36 



To him who in the love of Nature holds 

 Communion with her visible forms she speaks 

 A various language. 



Perhaps few are privileged to understand this language, 

 spoken to such high priests of nature as Humboldt, Lin- 

 naeus, Newton, Ouvier and Agassiz. We have learned 

 from science that there are sounds too deep for the ordi- 

 nary human ear, that there are colors which the common 

 eye cannot see. The undulatory theory of light has 

 shown us that the infinitesimal waves of ether or air are 

 by wise provision accommodated to our common human 

 wants and organs. Too great keenness of the senses 

 would result in powers beyond our need and miseries be- 

 yond our endurance. Man wants not the eagle's eye, the 

 vulture's scent, nor the fox hound's ear. It is said that 

 the wonderful ability of great cetaceans to communicate 

 with each other at vast distances under the ocean is ow- 

 ing to their ability to produce and to hear sounds too deep 

 for human ears. It would be no great stretch of imagina- 

 tion to fancy such giants in the wide ocean of thought as 

 Humboldt and Agassiz thus endowed. Their lives and 

 writings manifest an awe of the Creator, unfelt and not 

 comprehended by men who have not, like them, been in 

 the Presence and before the altar. Such an awe was 

 that Prof. Tyndall said he always felt when looking upon 

 the swift crystallization of certain substances into beauti- 

 ful forms before his eye, each molecule seeming endowed 

 with intelligence and evidently obeying an inscrutable 

 law of a great Thinker. Such an awe Newton, felt when 

 nearing the end of loner, intricate and laborious geomet- 

 ric calculations, the beauty, the symmetry, the order and 

 the law as manifested in the solar system burst upon him 

 in all its magnificence, and he was forced by overpower- 

 ing mental excitement to employ a friend to finish his 

 w T ork. Such an awe the physiologist, Draper, felt when 

 investigating the functions of the brain, its hemispheres- 

 conversing with each other, cerebral sight, and the won- 

 derful organism of the nervous ganglia, he entered the 

 inner sanctum of the temple of thought and, reasoning in- 



