34 8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



renunciation and of duty to neighbor these are brighter stars in the 

 firmament of human genius than the scientific discoverer. The dis- 

 covery of the law of gravitation is the grandest attainment of scientific 

 thought ; but can we justly compare the effects of that generaliza- 

 tion upon human interests and happiness with the elevating influence 

 which is exerted by the poetry of Isaiah or of Shakespeare upon mul- 

 titudes throughout the world ; which is perhaps being felt at this very 

 moment by fireside or on sick-bed in distant lands by the solitary 

 dweller on the skirts of the vast forests of Western America, in the 

 great lone land of Canada, in the farthest depths of the Australian 

 bush ? Science has not rendered the philosopher, the poet, and the 

 moral teacher superfluous, nor will it ever supersede them ; on the 

 contrary, it will have need of them to attain to its own perfect work- 

 ing to the bettering of man's estate ; and it may well seem to some 

 that the time lias come when its manifold scattered and somewhat 

 anarchical results should be penetrated by the synthetic insight of the 

 philosopher, be embodied in forms of beauty by the poet's imagina- 

 tion, and utilized by the moral teacher to guide and promote the 

 progress of mankind. So long as man sees splendor in the starry 

 heavens, beauty in the aspects of Nature, grandeur and glory in self- 

 sacrifice, so long will he feel that his brief conscious life is but a mo- 

 mentary wavelet on the vast ocean of the unconscious ; that there is 

 in him the yearning of something deeper than knowledge, which 

 " cometh from afar," and which the labored acquisitions of science 

 will ever fail to satisfy. 



* 



ABOUT SHARKS. 



SHARKS are usually spoken of as the most rapacious and abhorrent 

 of sea-animals. That they are rapacious is undeniable, but why 

 they are so is not generally considered. We will go a little into the 

 matter. The shark, a fish of the family Sqitalidce, when quite in his 

 infant state, and only a few inches in length, exhibits a pugnacity al- 

 most without parallel for his age. He will attack fish two or three 

 times larger than himself; or, if caught, and placed for observation 

 on the deck of a vessel, he resents handling, and, with unerring pre- 

 cision, strikes a finger placed on almost any part of his body. 



Two things contribute to the shark's determinate fierceness. In 

 the first place, we may refer to his teeth, for of these engines of de- 

 struction Nature has been to him particularly bountiful ; and this 

 species of bounty he has a peculiar pleasure in exercising. If he 

 could speak, he would probably tell us that, besides being troubled 

 with his teeth, which he could not help keeping in use, lie had been 

 gifted with enormous abdominal viscera, and that, more particularly, 



