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te;leste" of La Place. Its demonstration supports with undoubted proof many doctrines of the great Newton. Discovery has succeeded discovery; but its powers have never yet been fully tested. "It is that field of mathematical investigation," says Davies, "where genius may exert its highest powers and find its surest rewards." Looking back through the long course of events leading to such a magnificent result, looking up to that choral dance of wandering planets, all whose courses and seasons are marked down for us in the yearly almanac, can we not find in these manifestations something on the whole quite wonderful, worthy of very deep thankfulness, heartfelt humility withal, and far-reaching hope?
In an age of many-colored absurdity, when extremes meet and contradictions harmonize,--when men of gross, material aims give implicit confidence to the wildest ravings of the supernatural, and pure-minded men embrace French theories of social organization,--when crowds of dullards all aflame with unexpected imagination assemble in ascension-robes to await the apocalyptic trump, and Asiatic polygamy spreads unmolested along our Western rivers,--when the prediction is accomplished, "Old men dream dreams and young men see visions," and the most practical of the ages bids fair to glide ghostly into history as the most superstitious,--it is well, it can but be well, to contemplate reverently that Reason, which Coleridge, after Leighton, calls "an influence from the Glory of the Almighty." In the contemplation of the spirit of man (not your _animula_, by any means!) there is earnest of immortality which needs not that one rise from the dead to confirm it. In view of the Foresight which guides men, we may trust that all this tumultuous sense of inadequacy in present institutions, this blind notion of wrong, far enough from intelligent correction, is, after all, better than sluggish inaction.
BULLS AND BEARS.
[Concluded.]
CHAPTER XXX
.The susp