the universe-if Nature can produce one Newton, she can a thousand; if a thousand, a million; if a million, myriads of millions. The producing a Grotius, a MOZART, and a BIDDER, whose early indications of faculty are more wonderful to my mind than even the comprehension of a Galileo at a maturer age, evidently prove what Nature can do, and what possibly she may hereafter do. The mind of man, I say, is still in its infancy of power, and may therefore hereafter, when it shall be in its zenith, be, in comparison with its state at present, "Like another morn Risen on mid-noon." LOVERS OF NATURE. THERE are some men whose love of Nature leads them too far into the regions of hypothesis, but whose very errors teach us to think. Others there are whose disregard to everything not immediately connected with their personal interest is so great, that they would esteem any one idly employed who was investigating a plant, were it ever so beautiful or curious. The best way of viewing Nature is to unite poetry with science, and to enlist both in the pursuit of truth, in order that both may affect the heart and purify the mind. "There is nothing so delightful in literature," says Cicero, as that branch which enables us to discern the immensity of Na 66 |