THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION. 127 



deductions and inductions with the most rigid accuracy in his beaten 



track. 



I can conceive, too, the astronomer, conversant with the immensity 

 of simce and its innumerable systems of worlds, so prostrated before 

 the majesty of the material creation, as not only to lose sight of him- 

 self and of the whole race to which he belongs, but of the world, or 

 even of the solar system, and be led to doubt whether things so i)Oor, 

 and mean, and small can have any value in the sight of the Lord of 

 so wide a dominion. I can conceive him, too, observing the uni- 

 formity and the harmony of the laws that govern the whole system of 

 the heavens ; the undeviating course of all events_ among the stars 

 coming round as regularly as the shadow on the dial ; and the little 

 evidence there is that this uniformity has over suffered any disturb- 

 ance that cannot be accounted for by the law of gravitation, and made 

 the subject of calculation by the mathematician, who, working an 

 equation in his closet, shall come forth and declare the cause of irreg- 

 ularity, though that cause may be acting at thousands of millions of 

 miles distance — I can conceive him inferring from a uniformity like 

 this the absence of a superintending Providence in human affairs. If 

 the Creator, he will say, have given up the very heaven of heavens to 

 the immutable laws of gravitation, can I believe that he interferes by 

 his Providence to superintend the puny matters of this lower world ? 



His reasons seem plausible while the mind is pointed in that one 

 direction. But they lose all their force when, laying aside for a mo- 

 ment the telescope, the philosopher investigates with his microscope 

 the structure of any living thing, no matter how small and how seem- 

 ingly simple the organism may be. Let the object examined but have 

 life, and it will soon lead him to understand a little of the meaning of 

 God's glorious title, Ilaximus in minimis. And the further he car- 

 ries his researches, the more the field of research opens, until, ex- 

 tending from the speck beneath his lens, it spreads wider and wider, 

 and at" length blends with infinity at the ''horizon's limit." Here 

 his boasted analysis can afford him no help. He has laid bare the 

 "mechanism of the heavens;" he has weighed the sun and the 

 planets ; he has foretold with unerring certainty events which shall 

 happen a thousand years after he shall be laid in the dust : and yet 

 he cannot unravel the mystery that shrouds the seat of life, even as it 

 exists in the meanest thing that crawls. And if the life of this poor 

 worm be thus wonderful, what is that spirit which animates the 

 human frame? What is that humanity which, but a moment ago, 

 seemed like the small dust in the balance compared with the multitude 

 and the masses of the stars ? His conceptions of his own true position 

 in the scale of being become more rational. For a moment he views 

 from a new position the distant stars, as the peasant views them in a 

 clear night — points of light spangling the blue vault above. _ And he 

 reflects, " How do I hnoio that those shining ones are other than they 

 seem ? How do I Jcnoiu their size, their distance, the laws by which 

 they are governed — the reins by which the ' coursers of the sun ' are 

 held in their appointed track ? How, but by the intellectual powers 

 of. that human spirit which but now I deemed so poor and mean, so 



