2 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



of which is to dry them up. Probably every change 

 from ancient savagery to our present enlightenment 

 has excited, in a greater or less degree, fears of this 

 kind. But the fact is, that we have not yet deter- 

 mined whether its present form is necessary to the life 

 and warmth of religious feeling. We may err in linking 

 the imperishable with the transitory, and confound the 

 living plant with the decaying pole to which it clings. My 

 object, however, at present is not to argue, but to mark 

 a tendency. We have ceased to propitiate the powers of 

 nature ceased even to pray for things in manifest contra- 

 diction to natural laws. In Protestant countries, at least, 

 I think it is conceded that the age of miracles is past. 

 At an auberge near the foot of the Rhone glacier, 

 I met, in the summer of 1858, an athletic young priest, 

 who, after a solid breakfast, including a bottle of wine, 

 informed me that he had come up to ' bless the moun- 

 tains.' This was the annual custom of the place. Year 

 by year the Highest was entreated, by official inter- 

 cessors, to make such meteorological arrangements 

 as should ensure food and shelter for the flocks and 

 herds of the Valaisians. A diversion of the Rhone, or 

 a deepening of the river's bed, would, at the time I 

 now mention, have been of incalculable benefit to the 

 inhabitants of the valley. But the priest would have 

 shrunk from the idea of asking the Omnipotent to 

 open a new channel for the river, or to cause a portion 

 of it to flow over the Grimsel pass, and down the valley 

 of Oberhasli to Brientz. This he would have deemed a 

 miracle, and he did not come to ask .the Creator to 

 perform miracles, but to do something which he mani- 

 festly thought lay quite within the bounds of the 

 natural and non-miraculous. A Protestant gentleman 

 who was present at the time smiled at this recital. He 

 had no faith in the priest's blessing; still^ he deemed 



