gates, the objects to be studied are her gates and towers themselves, and the picturesque, winding streets climbing up the hill crowned by the minster, and the open space around it. It was only in the latest age of the empire that Wetzlar became a chief seat of such imperial power as still was left: when such causes as were reserved unto the hearing of Augustus, or of those by whom Augustus was directly represented, were decided, or, at least, argued, within her walls; and when a poet who survived the empire held, or might have held, a brief at Cæsar's judgmentseat. But the character of an imperial city is impressed on Wetzlar from the beginning. Marburg is a city of princes: Limburg is mainly ecclesiastical: Wetzlar, small as it is, is, every stone of it, a city of emperors.

one

Of the four churches which we have brought together, Dietkirchen and Wetzlar are the only two which retain any portions of unmixed Romanesque. The internal look of Dieskirchen, with its plain, square piers and arches, and the single round arch of its triforium, is, as so often happens in Germany, unworthy of the expectations which are aroused by the picturesque effect of its site and its towers. At Wetzlar the Romanesque part is of very small extent; but it is of the highest possible value: it consists of the original west front of the church, which has been preserved in a strange way through the very fact of its being destined to destruction. The whole church, from the west wall eastward, has been rebuilt; and it is now, both physically and theologically, divided into two, being parted asunder between the two prevalent religions. The nave, a fair example of what the Germans call a Hallenkirche with the nave and aisles of equal height, like Bristol Cathedral, and containing some fine geometrical windows- is used for Protestant worship. The Catholics keep possession of the choir; and the two parts are divided by a most stately roodloft. This choir, contrary to all German custom, is lower than the nave, and the work is of earlier date, the windows showing tracery in its rudimental form. It is plain that the work of rebuilding began from the east, and that, as the builders got westward, their ideas enlarged, and they made their nave on a grander scale than their choir. When they came, a generation or two later, to design their west front, their ideas enlarged again, and they planned a magnificent façade, with two lofty towers, and a stately double portal between them. The west wall was now to be advanced considerably to the west, and the length of the nave was to be increased by two bays. To this plan, of course, the original west front was to give way; but the builders had the discretion not to pull down till they had built up; and, as they never finished building up, they never altogether finished pulling down. The new west front was begun, its walls were carried up to a certain height all round, and its southern tower was finished as much as many other continental towers are finished; that is, it is complete as a square tower, but lacks the crown of its spire or octagon. But the central compartment got no higher than the portal; and of the northern tower nothing but a mere stump was built. Meanwhile, the ancient front was touched only so far as was needed for the building of the southern tower and its junction with the nave on that side. This involved the destruction of the southern tower of the old front, but left the northern tower and the great central doorway. The church, therefore, has now two imperfect fronts, one behind the other, the southern tower of the later, and the northern tower of the earlier, front, being in a comparatively finished state. Thus, from our point of view, we trust it may always remain: we could not wish to see the church enlarged, and the later front finished at the sacrifice of the precious relics of Romanesque work which lurk behind. The northern tower is one of those which, in England, we should be inclined to set very early, but which in Germany are often late in the eleventh century, or early in the twelfth. But the central doorway, double, and divided by a shaft, is one of the noblest examples of the style. The whole is rich with ornament, bold and massive, but thoroughly appropriate: while the central shaft carries us back to Speier and Gelnhausen, and to the lands from which Speier and Gelnhausen drew their mod

els. As becomes an imperial city, the capital of the one single column in the whole building assumes what we may, perhaps, venture to call the imperial form.

In chronological order, Limburg comes next. The church, raised in modern times to cathedral rank, is, throughout, a perfect example of the German transitional style: the stage where, outside at least, the general look and feeling is still Romanesque, but where nearly every arch is pointed. The details of the west front show plainly that it belongs to the thirteenth century; bit as far as the general outline and finish of its towers go, it might have belonged to the eleventh. Within, the piers, though their arches are pointed, retain the square massiveness of the Romanesque ; but the upper portions are later, and, in idea at least, much more advanced. Limburg, indeed, has some points of likeness to Laon in internal treatment as well as in external outline. Both have the same double triforium, making a fourfold, instead of threefold, division of the height; but at Limburg, as so often in Germany, the lower triforium forms a real gallery designed from the beginning. The internal treatment of the central octagon is most skilfully managed; and the whole inside has an appearance of dignity which might have been thought hard to reach in a church on so small a scale.

