The Pleasures of Life

e that find

hat getteth u

ise of it is bet

thereof tha

precious t

canst desire are not t

ys is in her

eft hand ric

e ways of p

er paths

BS OF

s dry, difficult, or prosaic-much of it is as easy as it is interesting. A wise instinct of old united the prophet and the "seer." "The wise man's eyes are in

"Indra dug out their beds with his thunderbolts, and sent them forth by long continuous paths;" but the real causes of natural phe

e is as wonderful and int

hings whose

fairyland; in

ul than our

constellations

verse is skillful

justly

ience! When the

w doting, and

vered that the

nguage to its l

botanist, but one with even a slight knowledge of that delightful science-when he goes out into the woods, or into one of those fairy forests which we call fields, finds himself welcomed by a glad company of friends, every one with something interesting to tell.

w, been said

ower they pluck

botany is bu

little time the thought of all that we ought to recognize in those words. All spring and summer is in them-the walks by silent scented paths, the rest in noonday heat, the joy of the herds and flocks, the power of all shepherd life and meditation; the life of the sunlight upon the world, falling in emerald streaks and soft blue shadows, when else i

u love one science, you cannot but feel intense interest in them all. How grand are the truths of Astronomy

astronomer in hi

ll the dark,

distant isles o

ting its orbit, finds that it w

come. It dare

or falsify he

ssed, but, watch

in in sleeples

men have perish

ace would watch t

l says of a stu

pass nightly in

it looks by

igns here when

limpses through

an eminence from which he looks back on the unive

at is certainly no longer the case now; and Lord Chesterfield's wise wish, th

and beautifully less." Our prehistoric ancestors hunted the mammoth, the woolly-haired rhinoceros, and Irish elk; the ancient Britons had the wild ox, the deer, and the wolf. We have still the pheasant, the partridge, the fox, and the hare; but even these are becoming scarcer, and must be pres

ce has done for him also, and has put the man into a bottle." I do not deny that there ar

quoting the following description from Hudson

, and yet leave it open to the soft south-western breezes, and to the afternoon sun. At the head of the combe wells up a clear spring, which sends a thread of water, trickling through a bed of osiers, into the upper end of the po

he plantation, and come unseen right on the corner of the wall; so that one quiet step will enabl

an old beech, lying half way across the pond, a vole is sitting erect, rubbing his right ear, and the spla

ripple above him is the only thing that tells of his silent flight. The water-hen has long ago got un

g deep in their necks, with telescopic limbs that now are withdrawn wholly within their bodies and now stretched out to many times their own length. Here are some riding at anchor, moored by delicate threads spun out from their toes; and there are others flashing by in glass armor, br

ute things, living and dead, is winding in and out of their curves into a gulf at the back of the flower. What happens to them there we cannot see; for round t

where they will, and grasping their prey with these chance limbs, wrap themselves round their food to get

, as the Esquimaux asked about the watch; or treat them as certain devout Afreedee villagers are said to have treated a descendant of the Prophet-killed him in order to worship at his tomb: but gradu

e summ

dral, boundles

s lamps the sun

nds and waves, i

e the s

e atoms arrange themselves in peace according to their nature-and you have the opal. Separate the clay, and it becomes a white earth, fit for the finest porcelain; or if it still further purifies itself, you have a sapphire. Take the soot, and if properly treated

so on the side of charity; like Nasmyth, who tells us in his delightful autobiography, that he used to think on

erest and charm to our leisure hours. Far from this, it would be impossible t

ion, and the mental habit of method and arrangement; it accustoms young persons to trace the sequence of cause and effect; it familiarizes them with a kind of reasoning which interests them, and which they can pr

ignificance. "Ah, beautiful creations!" says Helps, speaking of the stars, "it is not in guiding us over the seas of our little planet, but out of the dark waters of our own perturbed minds, that we may make to

the South London Working Men's College which struck me very much at the tim

ght? Yet it is a very plain and elementary truth that the life, the fortune, and the happiness of every one of us, and more or less of those who are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing something of the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated than chess. It is a game which has been played for untold ages, every man and woman of us being one of the two players in a game of his or her own. The chessboard is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the Universe,

perstitions, the degrading belief in sorcery and witchcraft, and the cruel, however well-intentioned, intolerance which embittered the Christian world almost from the very days of the Apostles

the recent celebration of the sexcentenary of Peterhouse College, near the close of a long dinner, Sir Frederick Bramwell was called on, some time after midnight, to return thanks for Applied Science. He excused himself from making a long speech on the ground th

-outspeedi

hing on i

attention of the student of Nature, that there is scarcely any natural phenomenon which can be fully and completely explained in all its circumstances, without a union of several, perhaps of all, the sciences." The most important secrets of Nature are often hidden away in unexpected places. Many valuable substances have been discovered in the refuse of manufactories; and it was a happy thought of Glauber to examine what everybody else threw away. There is perhaps no nation the future happiness and prosperity of which depend more on science than our own. Our populati

is to be paid for? We have before us, as usual, three courses. The natural rate of increase may be stopped, which means suffering and outrage; or the population may increase, only to vegetate in misery and destitution; or, lastly, by the development of scientific training and appliances, they may probably be maintained in happiness and comfor

Things; or that there is no one thing in Nature whereof the uses to human life are yet thoroughly understood"-a saying which is still as true now as when it was written. And, lest I should be supposed to be taking too sanguine a view, let me give the authority of Sir John Herschel, who says: "Since it cannot but be that innumerable and most important uses remain to be discovered among the materials an

ngthen the national, as surely as the individual, character. The great gift which Minerva offered to Paris is no

, self-knowledg

ne lead life to

power (pow

lled for), but

w we live by

voice shall whisper serenity and peace. In social converse with the mighty dead of ancient days, you will never smart under the galling sense of dependence upon the mighty living of the present age. And in your struggles with the world, should a crisis ever occur, when even friendship may deem it prudent to desert you, when priest and Levite s

given by Archdeacon Farrar in his address at Liverpool College-testimony,

vice of man. She has labored, her votaries have labored, not to increase the power of despots or to add to the magnificence of courts, but to extend human happiness, to economize human effort, to extinguish human pain. Where of old, men toiled, half blinded and half naked, in the mouth of the glowing furnace to mix the white-hot iron, she now substitutes the mechanical action of the viewless air. She has enlisted the sunbeam in her service to limn for us, with absolute fidelity, the faces of the friends we love. She has shown the poor miner how he may work in safety, even amid the explosive fire-damp of the mine. She hits, by her anaesthetics, enabled the sufferer to be hushed and

By

Emer

H. S