eir efforts. Something must be wanting, when
such unrivalled knowledge and wealth are accompanied by such
various and wide-spread evils. It is not benevolence that is
deficient, for nowhere can we turn without meeting it in private,
struggling against miseries too great for its power, and in
public devoting abilities of the first order to the cause of
humanity.

"It is the wider diffusion of knowledge we require: more heads
and hands still are wanted, qualified for acting in concert, or
at least acting generally on right principles. Too many persons
capable of generous feeling are absorbed and corrupted by luxury
and frivolity; too many waste their efforts from shallow,
mistaken, and contradictory views."

Then follows a splendid description of scientific energy, the
gratification which it affords, and the noble objects to which it points
the way.

"In examining the prodigious resources at the command of the
upper classes of English society, it is finely remarked, that
'the fine arts are the materials by which our physical and animal
sensations are converted into moral perceptions.'

"Every thing in the form of matter, however coarse--the refuse
and dross of more valuable materials--is resolvable, by science,
into elements too subtle for our vision, and yet possessed of
such potency that they effect transmutations more surprising than
the fables of magic. The points that spangle the still blue
vault, and make night lovely to the untaught peasant, interpreted
by science, expand into worlds and systems of worlds: some so
remote, that even the character of light, in which their
existence is declared to us, can scarcely give full assurance of
their reality--some, kindred planets which science has measured,
and has told their movements, their seasons, and the length of
their days. Such resemblances to our own globe are ascertained in
their general laws, and such diversity in their peculiar ones,
that we are led irresistibly to believe they all teem with
beings, sentient and intelligent as we are, yet whose senses, and
powers, and modes of existence, must be very dissimilar, and
indefinitely varied. The regions of space, within the field of
our vision, present us with phenomena the most incomprehensibly
mysterious, and with knowledge the most accurate and
demonstrable. Light, mo