216 CONGRESSIONAL PROCEEDINGS. 



which imagination herself can form no distinct conception : 

 the influence of all these upon the globe which we inhabit, 

 and upon the condition of man, its dying and deathless in- 

 habitant, is great and mysterious, and, in the search for 

 final causes, to a great degree inscrutable to his finite and 

 limited faculties. The extent to which they are discover- 

 able is, and must remain unknown ; but, to the vigilance of 

 a sleepless eye, to the toil of a tireless hand, and to the 

 meditations of a thinking, combining, and analyzing mind, 

 secrets are successively revealed, not only of the deepest 

 import to the welfare of man in his earthly career, but 

 which seem to lift him from the earth to the threshold of 

 his eternal abode ; to lead him blindfold up to the council- 

 chamber of Omnipotence ; and there, stripping the bandage 

 from his eyes, bid him look undazzled at the Throne of 

 God. 



In the history of the human species, (so far as it is known 

 to us,) astronomical observation was one of the first objects 

 of pursuit for the acquisition of knowledge. In the first 

 chapter of the Sacred Volume we are told that, in the pro- 

 cess of creation, " God said, let there be lights in the firma- 

 ment of the heavens, to divide the day from the night ; and 

 let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days and 

 years." By the special appointment, then, of the Creator, 

 they were made the standards for the measurement of time 

 upon earth. They were made for more ; not only for sea- 

 sons, for days, and years — but for signs. Signs of what ? 

 It may be that the word in this passage has reference to tlie 

 signs of the Egyptian zodiac, to mark the succession of 

 solar months ; or it may indicate a more latent connection 

 between the heavens and the earth, of the nature of judicial 

 astrology. These relations are not only apparent to the 

 most superficial observation of man, but many of them 

 remain inexhaustible funds of successive discovery — per- 

 haps as long as the continued existence of man upon earth. 

 What an unknown world of mind, for example, is yet teem- 

 ing in the womb of time, to be revealed in tracing the 

 causes of the sympathy between the magnet and the pole — 

 that unseen, immaterial spirit, which walks with us through 

 the most entangled forests, over the most interminable 

 wilderness, and across every region of the pathless deep, 

 by day, by night, in the calm serene of a cloudless sky, and 

 in the howling of the hurricane or the typhoon ? Who can 

 witness the movements of that tremulous needle, poised 

 upon its centre, still tending to the polar star, but obedient 

 to his distant hand, armed with a metallic guide, round 



