him, not with a passive indifferent gaze, as a set of phenomena in which he has no further interest than as they affect his immediate situation, and can be rendered subservient to his comfort, but as a system disposed with order and design. He approves, and feels the highest admiration for the harmony of its parts, the skill and efficiency of its contrivances. Some of these which he can best trace and understand, he attempts to imitate, and finds that, to a certain extent, though rudely and imperfectly, he can succeed -in others, that although he can comprehend the nature of the contrivance, he is totally destitute of all means of imitation; while in others, again, and those evidently the most important, though he sees the effect produced, yet the means by which it is done, are alike beyond his knowledge and his control. Thus he is led to the conception of a Power and an Intelligence superior to his own, and adequate to the production and maintenance of all that he sees in nature-a Power and intelligence to which he may well apply the term Infinite, since he not only sees no actual limit to the instances in which they are manifested, but finds, on the contrary, that, the farther he inquires, and the wider his sphere of observation extends, they continually open upon him in increasing abundance; and that, as the study of one prepares him to understand and appreciate another, refinement follows on refinement, wonder on wonder, till his faculties become bewildered in admiration, and his intellect falls back on itself, in utter hopelessness of arriving at an end.

When from external objects he turns his view upon himself-on his own vital and intellectual faculties, he finds that he possesses a power of examining and analysing his own nature to a certain extent, but no farther. In his corporeal frame he is sensible of a power to communicate a certain moderate amount of motion to himself and other objects; that this power depends on his will, and that its exertion can be suspended or increased at pleasure within certain limits; but how his will acts on his limbs, he has no consciousness; and whence he derives the power he thus exercises, there is nothing to assure him, however he may long to know. His senses, too, inform him of a mul

titude of particulars respecting the external world, and he perceives an apparatus by which impressions from without may be transmitted, as a sort of signals, to the interior of his person, and ultimately to his brain, wherein he is obscurely sensible that the thinking, feeling, reasoning being he calls himself, more especially resides; but by what means he becomes conscious of these impressions, and what is the nature of the immediate communication between that inward sentient being, and that machinery, his outward man, he has not the slightest conception.

Again, when he contemplates still more attentively the thoughts, acts, and passions of this his sentient intelligent self, he finds, indeed, that he can remember, and by the aid of memory, can compare and discriminate, can judge and resolve, and, above all, that he is irresistibly impelled, from the perception of any phenomenon without or within him, to infer the existence of something prior which stands to it in the relation of a cause, without which it would not be; and that this knowledge of causes and their consequences is what, in almost every instance, determines his choice and will, in cases where he is nevertheless conscious of perfect freedom to act or not to act. He finds, too, that it is in his power to acquire more or less knowledge of causes and effects according to the degree of attention he bestows upon them, which attention is again in great measure a voluntary act; and often when his choice has been decided on imperfect knowledge or insufficient attention, he finds reason to correct his judgment, though perhaps too late to influence his decision by after consideration. A world within him is thus opened to his intellectual view, abounding with phenomena and relations, and of the highest immediate interest. But while he cannot help perceiving that the insight he is enabled to obtain into this internal sphere of thought and feeling is in reality the source of all his power-the very fountain of his predominance over external nature-he yet feels himself capable of entering only very imperfectly into these recesses of his own bosom, and analysing the operations of his mind-in this as in all other things, in short, "a being darkly wise;" seeing that all the longest life and most vigorous intellect can give him power to discover by

his own research, or time to know by availing himself of that of others, serves only to place him on the very frontier of knowledge, and afford a distant glimpse of boundless realms beyond, where no human thought has penetrated, but which yet he is sure must be no less familiarly known to that Intelligence which he traces throughout creation, than the most obvious truths which he himself daily applies to his most trifling purposes. Is it wonderful that a being so constituted should first encourage a hope, and by degrees acknowledge an assurance, that his intellectual existence will not terminate with the dissolution of his corporeal frame, but rather that in a future state of being, disencumbered of a thousand obstructions, which his present situation throws in his way, endowed with acuter senses, and higher faculties, he shall drink deep at that fountain of beneficent wisdom for which the slight taste obtained on earth has given him so keen a relish?

THE LAWS OF NATURE.-Arnott.

