Glistering with dew; fragrant the fertile earth
After soft showers; and sweet the coming on
Of grateful evening mild; then silent night,
With this her solemn bird, and this fair moon,
And these, the gems of heaven, her starry train;
But neither breath of morn, when she ascends
With charm of earliest birds; nor rising sun
On this delightful land; nor herb, fruit, flower,
Glistering with dew; nor fragrance after showers;
Nor grateful evening mild; nor silent night,
With this her solemn bird, nor walk by moon,
Or glittering star-light, without thee is sweet.

But wherefore all night long shine these? For whom
This glorious sight, when sleep hath shut all eyes?
To whom our general ancestor replied :

ADAM. Daughter of God and man, accomplished Eve,
These have their course to finish round the earth
By morrow evening, and from land to land
In order, though to nations yet unborn,
Ministering light prepared, they set and rise;
Lest total darkness should by night regain
Her old possession, and extinguish life

In nature and all things, which these soft fires
Not only enlighten, but with kindly heat
Of various influence, foment and warm,
Temper or nourish, or in part shed down
Their stellar virtue on all kinds that grow
On earth, made hereby apter to receive
Perfection from the sun's more potent ray.
These, then, though unbeheld in deep of night,
Shine not in vain: nor think, though men were none,
That heaven would want spectators, God want praise;
Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.
All these with ceaseless praise His works behold,
Both day and night. How often from the steep
Of echoing hill or thicket have we heard
Celestial voices to the midnight air,
Sole, or responsive each to other's note,
Singing their great Creator! Oft in bands
While they keep watch, or nightly rounding walk
With heavenly touch of instrumental sounds
In full harmonic number joined, their songs
Divide the night, and lift our thoughts to heaven.

MILTON.

MARVELLOUS indeed have been the productions of modern scientific investigations, but none surpass the wonder-working Electromagnetic Telegraphic Machine; and when Shakspeare, in the exercise of his unbounded imagination, made Puck, in obedience to Oberon's order to him

reply,

"Be here again

Ere the leviathan can swim a league,"

"I'll put a girdle round the earth
In forty minutes

how little did our immortal bard think that this light, fanciful offer of a fairy to "the king of the fairies" would, in the nineteenth century, not only be substantially realized, but surpassed as follows:

The electric telegraph would convey intelligence more than twenty-eight thousand times round the earth, while Puck at his vaunted speed was crawling round it only once!

On every instrument there is a dial, on which are inscribed the names of the six or eight stations with which it usually communicates. When much business is to be transacted, a boy is necessary for each of these instruments; generally, however, one lad can, without practical difficulty, manage about three; but as the whole of them are ready for work by night as well as by day, they are incessantly attended in watches of eight hours each, by these satellite boys by day, and by men at night.

As fast as the various messages for delivery, flying one after another from the ground-floor up the chimney, reach the level of the instruments, they are brought by the superintendent to the particular one by which they are to be communicated; and its boy, with the quickness characteristic of his age, then instantly sets to work.

His first process is by means of the electric current to sound a little bell, which simultaneously alarms all the stations on his line; and although the attention of the sentinel at each is thus attracted, yet it almost instantly evaporates from all excepting from that to the name of which he causes the electric needle to point, by which signal, the clerk at that station instantly knows that the forthcoming question is addressed to him; and accordingly, by a corresponding signal, he announces to the London boy that he is ready to receive it. By means of a brass handle fixed

to the dial, which the boy grasps in each hand, he now begins rapidly to spell off his information by certain twists of his wrists, each of which imparts to the needles on his dial, as well as to those on the dial of his distant correspondent, a convulsive movement, designating the particular letter of the telegraphic alphabet required. By this arrangement he is enabled to transmit an ordinary-sized word in three seconds, or about twenty per minute. In the case of any accident to the wire of one of his needles, he can, by a different alphabet, transmit his message by a series of movements of the single needle, at the reduced rate of about eight or nine words per minute.

While a boy at one instrument is thus occupied in transmitting to-say Liverpool, a message written by its London author in ink which is scarcely dry, another boy at the adjoining instrument is, by the reverse of the process, attentively reading the quivering movements of the needles of his dial, which, by a sort of St. Vitus's dance, are rapidly spelling to him a message, via the wires of the South Western Railway, say from Gosport, which word by word he repeats aloud to an assistant, who, seated by his side, writes it down (he receives it about as fast as his attendant can conveniently write it) on a sheet of paper, which, as soon as the message is concluded, descends to the "booking-office." When inscribed in due form, it is without delay despatched to its destination by messenger, cab, or express, according to order.— SIR F. B. HEAD.

