172 BRAiMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. 



tolled, were content to grope purblind after nightfall, at the risk of 

 property, life, and limb ; we who pace the busy streets in this ques- 

 tioning age of wondrous things, have brilliant meteors to guide us on 

 our way, and the invisible streams that thread the iron channels be- 

 neath the streets of the paved city keep all night long their jets of 

 flame flickering on the pathway, to render still more complete the 

 blessings of the light. But, like all other things, in the flux and flow 

 of time even the gas light with its wondrous beauty is to become dim 

 before that application of the electric current, which promises, like 

 another sun, to banish darkness from the land. 



Not the less wondrous are those results of scientific research which 

 have opened up new and glorious empires of beauty in the minute 

 structure of the human frame, and the harmonies of its marvellous 

 functions. The names of Majendie, Bell, and Liebig, are to become 

 the poetic idols of a future age, when the truths revealed by their la- 

 bours shall have been fully developed and applied. The unexpected 

 results achieved by Sir Charles Bell in his patient investigations of 

 the nervous system, by which we learn that the various functions of 

 volition, touch, and reflex action have each their appointed channels 

 of operation and communication, have thrown a light over the mys- 

 terious economy of the mind in its relation to the body, which pro- 

 mises to future inquirers a harvest of the most noble fruit. None the 

 less wonderful are those discoveries of the philosopher of Giessen, 

 which reveal to us the intimate relations of all organised beings to the 

 lifeless elements of matter, and the chain of dependence established by 

 chemical law. Thus we learn that, in the blood which flows in our 

 veins the immediate cause of vitality is the very metal with which we 

 make our railroad bars and build the ponderous engine ; that the very 

 brilliancy of colour and vitality of the blood itself depends on the 

 minute atom of iron which each globule contains, and that if that be 

 deficient life must wane. From the labours of Liebig, too, we learn 

 that all our foods have corresponding qualities, and that the old dog- 

 mas which upheld the foods derived from the animal kingdom, above 

 those obtained from the green herb, were fictions and fancies all, hav- 

 ing no other substance than that which gives a colouring to dreams. 

 Passing the applications of these principles to agriculture and the in- 

 dustrial arts of life, we have still more of the poetry of science in 

 those elaborate investigations of Faraday, by which he has analysed 

 the electric spark itself, and traced out the laws and relations of light 



