THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 5 1 



loading. The mediaeval astrolabe passed into the quadrant, discarded 

 in its turn by sailors for the sextant ; and so on through the history 

 of one art and instrument after another. 



Books of costume, showing how one garment grew or shrank by 

 gradual stages and passed into another, illustrate the nature of the 

 change and growth, revival and decay, which go on from year to year 

 in more important matters of life. It is only when we fail to see the 

 hne of connection that we form the idea of something having been 

 originated. 



There is nothing more evident than the fact that man is in 

 every respect of the same nature as the world in which he dwells, 

 tfiat in fact he is a part of it — a part of the universal whole ; and, 

 descending from man — the highest known state of organized Ufe down 

 to the animate object of the lowest order — all creation is found to be 

 composed of individual members, which collectively form the infinite 

 whole. The line of demarcation here and there may be rugged; 

 seeming chasms exist, to be bridged over by future revelations of 

 science and investigation — but the conclusive result of all research 

 shows everything to be so gradually and yet so intimately connected 

 that it is in some cases a matter of difficulty to discriminate where 

 one terminates and another begins. All nature may be said to be 

 bound together by a series of connecting links, which conjointly form 

 the chain of unity and point to the grand idea of harmony which 

 pervaded creation at its birth. 



Our subject might be extended to all the sciences; to the 

 various branches of learning, including that highest branch of all, 

 mathematics ; to music and harmony, or the sweet blending of sounds ; 

 to geology ; to chemistry ; in fact, to everything whose collective 

 parts form unity : but I must to-night limit it to two branches — links 

 of mind, individual and ethnological, and links of matter. 



Of the individual links of mind memory stands the foremost ; 

 the remembrance of the past, vividly brought before us by some 

 connecting chain of thought, over the links of which the mind bounds 

 at once, till one string so recalls another that the original train of 

 thought is lost, and some past object so prominently recalled that it 

 occupies the attention to the exclusion of all else. Who amongst us 

 to-night, from some chance meeting, from the passage of some well- 

 known author, from the sight of a trifling object, has not recalled 

 scenes and phases of early life and days of childhood long since for- 



