154 FOBEST CULTURE AND 



Thoughtless criticism is but too often impatient of 

 success, and demands results premature and unreason- 

 able. Incompetent and perversive censure may even 

 carry the sway of public opinion — misleading, and 

 misled ; and, still worse, organized tactics may apply 

 themselves, for sinister purposes of their own, to dis- 

 turb the quiet work of the discoverer, mar the results 

 of his labors, or paralyze the vitality of research, not 

 understanding, or not wishing to understand, its di- 

 rection or its object. 



And yet, should we have no faith in science, wheth- 

 er it reveals to us the minutest organisms in a perfec-' 

 tion unalterable, * or the grandest doctrines of truth, 

 sure ever to bear on human happiness and the peace 

 of our soul; should we have no faith in science, 

 whether it unravels the metallic treasures of the depth 

 and the coals of the forests of bygone ages, or by eter- 

 nal laws permits us to trace the orbits of endless ce- 

 lestial worlds through space ; no faith, if it allows us 

 through spectroscopic marvels to count unerringly the 

 billions of oscillations of each ray of dispersed light 

 within a second ; or if it discloses the chemism of 

 distant worlds, and therewith an applicability of re- 

 search, both tellural and sidereal, ever endless and 

 inexhaustible. Science, as the exponent of God-like 



* As an instance of the maTvelouB complexity, and yet exquisite perfection 

 of the minutest creatures, the organ of vision in insects may be adduced. 

 Most careful observers have ascertained that the eyes of very many insects 

 are compound, contain numerous eyelets ; each of these provided with a 

 distinct cornea, lens, iris, pupil, and a 'whole nervous apparatus. In our 

 despised ordinary house-fly may be counted about four thousand of these 

 most subtle instruments o£ vision; in some dragon-flies about twelve thou- 

 sand. Reliable microscopists have counted even seventeen thousand three 

 hundred and fifty-flve in a kind of butterfly, while in the beetle genus mor. 

 della these most delicate eyelets have been found to rise to the almost incred. 

 ible number of twenty - Pyc tliousapd apd eighty - eipit.—{Fi-<m Th. Hpn, 

 Jona.) 