Marburg is, on every ground, one of the most famous churches of Germany. Its connection with the history of St. Elizabeth, and with the early days of the Teutonic Order, its wealth in tombs, pictures, and other ornaments, the shrine of the sainted princess herself among them, combine, with its singular perfection as an example of the earlier German Gothic style, to make it one of the most typical churches of the land. All of a single date, except, no doubt, the finish of the two slightly unequal towers, the building gains as an artistic study what it loses as a matter of architectural history. In Marburg, there is nothing to be spelled out, as at Wetzlar: there is a work, perfect in its own kind, to be studied and rated at its true value. It is a thoroughly German church,-—a Hallenk rche with apsidal transepts: no one could for a moment take it for a French or an English building. The merits of the arrangement the equal height of the nave and its aisles, as compared with the several stages of internal elevation with which we are more familiaris fairly a question of taste. It may, perhaps, be said that, at least as we see it at Marburg and Wetzlar, it gains in lightness, but loses in dignity. The treatment of the piers and arches at Marburg is most successful that of the windows, and the external treatment generally, strikes us as less so. We cannot blame its designers for not choosing the heavy roof which seems to crush so many churches of this type, as the choirs of the two great churches of Nürnberg. But, surely, the arrangement of Wetzlar, where each bay of the aisle is gabled, and contains a single large window, is better than that of Marburg, where the gables are hipped, and the whole circuit of the outside is cut up into two ranges of small windows. Even in the apses, the special German arrangement—the tall, narrow windows, so glorious at Aachen, and which may fairly stand their ground, as an alternative arrangement, beside the circling chapels of France, and the great east windows of England, is, at Marburg, forsaken. To us it seems that two or more ranges of windows, unless they really mark two constructive stages of the building, sin against the first law of reality. The arcade, triforium, and clerestory, are properly marked by three ranges of windows, because they are three real stages of the building: here at Marburg, the whole height of the church forms but one stage; and it should therefore have but one range of windows. In Romanesque apses and transept-fronts we indeed see several ranges of windows, one above the other; and the effect is thoroughly good. But why? Because, though they do not mark any actual constructive ranges in the apses and transept-fronts themselves, they are continuations of real constructive ranges in other parts of the building. Also in Romanesque, a style without tracery, windows must ever be small; and a window of the height of those at Aachen or Wetzlar would be impossible. It struck us at the first glance, and we still think, after weighing the matter, that

the arrangement of the windows is a fault throughout the beautiful church.

We have no room left to speak of the castle of Marburg. We will, therefore, only say that it is no mere ruin, no mere predatory fortress. It is a well-preserved mediæval secular building, worthy of the site on which it stands, and of the church on which it looks down. Its vaulted halls, its chapel, its windows, the architectural details throughout the building, deserve real artistic study, and not mere picturesque admiration.

A MIDDLE-AGED LOVE-STORY.

THEY had come, a little group of friendly faces, to watch me off, with waving handkerchiefs and kindly good-bys; and I stood on the stern nodding and waving back, till the steamer swept down the river out of their sight.

I knew I should have their prayers that the great sea might be gentle with me; I knew they would watch the weather, and look for the telegram of the arrival of our ship; yet I knew I was taking nothing from their lives, and that they each would go home hardly missing me: so it was with no great wrench of heart that I saw the pilot put of from us, and took the last look at my native shores.

During most of the passage I was just comfortably seasick, so I sat all the day long in a reclining-chair on deck, watching the white caps on the purple and green and blue waves that mounted and fell, down and up, up and down, away out to the far horizon. I saw the shining nautiluses float by, and now and then a whale, or a shoal of porpoises, or a sail, speeding white and full across the water.

I saw also a good many other things nearer by; for I didn't put my eyes in my pocket along with my shortsighted glasses; and nobody was much likely to mind a middle-aged woman in hood and waterproof.

The first thing I saw was a young girl with dark eyes, and brown hair that rippled itself into a tangle of rough curls whenever she took off her net. She was not so very pretty, nor so very brilliant; but there was a piquant charm about her that attracted half the passengers before the first day was over. By the end of the second day, everybody, from the captain to the ship's surgeon, and from the surgeon to the cabin-boy, was eager to show her attention; and everybody was met by the same genial smile and lively retort.

