beauty of the sciences whose benefits they
experience, are the true, the just, the only judges of their relative
importance. It is they who feel what impartial men of learning know,
that the mass of general knowledge is a perfect and beautiful body,
among whose members there should be no schism, and whose prosperity must
always be greatest when none are partially pursued, and none unduly
rejected. We do not, therefore, advance any proud and unjustifiable
claims to the superiority of that branch of science for the furtherance
of which this society has been formed over all others; but we zealously
come forward to deprecate the apathy with which it has long been
regarded, to dissipate the prejudices which that apathy alone could have
engendered, and to vindicate its claims to an honorable and equal
position among the proud thrones of its sister sciences. We do not bring
meteorology forward as a pursuit adapted for the occupation of tedious
leisure, or the amusement of a careless hour. Such qualifications are no
inducements to its pursuit by men of science and learning, and to these
alone do we now address ourselves. Neither do we advance it on the
ground of its interest or beauty, though it is a science possessing both
in no ordinary degree. As to its beauty, it may be remarked that it is
not calculated to harden the mind it strengthens, and bind it down to
the measurement of magnitudes and estimation of quantities, destroying
all higher feelings, all finer sensibilities: it is not to be learned
among the gaseous exhalations of the deathful laboratory; it has no
dwelling in the cold caves of the dark earth; it is not to be followed
up among the charnel houses of creation. But it is a science of the pure
air, and of the bright heaven; its thoughts are amidst the loveliness of
creation; it leads the mind, as well as the eye, to the morning mist,
and the noonday glory, and the twilight-cloud, to the purple peace of
the mountain heaven, to the cloudy repose of the green valley; now
expatiating in the silence of stormless ether, now on the rushing of the
wings of the wind. It is indeed a knowledge which must be felt to be, in
its very essence, full of the soul of the beautiful. For its interest,
it is universal, unabated in every place, and in all time. He, whose
kingdom is the heaven, can never meet with an uninteresting space, can
never exhaust the phenomena of an hour; he is in a realm of perpetual
change, of eternal motion, o