THE TECHNOLOGIST. [May 1, 1864. 



446 ON GRANITE AND ITS USES. 



four polished facets ; and the pearl (which is not, however, a crystal) 

 as it were, rounds these off, and grows into a perfect sphere. Each 

 assume many shapes but all related, all beautiful, and so unaltering 

 that their bounding angles do not vary. 



Those crystals in virtue of their structure, not their material, can 

 influence nearly all the great forces of nature. They can transmit rays 

 of light, and reflect them, bend them aside, break them in two, make 

 them visible or invisible, and strangely change all their properties. 

 They can similarly affect the rays of heat. They develop and modify 

 electrical agencies. They act, and are acted on, like magnets, and when 

 traversed by light, heat, electricity, and magnetism, display inner mar- 

 vels of structure unsuspected until these marvels revealed them. 



I will say nothing of their colours, for these are familiar, nor 

 enumerate further their characters. Enough has been said to show 

 that thej'' are among the most perfectly beautiful things that God has 

 given us to deligbt our senses and imaginations, and to cpiicken our 

 intellects ; and yet they are made of the most common, the most vulgar, 

 and most worthless ingredients, and owe their graces solely to the 

 exquisite skill with which those despised ingredients have been 

 moulded, and carved, and tinctured with the choicest dyes. And they 

 are bright with a lesson as heaven-born as themselves. 



We are placed in a world where all are commanded to live by 

 labour, the labour of head or hand, or heart or brain, or of all together. 

 And lest we should be discouraged by the apparent intractability and 

 meanness of the dull physical materials with which we must work, 

 and should complain that we have to deal with a hard taskmaster, who 

 sets us to make bricks but gives us no straw, behold He has stooped 

 like a benignant father to His wilful children, and with His own 

 Almighty hands has wrought into shapes of beauty the clay and sand 

 and trodden dust beneath our feet. We are too apt to regard it as 

 altogether exceptional that God should have shown to Moses on the 

 mount patterns of all the things he should make for the service of 

 the Tabernacle ; we forget that He has in all ages given to men pat- 

 terns of the way in which they should fashion the materials he has 

 placed in their hands. And do not forget that it is not merely a few 

 beadlike gems that show this. The everlasting mountains, the plains, 

 the valleys, the river-beds, and the caverns of the sea, are built up or 

 hewn out of the same common things. All the might and grandeur of 

 the ocean, whether as shown in its waves or in its ice-bergs, those 

 mightiest of emeralds, sapphires, and diamonds, depend upon the most 

 common of material things. All the splendours of the sky have a 

 similar origiu. All the trees of the forest, the meadow-grasses, and 

 every fruit and flower, are but new forms of the same endlessly alterable 

 materials ; and the creatures of the whole animal kingdom, up to the 

 highest models of manly and womanly beauty, are only the same things 

 in other shapes. On every side we hear one great truth uttered from 