She won her way at once into my heart by the kindly thought that led her to bring little relishes from the table to tempt my sickly appetite, and to soothe my forehead with bay-water and gentle touches of her shapely brown hands, where a great emerald glittered, encircled by diamonds. Very soon she got into the habit of drawing her rug beside my chair, and sitting on the deck leaning against me, so that I might "pet her," as she said.

This was how it happened that my quiet, out-of-the-way corner came to be the centre of the life and gayety and romance of the whole shipboard.

It seemed this young girl, Rosa Armour, was an only child, and an orphan, going to an uncle in Germany, her nearest of kin.

"Dear heart! I hope her uncle will be wise as well as loving," said I to myself very often; for she seemed too fragile a bubble of humanity to drift on through life alone.

The tips of her brown curls were lighter than the rest; and here and there were little bright touches all over her hair, as though the sun was shining in spots on it. One morning I sat coiling these gleams of sunshine around my fingers, and watching a flock of Mother Carey's chickens skim restlessly over the restless water, thinking these thoughts about Rosa, and having her soft presence alone to myself for a few moments. Not many, however: soon, up came a New Zealander: of course there was a New Zealander, or an Australian, on our boat.

"You are very lowly, Miss Armour," said he. "Let me bring you a chair."

guidly. "The deck is my favorite seat, if I can only have an excuse to sit on it."

"But you need something over you," persisted the New Zealander, going away, and coming back directly with his own heavy gray wrap. Then he seated himself on a low camp-stool beside her, folding the wrap over the two. "I never saw so rough a sea as this all the way from Honolulu to San Francisco," said he, looking out upon the gentle swell of the lazily-mounting waves.

"Rough!" cried Miss Armour. "I am sure the ocean is as smooth as a mill-pond!"

"Oh! but not as compared to the Pacific, peaceful: it was rightly named. We have never such gales on that as Sweep the Atlantic, but only the gentlest westerly breezes." The New Zealander shivered as he spoke, and drew his wrap closer over his knees. "We have the most charming climate in New Zealand," he went on: "we are never too hot, and never too cold. In fact, we never think of the weather. And the soil is the most fertile in the world."

"Pity it is in such an out-of-the-way part of the earth that nobody can live there," said Miss Armour.

"Beg your pardon, miss: there are several English towns of thirty thousand inhabitants each; and we never think of ourselves as being out-of-the-way, but rather feel sorry for those who live so far off," returned the other, bending his tall figure earnestly forward.

Rosa leaned her pretty head towards him in a confiding attitude of interest, and laughed: "Oh, so you are the people, and wisdom is going to die with you!" said she. "But what do you do out there in the heart of the universe?"

"We dig gold for one thing, and raise sheep for another, -millions and millions of them: from thirty to forty vessels are constantly plying to England with the tallow and pressed wool."

"What do you do with all that mutton?" asked Rosa, looking idly at the light in her ring, and then as idly at the light in the speaker's eyes.

"We use what we can," was the reply; "and sometimes, I am sorry to say, we bury the flesh, not usually; but sometimes an order will come to one farmer for a thousand sheep, if you please; and all he can do is to clip off the wool, get out the fat, and bury the carcasses."

"What a pity the meat can't be sent to the hungry poor at home! Why don't somebody condense it as they do the beef in Texas?" I said in my practical way.

"In good time I dare say somebody will; but we can't do every thing at once," replied the New Zealander, looking with sudden interest at the game of shuffle-board being played beside us.

Just then along came the ship's surgeon, a blonde youth in uniform, with his hair parted in the middle.

"Miss Armour," said he, "the gun is to be fired at the bow will you come and see it done?"

Miss Armour started up at once, turning the same halfconfiding glance and ready smile upon him she had been giving us.

"I am going to leave my rug with you: I shall come back," said she, beaming over her shoulder upon me as she took the surgeon's arm and went away.

The New Zealander looked after her, tried to console himself by drawing his wrap in another fold across his knees, did not succeed, and finally got up and went away. Of course it was not worth his while to make himself agreeable to a middle-aged woman in hood and waterproof So I sat, and looked at the likeness of a lake among the sunset clouds, and tried to decide whether I had better take oatmeal gruel or biscuit-tea for my supper: wondering the while, half unconsciously, about the old chord in my mem ory that was always being struck by a certain musical ring in the New Zealander's voice.

