is scarcely sufficient to make a respectable clown of the present time. Nothing has been stationary within the modifying power of human intellect: And whatever has failed to participate of its plastic emendations, must have been excluded from its scrųtiny, or have been too incorporeal for successful examination.

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Could the spirits of the ancients be aroused, from their protracted slumber, and awaked, to a present and a retrospective consciousness, with what astonishment, would they look upon the world's metamorphosis, since they left its bustling theater? With what magic influence, would the countless, novelties, of physical science, which modern genius has dug out of the rubbish of former times, dance before their enchanted vision? And do you, contemplate the future, as prononncing the same humiliating sentence upon us, as we are justly pronouncing upon the past that the proudest intellectual accomplishments of to-day, will, in a few fleeting years, be stigmatized as the fooleries of antiquity? I venture to charge you with having, misapprehended the nature of the case, or the testimony, by which a decision should be sustained. The cases are not parallel, in the circumstances relevant to the question.

The earliest knowledge, amongst mankind, must have been that of mere animal wants, and the practical manipulation, subservient to their indulgence. Their enterprise must have been exclusively directed to the attainment of sustenance, and personal securi; to which clothing and other comforts, and finally.

luxuries, were, doubtless, successively added. 'Necessity and expediency must for a long time, with every primitive people, have formed the texts, upon which, their entire history was a practical commentary. Abstract science, therefore, must have been slow, in presenting, and still slower in substantiating, its claims, upon human consideration: And what is much more unlucky, still, is, that whatever reflection was appropriated, without the pale of daily necessities, was squandered upon the whims of an unculti vated imagination. Fancy supplied a substitute for facts, which prejudice, or imposture, lost no time in appropriating, to its favorite purposes: And hence, the worst of all literary predicaments followed, viz: That mankind were not merely 'ignorant, and therefore, justly supposed to be teachable, but erroneously taught, and so as to be incorrigibly certain of the infallibility of their own ignorance. You can have no difficulty in apprehending the advantages of mere negative knowledge, over fallacies, laboriously acquired. No! you need not be told, how much more irksome is the task of unteaching what has already been mistaught, than of teaching what has not been taught at all; and most, who have been either teachers or pupils, are doubtless ready to yield a cheerful corroboration of the fact.

That science, even in Christendom, was mostly founded upon hypothesis, for sixteen hundred years, you have ample testimony in the quotations, already presented you, from the works of Francis Bacon, to the truth of which every page of literary history

offers corroborative testimony: And that it was, during the same period, under the supervisorship of superstitionists, or mistaught individuals, we hare only to refer to the biographies of such men as Roger Bacon, more commonly called Friar Bacon; Nicholas Copernicus, and the immortal Galileo Galilei. Nor does the former ever recur to my recollection, unaccompanied by sincere regret, that a little book purporting to contain many curious anecdotes of that philosophic paragon of the thirteenth century, and from which I derived an indelible satisfaction in my early boyhood, is not now extant; and in the possess ion of every youthful reader in my country.

Roger Bacon was a conscientious and indefatigable devotee of natural science-an enthusiastic aspirant after practical knowledge; in which hallowed enter prise he was but too successful, for the period at which he lived. His numerous and novel chemical experiments, amongst which was the discovery of the composition of gun-powder, were so wonderful to his ignorant and superstitious cotemporaries, that they contemplated him as an agent of the devil; and leagued with the adversary to spoil man's spiritual prospects: And for these holy aspirations after truth this careful listening to Nature's interpretations of herself, he was denounced as a dangerous and insuf ferable heretic; forbade to teach his doctrines at the public university; and subsequently twice imprisoned; in the last instance, during ten years; forbade communication with his friends, and so poorly fed, as even to endanger his life-a martyr of both the inquisition of Nature, and of the Church.

Notwithstanding we have already expended a remark upon those mathematical prodigies, Copernicus and Galilei, our present, particular purpose may, devertheless, excuse its repetition.

You have all, doubtless, both heard and read, much and often, of those great philosophers of the sixteenth century, whom Nature had endowed with an intellectual voracity, insatiable of her most prodi gal and choicest revelations-swallowing, digesting and assimilating to their own minds, with the easiest facility, facts and principles which would stultify common intellects to contemplate.

The name of Copernicus is justly and inseperably associated with our present sublime system of mathematical astronomy, he being the extraordinary individual, with whom it substantially originated. And because he looked around him with a scrutiny unknown to his cotemporaries; and familiarized himself with principles of which the world had never dreamed; adopting the truths of Nature, regardless, of their apparent discrepancy with revelation, he was relentlessly assailed with obloquy, persecution, and outlawry, by the same Christian Church that claims to have been the successful patroness of all useful science for the entire period of eighteen hundred years.

Of Galilei, more should be said, in justice to his memory, and in condemnation of his cotemporaries, than would be compatible with the whole of the present opportunity; and yet, a word must suffice, to show the sort of patronage, the Church bestowed upon philosophy.

This was the man, whose genius, attracted by the individual footsteps, wherein Copernicus had sought out the material of a future edifice, approached the, yet, unquarried mountain, where a few unhewn blocks were scattered at its base; and here, its prodi gious energies were successfully applied, in breaking up and fashioning the mountain mass, into the constituents of an exquisite, aggregate geometry.

These materials were erected, by his individual, superhuman strength, into a most magnificent temple of astronomical science, of which, only the cornice and dome remained, for the ingenuity of a Newton to supply. This man, unimpeached, even by his most inveterate adversaries, of any other delinquency, than a persevering scrutiny of Nature, for a revelation of her uncommunicated secrets, became the unfortunate object of a relentless persecution, which finally deigned to offer him personal safety, in exchange for his moral integrity. In this dilemma, into which his imputed heresies had involved him, he, unluckily, preferred hypocrisy to martyrdom; and, consonant with the requisition of a Romish tribunal, 'knelt before the altar of a persecuting superstition, and, with his hands upon the reputedly holy evangelists, declared, before God and a bigoted Inquisition, that what he had taught of the mobility of the earth, upon its axis, and in its solar orbit, was a false and damnable heresy, contrary to scripture, and the opinion of the Church. But as he arose from his posture of degrading, hypocritical humility, the resuscitated spirit of his native dignity awoke to an insuppressi