the process of creation, 'God said, Let
there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day
from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for
days, and for years.' By the special appointment, then, of the
Creator, they were made the standards for the measurement of time
upon earth. They were made for more: not only for seasons, for days,
and for years, but for SIGNS. Signs of what? It may be that
the word, in this passage, has reference to the signs of the
Egyptian zodiac, to mark the succession of solar months; or it may
indicate a more latent connection between the heavens and the earth,
of the nature of judicial astrology. These relations are not only
apparent to the most superficial observation of man, but many of
them remain inexhaustible funds of successive discovery, perhaps as
long as the continued existence of man upon earth. What an unknown
world of mind, for example, is yet teeming in the womb of time, to
be revealed in tracing the causes of the sympathy between the magnet
and the pole--that unseen, immaterial spirit, which walks with us
through the most entangled forests, over the most interminable
wilderness, and across every region of the pathless deep, by day, by
night, in the calm serene of a cloudless sky, and in the howling of
the hurricane or the typhoon? Who can witness the movements of that
tremulous needle, poised upon its centre, still tending to the polar
star, but obedient to his distant hand, armed with a metallic guide,
round every point of the compass, at the fiat of his will, without
feeling a thrill of amazement approaching to superstition? The
discovery of the attractive power of the magnet was made before the
invention of the alphabet, or the age of hieroglyphics. No record of
the event is found upon the annals of human history. But seven
hundred years have scarcely passed away since its polarity was first
known to the civilized European man. It was by observation of the
periodical revolution of the earth in her orbit round the sun,
compared with her daily revolution round her axis, that was
disclosed the fact that her annual period was composed of three
hundred and sixty-five of her daily revolutions; or, in other words,
that the year was composed of three hundred and sixty-five days. But
the shepherds of Egypt, watchin