Notice to our Readers. 3 



materials adapted to readers in various stages of scientific 

 progress. A portion of each number will be devoted to 

 beginners in various scientific pursuits, and when any reader 

 meets with an article beyond the existing state of his know- 

 ledge, he will either find that an elementary paper leading up 

 to it has already been published, or he may expect that one 

 will follow at no distant date. In the selection of topics regard 

 will be had to their novelty, and to their quality as subjects of 

 the day : thus an Intellectual Observer student will be 

 always up to date ; and side by side with matter for novices just 

 entering the portals of knowledge, will be found subjects for 

 the consideration of those who have penetrated the inmost 

 recesses which the human mind has reached. 



An additional department has been created for the purpose 

 of affording the earliest explanations of new inventions and 

 discoveries in the applied sciences, and in the practical arts. 

 The information will be conveyed in simple untechnical lan- 

 guage, and the record will embrace the principal achieve- 

 ments of human skill in Great Britain, on the Continent of 

 Europe, and in the United States. 



In conclusion, we would earnestly advise those who find 

 their first steps in science difficult, not to confine their endea- 

 vours to mere reading. Do something, try something, or see 

 something, and half the hardship disappears. It is astonishing 

 how many difficulties in natural history or physiology may be 

 made to vanish if a student will work with a microscope as 

 directed in any of the numerous practical papers we have pub- 

 lished. In like manner, a few evenings spent with a telescope 

 under Mr. Webb's instructions, will render many explanatory 

 statements easily intelligible, when without such a proceeding 

 they would remain obscure ; a glance through a spectroscope 

 will make a beginner take ten-fold interest in Mr. Huggins' 

 discoveries ; and a few chemical experiments will simplify many 

 a statement or illustration that without such aid oouLd convey 

 little to the mind. 



Parents may depend upon it that good books and good ap- 

 paratus are amongst the most remunerative investments they 

 can make. Homes to be happy must be enlightened, and 

 where Intellectual Observers most abound, the wise and benefi- 

 cent lessons of nature will be most reverently received, and 

 man will form the noblest conceptions of the duty and destiny 

 of a being, situated on a narrow spot of a little revolving globe, 

 limited in faculties, brief in life, and yet divinely endowed with 

 a capacity for evolving thoughts and aspirations grander than 

 all the material powers which condense nebulas into suns and 

 systems, and which unceasingly arrange and rearrange the 

 particles that build up the fabric of unnumbered worlds. 



