LECTURE I. 



THE words of an ancient sage, so apt a motto for this 

 discourse, may not perhaps remain wholly uncontested ; at 

 all events, pretty general experience shows that while all 

 perfectly deaf persons are sad, gloomy and hypochondriacal, 

 all the blind are gay and cheerful ; the eye leads only into 

 the world of matter, but the ear into our proper home, into 

 the communion of spiritual existence. Nothing can be 

 more unquestionable, however, than that among all our 

 senses, there is not one to which we either actually owe 

 so many elements of our knowledge of the world we live 

 in, or attribute so much of that which we have, it may 

 be an incorrect, knowledge of, as to the sense of sight. 

 Above all, it is the sense which originally introduces and 

 unceasingly expands our whole knowledge of the corporeal 

 world, and we may, therefore, with great propriety, call it 

 the Sense of the Naturalist. We can scarcely imagine 

 natural science to exist without it, and it the more pre- 

 eminently deserves a close examination, since this itself 

 will be the more fruitful, that most of the general laws 

 which our investigations make us acquainted with, not only 



