NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION. 237 



traces from country to coiintiy throughout the course of 

 centuries. See a Pascal, reproducing the Alexandrian's 

 problems at fifteen ; a Ferguson, making clocks from the 

 suggestions of his own brain, while tending cattle on a 

 Morayshire heath ; a boy Lawrence, in an inn on tlie 

 Bath road, producing, without a mtister, drawings wliich 

 the educated coidd not but admire ; or look at Solon and 

 Confucius, devising sage laws, and breathing the accents 

 of all but divine wisdom, for their barbarous fellow- 

 countrymen, three thousand years ago — and the whole 

 mystery is solved at once. Amongst the arrangements 

 of Providence is one for the production of original, in- 

 ventivCj and aspii-ing minds, which, when circumstances 

 are not decidedly unfavourable, strike out new ideas for 

 the benefit of their fellow-ci-eatures, or put upon them 

 a lasting impress of their own superior sentiments. 

 Nations, improved by these means, become in turn/oa* 

 for the diftusion of light over the adjacent regions of 

 barbarism — their very passions helping to this end, for 

 nothing can be more clear than that ambitious aggression 

 has led to the civilisation of many countries. Such is 

 the process which seems to form the destined means for 

 bringing mankind from the darkness of barbarism to the 

 day of knowledge and mechanical and social improve- 

 ment. Even the noble art of letters is but, as Dr. Adam 

 Fergusson has remarked, " a natural produce of the 

 human mind, which will lise spontaneously, wherever 

 men are happily placed ; " original alike amongst the 

 ancient Egyj^tians and the dimly monumented Toltecans 

 of Yucatan. " Banish," says Dr. Gall, " music, poetry, 

 painting, sculpture, architecture, all the arts and sciences, 

 and let your Homers, Raphaels, Michael Angelos, Glucks, 

 and Canovas, be forgotten, yet let men of genius of every 

 description spring up, and poetry, music, painting, archi- 



