IN FAVOR OF REVEALED RELIGION. 305 
of directing it on all the objects which it has been specially 
framed to see,— among the rest, on other eyes, and the pecu- 
liarities of their structure? In both natural and physical 
science, on the contrary, have we not often found, that while 
the promise has been slight, the fulfilment has been ample far 
eyond the reach of anticipation? When the boy James Watt 
was playing, as Arago tells the story, with the steam of the 
family tea-kettle,—now marking how its expansive force raised 
the lid of the utensil, and now how, condensed into water, it 
trickled powerlessly adown the sides of the cold china cup, 
which he had inverted over it,— who could have imagined 
that in these simple processes there lay wrapped up the princi- 
ple of by far the mightiest agent of civilization which man has 
yet seen,—an agent that, in a century after the experiment 
of the boy, would have succeeded in giving a new character to 
the arts both of peace and of war? Or who could have sur- 
mised, when, at nearly the same period, the Philadelphian 
printer was raising for the first time his silken kite in the 
fields, that there was an age coming in which, through a know- 
ledge of laws hitherto unknown, but whose existence he was 
then determining, man would be enabled to bind on_ his 
thoughts to the winged lightning, and to send them, with an 
instantaneousness that would annihilate time and space, across 
land and sea? Nor in that geological branch of natural sci- 
ence to which, with the cognate branches, our Society has 
specially devoted itself, has performance in proportion to pre- 
vious promise been less great. When it was first ascertained 
by the father of English geology, William Smith,—a man 
not yet more than twelve years dead, —that the Oolitic beds 
of England have always a uniform order of succession, and 
that this uniformity is attended by a certain equally uniform 
succession of groups of fossils, could it be once inferred that 
he was laying hold of a principle which, in the course of a 
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