After an hour or so the gun was fired; and presently Miss Armour came back, with the disorder of the strong sea-wind in her hair, and its freshness in her pretty pink cheeks.

she best loved to be, just such a smile as she would have given to the stokers down in the engine-room, or to the ship's cat. But it was lovely to look upon while it lasted; and we middle-aged people have learned to warm ourselves in any chance ray of sunlight, without stopping to consider whether it is likely to be perpetual.

This time the bit of sunshine did not stay long; for there came up an artist with his sketch-book; and when Miss Armour had sufficiently admired his graphic pencillings of the captain and the quarter-master, and the sea-sick occupant of an upper berth, it was time to throw the log; and so he bore her off, to find out by her own eyes whether we were actually going at the rate of thirteen knots, or only twelve and a half.

That was how the days went. The passengers read and paced the deck, played games and guessed riddles, and were always hungry; the pilot stood steady and firm at the wheel; the sailors ran up and down about the rigging like overgrown spiders, and were forever scouring and scrubbing, tying and untying, drawing up and letting down. Thus at last we had come safely almost to our desired haven. With fair sailing, we were only one day out from port; and, fond as we had grown to be of each other, we were getting impatient to part.

Miss Armour, during all the voyage, had kept on as she began, beguiling every one with her trick of lip and eye. They ran after her like boys at the string of a kite. Well, they had nothing better to do just then; and when she had faded out, as a rainbow fades, I made no doubt she would be as easily forgotten, or only remembered as a midsummer's day-dream, by all, unless it might be a solitary, warmhearted man like the New Zealander. To tell the truth, I was a little sorry for him. Evidently, life had not brought him all it might; and he was hungry for the love and confidence that had never been his. So I was afraid he would miss this little sparkle of girlhood and warm youth, and find the void deeper when it had gone out.

To the very last day, Rosa kept her place by my chair; and to the very last the New Zealander kept his place by her, when no one younger stepped in to carry her off, which was pretty often, to be sure. Then, he always quietly went away himself, with a kind of grave regret in his face. On this last morning, Miss Armour had just left us along with a young lawyer, to drop oranges and lemons among the steerage passengers, when I noticed the New Zealander looking after her with a sadder regret than usual almost a pain in his eyes. He had such handsome dark eyes! I could see that without my glasses.

"Now," said I to myself, "I hope he isn't going to get soft, — a sensible, gentlemanly, agreeable man like him, and quite old enough to be her father!" And so I looked at him to see if he was, when suddenly he turned upon me.

"At least, you might have written, Agatha Wells!" said he sharply.

-

I started, as you may think, to hear my own name spoken so familiarly by a stranger: when, looking again, behold! I saw beneath the bronze, and under the wrinkles and behind the beard, a face that twenty years before was the dearest in the world to me, the face of Duncan Ashley! We parted one day expecting to meet on the next; but that evening he was called away, and wrote instead of coming. In the letter, he said, what he had said before with his eyes, yes, those same beautiful eyes, - that I was the choice of his heart and the desire of his life. "Answer me," said he: "I cannot wait till I see you." So I answered, - a long, foolish letter, though there was no need of writing; for he had read all I could say long before, with those eyes of his. Then I watched and waited for him; but never saw him or heard one word more. you are young, you can imagine the slow dying-out of hope and expectation; and if you are old, you know how such things can be lived over, and hidden in secret graves.

If

But now, as though the graves had been opened, and the judgment set, came this sudden reproachful question up from the buried past. I fairly caught my breath, as turned back my eyes, and looked him in the face again. "Forgive me," said he directly, in a gentler tone. "I

did not mean to speak. You brought it out with your eyes: that questioning turn was so familiar. Of course you were quite right, and I never blamed you. I never meant you should see me again; but the temptation to feel myself beside you, only to be in the soothing charm of your presence, was too great. It has been a blessing I shall carry with me all the rest of my life."

He was rising to go away, but I put out my hand. "I did write, Duncan Ashley," said I: "the letter must have gone wrong." "You did!

You wrote!" he cried. sinking back in his

chair again, and looking at me eagerly. "What did you

say?"

"There was only one thing I could say; and I said that," I answered, blushing as though I had just written the

letter.

A middle-aged woman in hood and waterproof! But, dear me! it was only my face that was middle-aged, after all my heart was as young and silly as ever. And as for Duncan's face, the marks of care, and thought, and time, fell off, leaving in it only the eternal youth of love.

