note the dire reactions (?) of evils: young thieves growing to old
ones, no sewers, damp, famine-engendering, desolating and wasting
plagues or typhus fever, want of granaries or mendacious violence
destroying food, civil feuds coming round in internecine wars, and
general desolations, and, as in Persia, eight millions occupying the
homesteads of three hundred millions. Here, if anywhere, is seen the
almighty reactions through which the cycle of human life, oscillating,
moves.

In the speech of the Lord Provost of Edinburgh (reported on June 14th,
1844), it is recited that boys 'left to stroll about the streets and
closes,' acquire habits so fixed, if not of vice, at least of idleness,
that in consequence of their not being trained to some kind of
discipline in their early years, the habit of vagabondizing acquires
such power that it is uncontrollable. And how apt and forcible was that
quotation in the place assigned it: 'If thou forbear to deliver them
that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain; if thou
sayest, _Behold, we knew it not_, doth not He that pondereth the heart,
consider it?'--consider it, regard it, make account of it.

_Manners._--The making game of a servant before company--a thing
impossible to well-bred people. Now observe how this is illustrative of
H---- Street.

I confess myself wholly at a loss to comprehend the objections of the
Westminster reviewer and even of my friend Dr. Nichol, to my commentary
on the strange appearance in Orion. The reviewer says that this
appearance (on which he seems to find my language incomprehensible) had
been dispersed by Lord Rosse's telescope. True, or at least so I hear.
But for all this, it was originally created by that telescope. It was
in the interval between the first report and the subsequent reports
from Lord Rosse's telescope that I made my commentary. But in the case
of contradiction between two reports, more accurate report I have not.
As regards the reviewer, there had been no time for this, because the
book, which he reviews, is a simple reprint in America, which he knows I
had had no opportunity of revising. But Dr. Nichol perplexes me. That a
new stage of progress had altered the appearances, as doubtless further
stages will alter them, concerns me nothing, though referring to a
coming republication; for both alike apparently misunderstood the case
as though it required a _real_ phenomenon for its basis. To understand
the