118 “ FOREST CULTURE AND 
Thoughtless criticism ig but too often impatient or 
success, and demands results premature and unreason- 
able. Incompetent and perversive censure may even 
carry the sway of public opinion—misleading, and 
misled ; and, still worse, organized tactics may apply 
themselves, for sinister purposes of their own, to dis- 
turb the quiet work of the discoverer, mar the results 
of his labors, or paralyze the vitality of research, not 
understanding, or not wishing to understand, its di- 
rection or its object. 
And yet, should we have no faith in science, wheth- 
er it reveals to us the minutest organisms in a perfec- 
tion unalterable, * or the grandest doctrines of truth, 
sure ever to bear on human happiness and the peace 
of our soul; should we have no faith in science, 
whether it unravels the metallic treasures of the depth 
and the coals of the forests of bygone ages, or by eter- 
nal laws permits us to trace the orbits of endless ce- 
lestial worlds through space ; no faith, if it allows us 
through spectroscopic marvels to count unerringly the 
billions of oscillations of each ray of dispersed light 
within a second; or if it discloses the chemism of 
distant worlds, and therewith an applicability of re- 
search, both tellural and sidereal, ever endless and 
inexhaustible. Science, as the exponent of God-like 
* As an instance of the marvelous complexity, and yet exquisite perfection 
of the minutest creatures, the organ of vision in insects may be adduced. 
Most careful observers have ascertained that the eyes of very many insects 
are compound, contain numerous eyelets; each of these provided with a 
distinct cornea, lens, iris, pupil, and a whole nervous apparatus. In our 
despised ordinary house-fly may be counted about four thousand of these 
most subtle instruments of vision; in some dragon-flies about twelve thou- 
sand. Reliable microscopists have counted even seventeen thousand three 
hundred and fifty-five in a kind of butterfly, while in the beetle genus mor- 
della these most delicate eyelets have been found to rise to the almost incred- 
ible number of twenty - five thousand and eighty-eight.—(From Th. Rym, 
Jones.) 
