PROCEEDINGS OF SOCIETIES. 149 
who are unaware of the pleasure it affords. As so many ladies 
were present, he suggested that it was a branch of science they 
may both delight and excel in, for it deals with the most delicate 
objects, requiring the finest touch and handling, all of which dis- 
play exquisite workmanship, and many consummate beauty. He 
directed attention to some enlarged drawings made by two ladies 
from the objects under the microscope, which, for accurate draw- 
ing and taste, could not well be exceeded; and he remarked that 
if ladies with leisure would devote the same patience they exer- 
cised in fancy work to microscopical investigations, not in a 
desultory way, but following up one subject, they might add to 
our discoveries as well as to their own interest in life. And if 
ladies did not pursue it themselves, they might create a taste for 
natural history in their families, and thus become the mothers of 
the minds of future naturalists. Carlyle described Dr. Arnold’s 
house as a “temple of industrious peace;” and it is in such 
temples, with their guardian priestesses, that tastes are best cul- 
tivated, which, in after life, have the pleasantest recollections ; 
and, as age advances, the mind, interested in all kinds of truth, re- 
mains fresh and young, a source of comfort to itself and of light 
and joy to all around it. After directing attention to some of the 
microscopical specimens of most interest to such a company, Dr. 
Bullar thanked the town council for lending the handsome and 
commodious rooms of the Hartley Institution for the legitimate 
purpose of increasing taste in science in Southampton, and he 
thus concluded:—“ Living as we are amongst so many new 
wonders, in an age which paints in an instant our portraits by 
the light, sends our messages by the electric force with the 
velocity of a wish, carries our bodies and our merchandise by con- 
summate mechanism, moved by steam, over earth and sea, with 
the speed of the storm and the certainty of time, and brings and 
concentrates with the same rapidity, from every portion of the 
globe, its freshest news for our daily reading—which, by a refined 
optical chemistry, discovers, by the colours of light, the actual 
mineral constitution of the sun—with the telescope not onl 
discloses, but photographs the mountains and the valleys, the’ 
extinct volcanoes, and the sterile rocks of the moon, and resolves 
the distant night clouds of light into systems of starry worlds— 
and, in the other direction, looking downwards instead of up- 
wards, by our microscope reveals new worlds of living beings in 
the water we drink and in the dust we tread upon—living 
amidst such wondrous realisations of the scientific hopes and dim 
anticipations of the most sanguine philosophers of former days, 
these marvels seem to us so common that we are apt to forget our 
high privileges, and not sufficiently to dwell upon and to rejoice 
in the fuller life and more extended knowledge and wider range 
of beauty that is opened to us. For with such advantages 
lavishly bestowed on us, we only need the common use of our 
faculties—the eyes awake to see, the mind attentive to observe, 
the heart open to feel, this wondrous world of ours—in order to 