It was the old story of a lost letter, and the older story of a proud man believing himself rejected and humiliated, and fleeing to the ends of the earth with his pain.

"Twenty precious years wasted!" said my New Zealander. "We will not be separated another day while we both live. There is a clergyman among our passengers; and we will be married this very hour."

That was so like his headlong decisions! Certainly he did need a sober second-thought like me for ballast. "That cannot be !" I cried. "The ceremony wouldn't be legal witha license or something. And I would by no means do any thing so sensational and conspicuous.”

But, bless your heart! I might as well have tried to wipe up the Atlantic with my pocket-handkerchief. He was so grieved, and so impatient, and so resolute (and, indeed, when one comes to think of it, twenty years is long enough for an engagement), that I finally dropped off my waterproof and my sea-sickness, and stood up behind the binnacle, and was married before eight bells that very morning, -ring and all. Duncan produced it from a small casket, where he had carried it in his waistcoat pocket for the whole twenty years.

"I could never bear to put the little thing away," said he, looking at it tenderly.

The next day we came to port, with the sun shining and our flags flying. There was a flurry of good-bys, a hoisting of trunks, a welcoming of friends on the shore, and a glad hurrying to and fro.

Among the rest was an instant's nestling of Miss Armour's lips on my cheek, and a little cling of her hand in mine, the vanishing of a smile, and she was gone, like the flash of a fire-fly, out of my sight forever. But wherever she is, and however she fares, she has the daily blessing of two middle-aged hearts, whose way to each other she unconsciously lighted.

My Lords, Ladies, and Gentlemen, - Thirty-six years have now elapsed since, at the first, and (I regret to say) the which only, meeting of this association held in Bristol, ancient city followed immediately upon our national universities in giving it a welcome, I enjoyed the privilege which I hold it one of the most valuable functions of these annual assemblages to bestow: that of coming into personal relation with those distinguished men whose names are, to every cultivator of science, as "household words;" and the light of whose brilliant example, and the warmth of whose cordial encouragement, are the most precious influences by which his own aspirations can be fostered and dire ted. Under the presidency of the Marquis of Lansdowne, with Conybeare and Prichard as vice-presidents, with Vernon

Harcourt as general secretary, and John Phillips as assistant-secretary, were gathered together Whewell and Peacock, James Forbes and Sir W. Rowan Hamilton, Murchison and Sedgwick, Buckland and De la Beche, Henslow and Daubeny, Roget, Richardson, and Edward Forbes, with many others, perhaps not less distinguished, of whom my own recollection is less vivid.

In his honored old age, Sedgwick still retains, in the academic home of his life, all his pristine interest in whatever bears on the advance of the science he has adorned as well as enriched; and Phillips still cultivates with all his old enthusiasm the congenial soil to which he has been transplanted. But the rest, -our fathers and elder brothers, "where are they? It is for us of the present generation to show that they live in our lives: to carry forward the work which they commenced, and to transmit the influence of their example to our own successors.

--

There is one of these great men whose departure from among us, since last we met, claims a special notice; and whose life, full as it was of years and honors, we should have all desired to see prolonged for a few months, could its feebleness have been unattended with suffering. For we should all then have sympathized with Murchison in the delight with which he would have received the intelligence of the safety of the friend in whose scientific labors and personal welfare he felt to the last the keenest interest. That this intelligence, which our own expedition for the relief of Livingstone would have obtained (we will hope) a few months later, should have been brought to us through the generosity of one, and the enterprising ability-may I not use our peculiarly English word, the "pluck?" - of another of our American brethren, cannot but be a matter of national regret to us. But let us bury that regret in the common joy which both nations feel in the result; and, while we give a cordial welcome to Mr. Stanley, let us glory in the prospect now opening, that England and America will co-operate in that noble object, which, far more than the discovery of the sources of the Nile, our great traveller has set before himself as his true mission, the extinction of the slave trade.

