AND AMERICAN RURAL SPORTS. 



101 



mire and to feel are both essential and valuable parts of our 

 nature; but neither of them is so essential, as to know. 

 That is the antecedent matter; because by it, and by it only, 

 the admiration and the feeling can be properly directed. 

 The first property of the ocean that strikes our sight, is its 

 vast extent; and the first that addresses our understanding, 

 is the vast extent of its usefulness. The evaporation of 

 water from its surface, cleared from the impurities of the 

 land, and adapted for the promoting of life and fertility, 

 has already been mentioned. But the ocean is also the 

 grand messenger of physical nature: that general law, or 

 phenomenon of the constitution of matter, (for the laws 

 and the phenomena of nature are the same) by which the 

 earth is maintained in its orbit, and has the figure and con- 

 sistency which it possesses, and bj' which the objects on its 

 surface preserve their forms and their places, — that simple 

 law occasions the tides of the ocean; and these, by moving 

 in the very directions which an obedience to this law points 

 out, produce currents, by means of which there is a con- 

 stant circulation of the waters of the ocean through all parts 

 of the earth's sui-face; and the immediate consequence is 

 an equalization of warmth, by means of which, the ex- 

 tremes, both of heat and cold, are mitigated, and the gene- 

 ral fertility and comfort promoted. 



AN INQUIRY RESPECTING THE TRUE 

 NATURE OF INSTINCT. 



BY OLIVER FRENCH, Esq. 



The mighty and various powers of man are wonderfully 

 imaged forth in the sensible objects that surround him; 

 and, in the march of science, such additional evidences are 

 continuallyelicited,in conformation of thisimportant truth, 

 that we may perhaps be warranted in giving a philosophical 

 assent to the sentiment of the poet, — 



—That lor the Instructed, time will come 



When they shall meet no object but may teach 

 Some acceptable lesson to their minds 

 Of human sufferings, or of human joj', 

 For then shall all things speak of man. 



Wordsworth. 



Nature's widedomain indeed exhibitsaboundlesstheatre, 

 in which moral and intellectual agency is ever active and 

 emploj'ed; — strikingly inanifesting its presence to the con- 

 templative mind, in even the most common operations, the 

 results of which have been denominated fixed laws: for 

 what are these but the operations of such agency producing 

 effects for particular ends and purposes, which ends and pur- 

 poses are evidently intended to be subservient to the appli- 

 cation to the powers of the human mind, in the adaptation 

 C c 



of all lower things to the purposes suggested by man's 

 reason in all the various products of the arts and sciences. 

 These rise like a new creation from^the apparently chaotic 

 parts of Nature, and their production is strictly compre- 

 hended within the universal plan of the Divine Artificer, 

 who well knows how much to do for man, and what to 

 leave within man's province, for the proper exercise of the 

 faculties with which he endows him; and to aid him in 

 which exercise, Nature is thus made to unfold a rich and 

 fertile picture of moi-al and intellectual qualities. 



It would appear that traces of the delineation here alluded 

 to might be found throughout the varied products of Na- 

 ture; but in the animal kingdom we find a broad and certain 

 basis for induction — the world of instinct, in which the 

 various moral and intellectual powers of man are symboli- 

 cally reflected, as in a mirror, even to his entrance into a 

 glorious immortality. In this great division of the lower 

 creation, the qualities of foresight, industry, integrity, jus- 

 tice, and order, sociability and mutual aid and protection, 

 self-devotion and magnanimity, arc imaged forth with an 

 astonishing fidelitj' and touch of truth: and in a manner no 

 less astonishing and faithful are displayed the opposites of 

 all these, — improvidence, idleness, dishonesty, injustice 

 and disorder, unsociableness and mutual disregard, selfish- 

 ness and cowardice. 



To the contemplative mind, final causes, natural and 

 moral, are every where multiplied to the view, in the in- 

 numerable parts of the great machinery of Creation. How 

 forcibly, in numerous instances, are the destroying passions 

 depicted; and how finely does the picture set off the relative 

 beauty of their o])posites — the social virtues, which in the 

 instincts of animals are not less faithfully delineated. 



This circumstance is really so striking, that, (if such an 

 inquiry could be entered into a philosophical dissertation) 

 we might be tempted to ask, whether these passions of in- 

 ordinate self-love, giving birth to offensive violence, are not 

 thus exhibited so as to affect the outward senses, through 

 the medium of ferocious animals, in order to furnish us 

 with the strongest possible perceptions of the nature of 

 such passions in ourselves. But the creatures themselves 

 are incapable of conceiving any thingrespectingthe nature 

 of the moral and intellectual qualities which they thus ex- 

 hibit, — to them virtue andvice are nothing: theyareindeed 

 but the passive mediums in which those qualities are repre- 

 sented and illustrated, in the language of God in Nature, 

 addressed to the human mind; and they seem to be but as 

 types of things — of the inighty powers, moral and intellec- 

 tual, which fill the mind of man, who alone is an inhabitant 

 of the moral and intellectual world, as he is of the natural 

 world. 



Man was called by the ancients a Microcosm, or little 



