ses of facts can learn so much as they do from a single
branch of inquiry. Tell an uninformed man of the daily results of the
study of Fossil Remains, and he will ask how the student can possibly
know what was done in the world ages before man was created. It will
astonish a thoughtless man to hear the statements about the condition of
the English nation which are warranted by the single study of the
administration of the Poor Laws, since their origin. Some physiognomists
fix their attention on a single feature of the human face, and can
pretty accurately interpret the general character of the mind from it:
and I believe every portrait painter trusts mainly to one feature for
the fidelity of his likenesses, and bestows more study and care on that
one than on any other.

A good many features compose the physiognomy of a nation; and scarcely
any traveller is qualified to study them all. The same man is rarely
enlightened enough to make investigation at once into the religion of a
people, into its general moral notions, its domestic and economical
state, its political condition, and the facts of its progress;--all
which are necessary to a full understanding of its morals and manners.
Few have even attempted an inquiry of this extent. The worst of it is
that few dream of undertaking the study of any one feature of society at
all. We should by this time have been rich in the knowledge of nations
if each intelligent traveller had endeavoured to report of any one
department of moral inquiry, however narrow; but, instead of this, the
observations offered to us are almost purely desultory. The traveller
hears and notes what this and that and the other person says. If three
or four agree in their statements on any point, he remains unaware of a
doubt, and the matter is settled. If they differ, he is perplexed, does
not know whom to believe, and decides, probably, in accordance with
prepossessions of his own. The case is almost equally bad, either way.
He will hear only one side of every question if he sees only one class
of persons,--like the English in America, for instance, who go commonly
with letters of introduction from merchants at home to merchants in the
maritime cities, and hear nothing but federal politics, and see nothing
but aristocratic manners. They come home with notions which they suppose
to be indisputable about the great Bank question, the state of parties,
and the relations of the General and State governments;