At the last meeting of this association, I had the pleasure of being able to announce that I had received from the first lord of the Admiralty a favorable reply to a representation I had ventured to make to him as to the importance of prosecuting on a more extended scale the course of inquiry into the physical and biological conditions of the deep sea, on which, with my colleagues, Prof. Wyville Thomson and Mr. J. Gwyn Jeffreys, I had been engaged for the three preceding years. That for which I had asked was a circumnavigating expedition of at least three years' duration, provided with an adequate, scientific staff, and with the most complete equipment that our experience could devise. The council of the Royal Society having been led, by the encouraging tenor of the answer I had received, to make a formal application to this effect, the liberal arrangements of the government have been carried out under the advice of a scientific committee, which included representatives of this association. H.M. ship " Challenger," a vessel in every way suitable for the purpose, is now being fitted out at Sheerness. The command of the expedition is intrusted to Capt. Nares, an officer of whose high qualifications I have myself the fullest assurance while the scientific charge of it will be taken by my excellent friend, Prof. Wyville Thomson, at whose suggestion it was that these investigations were originally commenced, and whose zeal for the efficient prosecution of them is shown by his relinquishment for a time of the important academic position he at present fills. It is anticipated that the expedition will sail in November next; and I feel sure that the good wishes of all of you will go along

with it.

The confident anticipation expressed by my predecessor, that, for the utilization of the total eclipse of the sun then impending, our government would "exercise the same wise liberality as heretofore in the interests of science," has been amply fulfilled. An eclipse expedition to India was organized at the charge of the home government, and placed under the direction of Mr. Lockyer: the Indian government

contributed its quota to the work; and a most valuable body of results was obtained, of which, with those of the previous year, a report is now being prepared under the direction of the council of the astronomical society.

66

It has been customary with successive occupants of this chair, distinguished as leaders in their several divisions of the noble army of science, to open the proceedings of the meetings over which they respectively presided with a discourse on some aspect of Nature in her relation to man. But I am not aware that any one of them has taken up the other side of the inquiry, that which concerns man as the interpeter of Nature; and I have therefore thought it not inappropriate to lead you to the con-ideration of the mental processes by which are formed those fundamental conceptions of matter and force, of cause and effect, of law and order, which furnish the basis of all scientific reasoning, and constitute the philosophia prima of Bacon. There is a great deal of what I cannot but regard as fallacious and misleading philosophy" oppositions of science falsely socalled " - abroad in the world at the present time. And I hope to satify you that those who set up their own conceptions of the orderly sequence which they discern in the phenomena of nature as fixed and determinate laws, by which those phenomena not only are, within all human experience, but always have been, and always must be, invariably governed, are really guilty of the intellectual arrogance they condemn in the systems of the ancients, and place themselves in diametrical antagonism to those real philosophers by whose comprehensive grasp and penetrating insight that order has been so far disclosed. For what love of the truth as it is in nature was ever more conspicuous than that which Kepler displayed in his abandonment of each of the ingenious conceptions of the planetary system which his fertile imagination had successively devised so soon as it proved to be inconsistent with the facts disclosed by observation? In that almost admiring description of the way in which his enemy Mars, "whom he had left at home a despised captive," had "burst all the chains of the equations, and broke forth from the prisons of the tables," who does not recognize the justice of Schiller's definition of the real philosopher as one who always loves truth better than his system? And when at last he had gained the full assurance of a success so complete that (as he says) he thought he must be dreaming, or that he had been reasoning in a circle, who does not feel the almost sublimity of the self-abnegation with which, after attaining what was in his own estimation such a glorious reward of his life of toil, disappointment, and self-sacrifice, he abstains from claiming the applause of his contemporaries, but leaves his fame to after ages in these noble words: "The book is written to be read either now or by posterity, I care not which. It may well wait a century for a reader, as God has waited six thousand years for an observer."

And when a yet greater than Kepler was bringing to its final issue that grandest of all scientific conceptions,-long pondered over by his almost superhuman intellect, which linked together the heavens and the earth, the planets and the sun, the primaries and their satellites, and included even the vagrant comets, in the nexus of a universal attraction, establishing for all time the truth for whose utterance Galileo had been condemned, and giving to Kepler's laws a significance of which their author had never dreamed, - what was the meaning of that agitation which prevented the philosopher from completing his computation, and compelled him to hand it over to his friend? That it was not the thought of his own greatness, but the glimpse of the grand universal order thus revealed to his mental vision which shook the serene and massive soul of Newton to its foundations, we have the proof in that beautiful comparison in which he likened himself to a child picking up shells on the shore of the vast ocean of truth,- a comparison which will be evidence to all time, at once of his true philosophy and his profound humility.

Though it is with the intellectual representation of Nature, which we call "science," that we are primarily concerned, it will not be without its use to cast a glance, in the first instance, at the other two principal characters