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 by 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 surface; 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, Es<*. 
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 
continually elicited, in conformation of this important truth, 
that we may perhaps be warranted in giving a philosophical 
assent to the sentiment of the poet, — 
That for 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 joy, 
For then shall all things speak of Man. 
Wordsworth. 
Nature’s wide domain indeed exhibits a boundless theatre, 
in which moral and intellectual agency is ever active and 
employed; — strikingly manifesting 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 
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 moral 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, are imaged forth with an 
astonishing fidelity 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 opposites — 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 thing respecting the nature 
of the moral and intellectual qualities which they thus ex- 
hibit, — to them virtue and vice are nothing: they are indeed 
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 mighty 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 
