208 ANIMAL LIFE IN THE SEA. 



the Creator to limit our powers, yet it lias also pleased 

 him to leave the limit of those powers undefined. 

 We may not, indeed, ever hope in this life to attain 

 to perfect knowledge, nevertheless, by " searching " 

 we may " find out wisdom ; " and certain it is, that, 

 although there undoubtedly must be a point of 

 knowledge on any given subject which man cannot 

 reach, there is in man a power incessantly to ex- 

 tend his knowledge and increase his powers of 

 conception, by each successive effort that he makes 

 in his course from the cradle to the grave. 



Even although we were told the exact number of 

 the little creatures that inhabit the sea, we could 

 not, by any simple effort of the mind, however 

 powerful, form a conception of what that number 

 implied. We might shut ourselves up like the 

 hermits of old, abstract our thoughts from all 

 other things, and ponder the subject for weeks or 

 months together, and at the termination of our effort 

 we should be as wise as we were at its commence- 

 ment, but no wiser. But by searching round the 

 subject, and comparing lesser things with greater, 

 although we should still fail to arrive at a full com- 

 prehension of the truth, we may advance our powers 

 of conception very considerably beyond the point 

 attained by our first effort ; and which point, as we 

 have said, could not be surmounted by a hair's breadth 

 by the mere exertion of simple or abstract thought. 



Dr. Scoresby's remarks on the subject of animal 

 life in the ocean, are so graphic and curious that we 



