Comparative Account : Popiilatio7i of Great Britain. 213 



blunted the sharpest, and distanced the loftiest of the shafts of the 

 satirist, the philosopher has imposed on the moralist an obligation of 

 surpassing weight. In unveiling to him the living miracles which 

 teem in rich exuberance around the minutest atom, as well as through- 

 out the largest masses of ever-active matter, he has placed before him 

 resistless evidence of immeasurable design. Surrounded by every 

 form of animate and inanimate existence, the sun of science has yet 

 penetrated but through the outer fold of nature's majestic robe ; but 

 if the philosopher were required to separate from amongst those 

 countless evidences of creative power, one being the master-piece of 

 its skill ; and from that being to select one gift, the choicest of all 

 the attributes of life ; — turning within his own breast, and conscious 

 of those powers which have subjugated to his race the external world, 

 and of those higher powers by which he has subjugated to himself 

 that creative faculty which aids his faltering conceptions of a Deity, — 

 the humble worshiper at the altar of truth would pronounce that 

 being, man ; that endowment, human reason. 



"But however large the interval that separates the lowest from the 

 highest of these sentient beings which inhabit our planet, all the re- 

 sults of observation, enlightened by all the reasoning of the philoso- 

 pher, combine to render it probable that, in the vast extent of creation, 

 the proudest attribute of our race is but, perchance, the lowest step 

 in the gradation of intellectual existence. For, since every portion 

 of our own material globe, and every animated being it supports, af- 

 ford, on more scrutinizing inquiry, more perfect evidence of design, 

 it would indeed be most unphilosophical to believe that those sister 

 spheres, glov.'ing with light and heat, radiant from the same central 

 source — and that the members of those kindred systems, almost lost 

 in the remoteness of space, and perceptible only from the countless 

 multitude of the congregated globes — should each be no more than a 

 floating chaos of unformed matter ; — or, being all the work of the 

 same Almighty Architect, that no living eye should be gladdened by 

 their forms of beauty ; that no intellectual being should expand its 

 faculties in deciphering their laws." 



Comparative Account : Population of Great Britain. Ordered by the 

 House of Commons to be printed, I9th October, 1831*. 



The scientific world is indebted to iVIr. Rickmari for superintend- 

 ing four returns of the population of Great Britain, in 1801, 1811, 

 1821, and 1831, — a long period for the same individual to be occu- 

 pied with the same subject, and which he has conducted with all the 

 ability that a long familiarity with so complicated an inquiry demands, 

 and with all the scrupulous accuracy which an ardent and philosophic 

 disciple of this peculiar kind of arithmetic could display. 



There is nothing, it will be admitted, about the subject itself, con- 

 sidered as mere dry details of figures, that particularly invites atten- 

 tion ; and it is rather in its accessories and in the well-springs of 

 philosophic light that its conclusions supply, that we must look for 



• Tlie Compnrnlivr Accounl has been just published in a separate form, 

 (price 10*.,) in which it cannot fail to have an extensive circulation. 