With

Acquaintance with the laws of nature has been very slowly obtained, owing to that complicacy of an ordinary phenomenon, which is produced by several laws operating together, and under great variety of circumstances. respect to many laws of chemistry and life, men seem to be yet little farther advanced than they were with respect to the physical law of attraction, when they knew only that heavy things fell to the earth. But we have learned enough to perceive that the great universe is as simple and harmo nious, as it is immense; and that the Creator, instead of interposing separately, or miraculously, in the common sense of the word, to produce every distinct phenomenon, has willed that all should proceed according to a few general laws. There is nothing in nature so truly miraculous and adorable, as that the endless and beneficent variety of results which we see should spring from such simple elements. In times of ignorance, men naturally attributed every occurrence which they did not understand, that is to say, which they could not refer to a general law, to a direct interference of supreme power. And thus for many ages, and among some nations still, eclipses, and earthquakes, and many dis

eases, particularly those of the mind, and the winds and weather, were, or are accounted miraculous. Hence arose among heathens the barbarous sacrifices for propitiating or appeasing their offended deities. They had not yet risen to the sublime conception of one God, who said, “Let there be light,” and it was so; and who also gave to the whole of nature -permanent laws, which he allows men to discover for the direction of their conduct in life-laws so unchanging, that men can calculate eclipses backward or forward for thousands of years, without erring by one beat of a pendulum; and as their knowledge of nature advances, they can anticipate and explain other events with equal precision. Even the wind and the rain (which, in common speech, are the types of uncertainty and change) obey laws as fixed as those of the sun and moon; and already (as regards many parts of the earth) men can foretell these with out fear of being belied. They plan their voyages to suit! the coming monsoons, and they prepare against the floods of rainy seasons. He who understands the laws of nature, even in the degree in which men now know them, has such clear prescience of the future, and of the effects which will arise from certain causes, that, in many cases, he can inter pose and control events to answer his private ends. To a certain extent he thus commands nature, and, as expressed in the language of Lord Bacon," his knowledge is power." Again, as all single material objects and states of objects in the universe are results of antecedent operation of the laws of change, a man who first studies the laws, knows beforehand, in great part, the objects which he will meet with in examining nature, and he thus most remarkably diminishes the labour of studying natural history. He seems to learn by intuition. A well-informed man of the present day may be said to possess, within the boundaries of his mind, the universe in miniature, in which he may contemplate at leisure past events, and the present, and the future.

THE USES OF ANIMALS TO MAN;

RELATED BY A FATHER TO HIS CHILDREN.

We talked some time ago, children, of the services which animals might render to man services voluntary and invo

luntary. And I remember a circumstance so remarkable and so interesting, that it will do well for our evening tale.

Perhaps you have heard of General Rafael Riego; he was well known during the war of independence in the Peninsula, and still better after he and Quiroga had headed an insurrection of the Spanish troops in the Isla de Leon, and set up against the despotism of Ferdinand VII. a popular representative government. I was then a traveller in Spain, and saw the constitutional monuments erected in many of the towns and cities amidst the acclamations of the people. At that time Riego was absolutely the idol of the nation: he was a man of gentle manners, kind affections, and made to be loved. But in those political vicissitudes through which men almost always are doomed to pass when struggling for political change, Riego perishedperished on the scaffold. One of his aid-de-camps was an Irishman, named George Matthewes.

It happened that many Englishmen were engaged in these contests, which ended in the subjugation of freedom and the re-establishment of despotic power; and many of these Englishmen occupied the prisons of Spain. I was called upon to inquire into the fate of one of them, who was believed to be immured in the dungeons of the Spanish capital. I employed a banker of some influence to ascertain whether any Englishman, who corresponded to the description I gave of the party, was really confined in any of the jails of Madrid. He could not be found, notwithstanding the most anxious and persevering search of my friend. But, while he was engaged in his investigations, a dirty memorandum was put into his hand by a soldier who was guarding one of the condemned cells in which a human being had been long kept in solitary confinement-excluded from all communication, except such verbal conversation as, in opposition to the orders of his superior, might be charitably entered on by the soldier stationed at the door of the cell. No writing materials—no pen, ink, or paper-no means of intercourse with any person beyond the four walls of the dungeon, were ever allowed to the unhappy prisoner. The name of the prisoner was unknown to his guard; all he knew was that he had been captured with Riego, and con