Linnean Socteiy, 375 



" With thee conversing I forget all lime; 

 All seasons, and their change, all please alike. 

 Sweet is the breath of Morn, her rising sweet. 

 With charm of earliest birds ; pleasant the Sun, 

 When first on this delightful land he spreads 

 His orient beams, on herb, tree, fruit, and flower :....'' 

 But neither .... herb, fruit, flower. 

 Glistering with dew, .... nor walk by Moon, 

 Or ghttering star-light, without thee is sweet.'* 



Indeed, remove from all human studies this one, single, heart-stirring, all- 

 uniting, all-ennobhng principle, what are they all but toilsome madness, the 

 vanity of folly ; — at the best, delusive dreams ; in reality, different modes of 

 restless selfishness ! Why perplex our minds with any study, if all sympathy be a 

 mere illusion? The insufficiency of ethical motives, unless something stronger 

 can impel us than the prospective remote improvement of our contemplative 

 energies, is too obvious to need proof. Ambition has no check, licentious 

 selfishness no bounds, if the consciousness of responsibility to an omniscient 

 Governor be once extinguished. But this hallowed and all-sanctifying con- 

 sciousness must be first preserved and cultivated by continual contemplation 

 of those evidences of his ineffable power and goodness, which it has pleased 

 the Almighty Author of Creation to display around us. Dr. Paley, in his 

 excellent moral arrangement of natural objects, with a strain of eloquence 

 quite foreign to his ordinary close and cautiously argumentative style, thus 

 supports his important proposition, that the Deity has added pleasure to 

 animal sensations beyond what was necessary for any other purpose than 

 the beneficent promotion of enjoyment : — " I shall not," says he, " I believe, 

 be contradicted when I say, that, if one train of thinking be more desirable 

 than another, it is that which regards the phenomena of nature with a con- 

 stant reference to a supreme intelligent Author. To have made this the 

 ruling, the habitual sentiment of our minds, is to have laid the foundation 

 of every thing which is rehgious. The world, thenceforth, becomes a temple, 

 and life one continued act of adoration." If this be the certain result of a 

 sincere, ardent, truth-seeking investigation (and what true disciple of Ray 

 and of Linnaeus can doubt, after full evidence of his own experience, that it 

 is so), what more abundant answer can or need be given to the question, 

 Cui bono? than this? The tendency of our Linnean studies, or our contem- 

 plation of the glorious universe, is to tranquillise our minds, to purify our 

 affections, to expand our hearts with veneration and love toward the great 

 Author of our being and of all being ; to prepare us to meet the day of our 

 inevitable change, the awful moment in which we know our career on earth 

 must terminate, with calm undoubting confidence in the Creator, that he 

 hath not made us in vain, to glitter like motes in the sunbeam, and sink for 

 ever into shadow, but has enabled us to improve our faculties, and has filled 

 us with high and holy aspirings, with longings after immortality, which will 

 not end in disappointment. The beauty and the wonder with which it has 

 pleased the Creator to invest all his works, the starry firmament, the depths 

 of the sea and its multitudinous inhabitants, the insect tribes, the reptiles, 

 the birds, and the beasts, and the whole of the vegetable kingdom, produce, 

 by all their diversities and analogies, continual excitement, most happily 

 adapted to prevent weariness and languor of attention ; they occur in all 

 our paths, before us, beside us, and behind us, above us and below us, by 

 night and by day. He that planted the ear, shall he not hear ? or he that 

 made the eye, shall he not see ? Whither shall I go, then, from thy Spirit ? 

 whither shall I go, then, from thy presence ? Th^nk God ! thank God ! It 

 cannot be. He has given us the rule of life ; he has sec before us the mira- 

 culous evidence, in his creation, of the wisdom which ordained the rule ; he 

 allures us by all loveliness ; he compels us by his majesty, and awes us by 



