196 CONGKESSIONAL PROCEEDINGS. 



door neighbors of the solar system, of the fixed stars, scattered over 

 the blue expanse in multitudes exceeding the power of human compu- 

 tation, and at distances of which imagination herself can form no dis- 

 tinct conception; the influence of all these upon the globe which we 

 inhabit, and upoii the condition of man, its dying and deathless inhab- 

 itant, 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 discoverable 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, l)id 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 process of creation, "God said, let there be 

 lights in the firmament of the heavens, to divide the day from the 

 night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for da3^s and 

 3"ears." 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 seasons, for days, and years — l)ut 

 for signs. Signs of what? It may be that the word in this passage 

 has reference to the signs of the Egyptian zodiac, to mark the succes- 

 sion 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 observa- 

 tion of man, but many of them remain inexhaustible funds of successive 

 discovery — perhaps as long as the continued existence of man upon 

 earth. What an unknown world of mind, for example, is yet teeming 

 in the womb of time, to be revealed in tracing the causes of the sym- 

 pathy 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, l)y "ight, in the calm serene of a cloudless sk}^ and in the 

 howling of the hurricane or the typhoon. Who can witness the move- 

 ments of that tremulous needle, poised upon its center, still tending 

 to the polar star, but obedient to His distant hand, armed with a metallic 

 guide, round every point of the compass, at the fiat of His will, without 

 feeling a thrill of amazement approaching to superstition ? The dis- 

 cover}^ of the attractive power of the magnet was made before the 

 invention of the alphabet or the age of hierogl3^phics. No record of 

 the event is found upon the annals of human history; but seven hun- 



