which he himself surveyed at midnight more than at noonday, and how they 

 are guarded from destruction by the Coast Survey, on which with the la- 

 mented Bache he was engaged, to save many a vessel from wreck by show- 

 ing every rock and quicksand more precisely on the chart, he yet had and 

 would share with others the more intense and immortal joy of purely con- 

 templating the truth which is, in its own glory, divinely good. In phyllotaxy, 

 or that special arrangement of the stems on a plant which the planets in the 

 solar system repeat, in immense and splendid illustration of the same law, he 

 had a pleasure which air the harvests of the field could not afford. Having 

 heard a fine oration on the importance of business and business men in the 

 economy of life, he insisted on making the balance true by putting the ideal 

 element of pure thought in the other scale. Who that heard but must have 

 admired his address at the Chestnut-street Club, in which he likened the 

 spinning of the stars to that of an earthly parent's twirling a top for the 

 amusement of his little boy, thus taking up a wooden toy into the solar spaces 

 and Milky Way where the Father of all fatherhood launches the mighty orbs 

 from their centre to please his offspring, as the balls immeasurable and im- 

 ponderable by man whirl around on the ethereal floor ? If, he said, in a 

 nebula or fire-mist was the origin of the sun and all his attendant primaries 

 and satellites, the nebula itself was no vague, void, and thoughtless sub- 

 stance, but had a plan, and involved all in it that was to be evolved out of it, 

 as much as an acorn or an egg. That great thinker, Chauncey Wright, 

 considered the past and future of the outward universe so uncertain and 

 indeterminable, that is, he was so anti-dogmatic, with all his wisdom and 

 profound insight, that he called the whole cosmic weather, like the changing, 

 unpredictable clouds and winds. Peirce saw the stability, mid all the shift- 

 ing, in the immutable mind of God, of which, as the Rock of Ages, he was 

 glad humbly to speak. If to his exposition of the laws of light and motion 

 objection was made, he had no ambition to reply, but had an unperturbed 

 dignity in resting on and trusting in the truth. Said the sublime discoverer 

 Kepler, " I think God's thoughts after him." Peirce, with the prophet 

 Isaiah, was conscious of the rapture of feeling God had thought his human 

 thoughts before him, and that, in some sense, the Everlasting One had 

 weighed and meted out the globes and their huge ellipses, even as does the 

 mortal investigator, however feebly tfie latter follows the wisdom and love 

 that presided at the genesis and birth of all. 



It is this reverent quality in Benjamin Peirce which is the motive of my 

 discourse, and without which none of his surpassing attainments in his explo- 



