42 TRANSACTIONS OF THE 



admiration rises with the tide of knowledge, with what we can 

 appreciate and love, whether it be associated with the name of a 

 Washington or a Franklin, a Newton or a Maury. Led by the 

 hand of men who loved truth and liberty that they might diffuse 

 it, every step into a more intimate acquaintance with physical 

 and moral truth, leads to the entrance of new and delightfully 

 interesting enquiries — to the presentment of fresh mysteries to be 

 unveiled, fresh truths to be held up to the approval of legislators 

 and statesmen. All this is suggestive of enjoyment. Mind, like 

 the gem once entombed in the earth, is susceptible of a polish 

 and a resulting brilliancy that is more than ornamental. Eliza 

 Cook has beautifully put it, in her pretty woman-like way, that 

 charcoal and the diamond are both, chemically speaking, the self- 

 same thing; it is only the varying arrangement of the particles, 

 and the cutting and polishing on the surface that constitute the 

 difference. Yes, you may drag this black and seemingly value- 

 less charcoal from its dark prison house in the Tive Points, you 

 may vainly expect ignorant, untutored mind to perform all the 

 pleasing duties of educated intelligence, you may seek to restrain 

 by penal enactments all the vices and crimes untaught, unedu- 

 cated, uncivilized mind is perpetually and painfully obtruding 

 upon society. Now, what is there in our anger more rational 

 than in bidding the dead man to rise and walk 1 Our regrets in 

 this matter are somewhat hypocritical. The wagoner was told 

 by Jupiter to set his shoulder to the wheel, and that then he 

 might expect assistance. Before we seek for new forms of coer- 

 cion, and erect more jails and prison houses as the evidence that 

 no higher or better instrumentality is available to deter men from 

 crime, instead of whining over the ignorance of mankind and its 

 results, would it not be better to ask ourselves if individually we 

 have^ aided the collective effort to remove it? It is not half a 

 century, since every month about twenty men were regularly 

 strung on tlie gibbet at Newgate, for sheep-stealing, and similar 

 enormities. But what a sanguinary legislative code could not 

 effect, the progress of education is effectually doing for my native 

 land. 



