unable are we to describe, unless objects have passed through the eye into the mental sensorium ; nay, how utterly unable are we to perceive the true meaning of objects. Nature deceives the unpractised eye, and the unnoting ear. There are fine shades of tone and expression, which can only be caught by one who has listened-who has waited upon Nature as a lover, and wooed her at all hours. Hence the gift of the Poet to utter, and the Painter to transfix to his canvass, the fleeting and evanescent beauty. From observation, from personal observation, all the truth and the beauty have resulted; all is the work of the brain, reflecting behind the eye. The eyes of some men, alas! are but little more than optical lenses: the spectacles upon their nose, the glasses of their telescope or microscope, have beheld as much, and have revealed far more. Let such persons go forth into the grand and vivid scenery of Nature, and attempt to recall their impressions, could they ever bring back with them the lights and colours which make up the following fine picture, which we quote from Mr. Macgillivray's account of the outer Hebrides, and is a fine illustration of the power of correct colouring from close observation ?

The picture is a thunder storm in the Hebrides.

"Let any one who wishes to have some conception of the sublime, station himself upon a headland

of the West Coast of Harris, during the violence of a winter. tempest, and he will obtain it. The blast howls among the grim and desolate rocks around him; black clouds are seen advancing from the west in fearful masses, pouring forth torrents of rain and hail. A sudden flash illuminates the ground, and is followed by the deafening roar of the thunder, which gradually becomes fainter, until the roar of the waves upon the shore prevails over it. Meantime, far as the eye can reach, the ocean boils and heaves, presenting one wide extending field of foam; the spray, from the summits of the billows, sweeping along its surface like drifted snow. No signs of life is to be seen, save when a gull, labouring hard to bear itself up against the blast, hovers over head, or shoots athwart the gloom like a meteor. Long ranges of giant waves rush in succession along the shores; the thunder of the shock echoes among the crevices and caves; the spray mounts along the face of the cliffs to an astonishing height; the rocks shake to their summit, and the baffled waves roll back to meet its advancing successor. If one ventures at this season by some slippery path to peep into the haunts of the cormorant and the rock pigeon, he finds them huddled together in melancholy silence. For whole days and nights they are sometimes doomed to feel the gnawings of hunger, unable to make way against the storm; and often, during the winter, they can

only make a short daily excursion in quest of a precarious morsel of food. In the meantime the natives are snugly seated around their blazing peat fires, amusing themselves with the tales and songs of other years, and enjoying the domestic harmony, which no people can enjoy with less interruption than the Hebridean Celts."

But although your observations are minute, take care that they are not empirical and partial. You remember the French student in London, who lodged with a poor man ill with a fever; he was continually teased by his nurse to drink, although quite nauseated by the liquids she offered him; at last when she was more importunate than usual, he whispered, "For Heaven's sake, bring me a salt herring and I will drink as much as you please." The woman indulged his request; the man perspired profusely and recovered. The French student inserted in his note book, this aphorism:-"A salt herring cures an Englishman in his fever." On his return to France he prescribed the same remedy to the first patient in fever he was called to attend. The patient died; the student inserted in his note book, "N.B., Though a salt herring cures an Englishman, it kills a Frenchman." And whether this be a true story or only a joke, it certainly illustrates the method of much of what is called observation. Our French neighbour and indeed the Celtic cha

racter everywhere, is remarkable for the rapidity of generalization. Few persons are qualified to describe a circumstance. Simply to note and record an event exactly, requires a philosophic acumen which few persons possess, but to draw the correct inference from what is seen, requires not only acuteness, but breadth of observation, and calmness of judgment, which are generally possessed only by the higher order of minds. Much of what is called observing, should be called surmising; men do not draw a distinction between what they saw and what they inferred. You will notice a tendency in the human mind, too, to form an opinion from isolated facts; but this should not be done: facts should be weighed with the great mass and body of facts. The advice of Lord Bacon, in the Second Part of the Novum Organum, is sometimes fastidious, but his directions for making observations upon Nature are specially worthy the attention, and will guard the mind frequently from false conclusions in matters of experience. If Niveo, the youth mentioned to us by Dr. Watts, had studied the principles of Bacon, he would not have writ it down in his Almanac that we were always to look for snow at Christmas, because he had noticed snow on three successive Christmas days; that observation warranted no such inference. And as little that of Euron, who had noticed ten times, that there was a sharp frost when the wind was in the north

east, and therefore in the middle of July expected it to freeze, because the weather-cocks showed him a north-east wind. This is the sort of hasty observation that determines at once upon the charac ter of a people. The English believe of the French that they are all cooks and dancing masters, and the French tell their children that in England, in the month of November, the weather is so doleful that half the people hang or drown themselves. With the majority of people a fact is taken for a principle; an exception is quoted for a rule. "A raw English traveller in China, was entertained," Miss Martineau tells us, "by a host who was intoxicated, and a hostess who was red-haired; he immediately made a note of the fact, that all the men in China were drunkards, and all the women red-haired;" and his generalisation was as correct as that of the Chinese traveller in England, who was landed by a Thames waterman with a wooden leg. The stranger saw that the wooden leg was used to stand in the water with, while the other was high and dry. The apparent economy of the fact struck the Chinese; he saw in it strong evidence of design, and wrote home that in England one legged men are kept for watermen, to the saving of all injury to health, shoe, and stocking, from standing in the water.

I am far from implying that the perception should not be accompanied by reflection, but let