NATURE is represented as dead, and contrasted in common language with living nature; but because it has not the same life with the animal or the plant, is it then bereft of all life? If it has not life, we must acknowledge that it has at least the appearance of life. Has it not motion in the water which streams and murmurs on the surface of the continents, or which tosses in the bosom of the seas? in the winds, which course with terrible rapidity, and sweep the soil that we tread under our feet, covering it with ruins? Has it not its sympathies and antipathies in those mysterious elective affinities of the different molecules of matter which chemistry investigates? Has it not the powerful attractions of bodies to each other, which govern the motions of the stars scattered in the immensity of space, and keep them in

an admirable harmony? Do we not see, and always with a secret astonishment, the magnetic needle agitated at the approach of a particle of iron, and leaping under the fire of the northern light? Place any material body whatever by the side of another, do they not immediately enter into relations of interchange, of molecular attraction, of electricity, of magnetism? The disturbance of the equilibrum at one point induces another elsewhere, and the movement is propagated to infinity. And what will it be, if we rise to the contemplation of all the phenomena together, of this order, which are presented by a vast country-by an entire continent?

It is thus that, in organic nature also, all is acting, all is changing, all is undergoing transformation. Doubtless this is not the life of the organized being, the life of the animal; but is not this assemblage of phenomena also a life? If, taking life in its most simple aspect, we define it as a mutual exchange of relations, we cannot refuse this name to those lively actions and reactions, to that perpetual play of the forces of matter of which we are every day the witnesses. It is indeed life, but undoubtedly in a very inferior order of things. It is life; the thousand voices of nature which make themselves heard around us, and which in so many ways betray that incessant and prodigious activity, proclaim it so loudly that we cannot shut our ears to their language.

This general life, this physical and chemical life, belongs to all matter it is the basis of the existence of all superior beings, not as the source, but as the condition; it is in the plant, it is in the animal; only here it is in the service of a principle of higher life, of a spiritual nature, of a principle of unity, of which the mysterious force, referring all to a centre, modifies it, controls it, and organizes it, for the benefit of an individual.-GUYOT's Earth and Man.'

THE history of science is similar to that of literature, and intimately connected with it. Its records show that many ancient nations had an extensive and reverential, if not absolutely accurate, scientific knowledge. Then came the dark ages of Europe, when distorted traditions and superstitions usurped the place of truth,

and effectually blinded the eyes of those who, from leisure and station, might otherwise have engaged in useful inquiries into the wonders of the world around them. The Chaldeans of old knew something of the stars, and the Arabians added to that knowledge. The art of measuring time by a sun-dial was known to the Hebrews in the time of Hezekiah; and, far earlier, the annual inundations of the Nile, by compelling the Egyptians to measure their land after the waters had abated, gave rise to a knowledge of geometry. This introduced the study of arithmetic, which is the foundation of all the exact sciences. Mathematics and mechanics were carefully studied, and brought to great perfection by the Greeks.

The ancients seem to have divided knowledge into three parts,-arithmetic, geometry, and dialectics or language. Since the Christian era, the Arabians were, until the tenth century, the most literary and scientific people. To them modern Europe was indebted for numerals, chemistry, and improvements in architecture and poetry. They founded numerous schools in Spain, and established the earliest libraries. Their false religious faith, however, made the Christians receive their discoveries with dread and suspicion; and a long period of gross darkness prevailed, in which natural phenomena were regarded with mere stupid wonder by some, and with awe-stricken dread by others; and any attempt to understand those wonders was thought an unlawful study, and any successful knowledge a proof of magical power, justly subjecting its possessor to suspicion, hatred, and persecution.

The first man in England who dared to investigate nature, and introduce those laws we term science, was Roger Bacon (born 1214). He is the most memorable instance on record of a man living before his age, and becoming the servant, not of his contemporaries, but of posterity. He was intimately acquainted with geography and astronomy, and made many valuable discoveries in optics and chemistry; he, also, was not ignorant of the composition of gunpowder. This great man's knowledge was so little appreciated, that it made him numerous enemies, particularly among the monks of his own fraternity, and consigned him twice to close imprisonment. For a brief period between those imprisonments, a pope (Clement IV.), more enlightened than the clergy generally, liberated him, and took him under his protection. But this patron died, and ten years of yet stricter imprisonment for Bacon followed. So little were his works and labours valued or understood, that the name of Friar Bacon has come down to modern times rather as a necromancer1 of the middle ages than as a scientific discoverer. It has been