REWARDS OF STUDY. 27 



raw materials into her many beautiful productions — ^yet how interest- 

 ing it must be to know her ways, how useful even partially to find them 

 out! 



Permit me, in conclusioK, to submit to you one reflection. We have 

 seen that oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen, are alT gaseous substances, 

 which when pure are destitute of colour, taste, and smell. They can- 

 not be distinguished by the aid of our senses. Man in a state of nature 

 — uneducated man — cannot discern that they are diflerent. Yet so 

 simple an instrument as a lighted taper at once shows them to be totally 

 unlike each other. This simple instrument, therefore, serves us in- 

 stead of a new sense, and makes us acquainted with properties the ex- 

 istence of which, without such aid, we should not even have suspected. 

 Has the Deity then been unkind to man, or stinted in his benevolence 

 in withholding the gift of such a sense ? On the contrary, he has given 

 us an understanding which when cultivated is better than twenty new 

 senses. The cliemist in his laboratory is better armed for the investi- 

 gation of nature, than if his organs of sense had been many times mul-^ 

 liplied. He has many instruments at his command, each of which, 

 like the taper, tells him of properties which neither his senses nor any 

 otlier of his instruments can discover; and the further his researches 

 are carried, the more willing does nature seem to reveal her secrets to 

 him, and the more rapidly do his chemical senses increase. Do you 

 think that the rewards of study and patient experimental research are 

 confined to the laboratory of the chemist, and that the Deity will prove 

 less kind to you, whose daily toil is in the great laboratory of nature 1 

 As yet 3'ou see but faintly the reason of many of your commonest oper- 

 ations, and over the results you have comparatively little control — but 

 tiie light is ready to spring up, the means are within your reach — you 

 have only to employ your minds as Uligently as you labour with your 

 hands, and ultimate success is sure 



