NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY OF MONTREAL. 67 



only book ; and as among lower creatures, every one is specially 

 adapted to its condition of life, so there is a special adaptation of 

 the powers of man, created in the image of his Maker, to that 

 system of things proceeding in all its parts from the same Al- 

 mighty mind. Practical experience confirms this inference. 

 What more fitted than natural objects to call forth the exercise 

 of the powers of observation, what to develope a more nice power 

 of discrimination, what to train to all the intricacies of contingent 

 reasoning. The man who has disciplined his mind by the thor- 

 ough study of any department of nature, who has gathered to- 

 gether and scrutinized its minute facts, who has by careful induc- 

 tion learned from them general truths, who has mastered, as far as 

 out limited intellects may, the plans of the Creator in any portion 

 of his works, has thereby aquired a mental training more godlike 

 in its character than any that can be gained from art or human 

 literature, because he has been following in the footsteps, not of 

 man, but of God. Farther, natural science grasps within itself 

 the essence of many other departments of culture. All the higher 

 literature and more especially the literature of the sacred books 

 and of the more ancient nations, is imbued with nature. All true 

 art has its foundation in the higher art of creation. The princi- 

 ples of mathematical and physical science have some of their 

 highest applications in the mineral, the plant and the ani- 

 mal ; and geology presses into its service the results of almost 

 every kind of inquiry as to material things. For this reason, 

 while nothing can be more simple than the mere elements 

 of the knowledge of nature, nothing can be more intricate or 

 abstruse than its higher questions ; nothing is more suited to 

 convince a man of his own ignorance, or to prevent him from 

 resting in a limited range of acquirement, or from remaining sat- 

 isfied with the rude attempts of man to imitate the perfect beauty 

 and adaptation of natural things. Again, the modes of investiga- 

 tion in natural history bear a direct relation to those modes of 

 thought which are most necessary in the ordinary work of life. 

 Observation, comparison, reasoning from cause to effect, — and these 

 in celation to the means by which the Author of nature carries 

 on his vast operations, — are the leading pursuits of the naturalist ; 

 &nd their effect in producing an acute, yet comprehensive style of 

 thought, is conspicuous in the lives and works of all eminent stu- 

 dents of nature. Nor is there anything in natural history calcu- 

 lated to engender pedantry or. conceit. The naturalist works in 



