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Nothing on earth could give us any idea of it. If anyone wished 
to write a poem, he suggested they should take the surface of the 
sun for a subject. It was the great laboratory of the universe, 
and provided more food for the imagination in its boundless 
phenomena than anything we could conceive. 
TRAVELS: HOW, WHY AND WHERE. 
By THOMAS WYLES, The College, Buaton. October Tth, 1890. 
The lecturer began by saying that according to some our 
proneness to travel is a relic of our savage nature. Man in 
savage life is very much a marauding wanderer. To him a 
settled abode is an offence and civilized labour intolerable. This 
vagrant blood is often strong in the veins of an Englishman, 
and we are perhaps not only the most migratory, but the most 
travelling people on the face of the globe. Our American cousins 
necessarily inherit much of our roving tendency, and although 
the vastness of their country and its extremely interesting 
geography offer unbounded facilities for sport and travel, still its 
yet new and comparatively unsettled condition is an obstacle to 
many, and the tendency of Americans is to overflow into Europe. 
Our motive for travelling is primarily to widen our knowledge 
of the world in which we live: it is most reasonable that man’s 
mental and emotional faculties should find their highest exercise, 
their most refined enjoyment, in asking nature to reveal her 
secrets, and in seeking to know what is man’s relation to them. 
But every conceivable motive and no motive may prompt us to 
travel. In the progress of the century education has widened, 
literature has expanded, a better knowledge of the world has 
been very widely diffused, wealth has been more easily acquired 
by broader and lower stages of our civil life, and, with the 
acquisition of means, the desire for travel has marvellously spread 
itself among our own and other peoples. Many travel to say 
that they have travelled; these do much to crowd the modern 
railway train and the large tourist hotels. The hard-worked 
and weary man or woman of broad sympathies, who for eleven 
months in the year has plodded in shop, or warehouse, or office, 
often toiling on far beyond the stipulated eight hours a day, well 
merits the means and freedom to spend a well-earned holiday in 
travel. Such may be more or less observant, but the benefit of 
exciting and instructive change is a large profit to their lives, 
and the money spent in travel is to these a good investment. But 
from whatever motive it may be undertaken, we must rejoice in 
