matter and man which I deduce from the idea of God as infinite perfection, and the very fact of that relation leads us to infer, not only power, law, mind, but that dear love which sends the sun so sweetly round the world, "From seeming evil still educing good, And better thence again, and better still, THE EFFECT OF MATERIAL CIRCUMSTANCES ON ANIMALS. SEE the effect of material circumstances on animals. In the spring, warm weather brings out the flies, gnats, and swarms of other insects; and they will multiply just in proportion to the geniality of the weather and the supply of their food. More requires more, and less requires less; and the multiplication of insect life is exactly in proportion to the means of its support. With the increase of insects there will come an increase of the purple martin, the swallow, and other birds that feed thereon. Let a cold summer kill the insects, and the martins will disappear. Napoleon Bonaparte multiplied beasts of prey and birds of rapine. They fed on the wreck of armies that went to pieces under his hand; and Napoleon Bonaparte was the great father of wolves and vultures, because he furnished the material conditions which gave them birth, as much as if he had sat on the vulture's nest, and brooded her eggs with his own selfish bosom. RESERVED POWER. EVERYWHERE in the world there is an exhibition of power, force active to-day. Everywhere, likewise, there is a reserve of power, force waiting for to-morrow. Force is potent everywhere, but latent as well. All men see the active power, all do not see the power which waits till it comes of age to do its work. In order to get the general analogy of the universe to bear upon this particular matter in hand, the power of progressive development in the human race, look at the plainest examples of this reserved power in nature. All around us the fields lie sleeping under their coverlet of frost. Only the mosses, the lichens, and other cryptogamy have any green and growing life. Every hide-bound tree has taken in sail, and sent down its topmast, housed the rigging, and lies stripped there in bay, waiting for navigation to open in March and April. Even the wellclad bear has coiled himself up for his hybernating sleep all winter long; the frogs and snakes and toads have hid their heads; the swarms of insects all are still. Nature has put her little ones to bed. "Hush, my babe! lie still and slumber! Holy angels guard thy bed, Heavenly blessings without number This is the evening cradle-song wherewith Nature lulls the reptile, insect, bear, and tree, to their winter sleep. Look at the scene next June. What life in the ground, in the trees spreading their sails to every wind, in the reptiles, in the insects! Nature wakens her little ones. in the new morning, and sends them out to the world's great vineyard to bear the burthen in the heat of the day, sure of their penny at its end. What a reserve of power lies in the ground under our feet, in the silent throat of every bird, in the scale-clad buds on oak and apple-tree! What energy sleeps in that hybernating bear, who in spring will come out from his hole in the Green Mountains, and woo his shaggy mate, and ere long rejoice in the parental joys of home, "His wee bit ingle blinkin' bonnily, His clean hearth-stane, his thriftie wifie's smile." A few years ago men brought from Egypt to Tuscany some grains of wheat which a farmer had laid up thirtyfive or forty hundred years ago. They put it in the ground in Italy, and the power which those little grains had kept so long waked up bright, and grew wheat there, just as if nothing had happened since Sesostris marched his Egyptians, and set up pillars and temples from Asia Minor to the Indus, which Herodotus saw twoand-twenty hundred years ago. All the coffee plants in America, it is said, have come from two little trees which a Dominican priest brought here from Spain; and when the ship was on short allowance for water, he divided his pint a day, taking a half-pint for himself, and sparing a gill for each of his trees; and so they lasted, and were planted in Saint Domingo, and now they are spread all over the tropic continent. Three hundred years ago New-England was a wilderness, with wild beasts howling in the forests, and thirty thousand lazy, half-naked Indians howling wilder than the beasts. Idle rivers ran idly to an idle sea, flapping to the moon's attraction, as restless and as lazy as a summer cloud. Then New-England was shaggy with awful woods, the only garment of the savage land. In April the windflower came out, and the next month the maple saw his red beauties reflected in the Connecticut and the Merrimac. In June the water-lily opened her fragrant bosom. Who saw it? Only here and there some young squaw, thinking of her dusky lover, turned to look at its beauty, or the long-lipped moose came down in the morning and licked up its fragrance from the river's breast; and otherwise the maple bloomed and blushed unseen, and the lily wasted its sweetness on the desert air. Now civil-suited New-England has gardens, orchards, fields, is nicely girded with earthen and iron roads, and jewelled all over with cities and fair towns. The shaggy wood has been trimmed away, and is only "A scarf about her decent shoulders thrown." The Three millions of men are snugly cradled in New-England's lap. The winds have been put to work. ground, so lazy once, has no Sunday but the winter now. The rivers have been put out to apprentice, and become blacksmiths, paper-makers, spinners, and weavers. The ocean is a constant ferryman, always at work, fetching and carrying between the corners of the world. Even the lightning has been called in from his play-ground, and set to work; he must keep the side-walk now when he travels, for we regulate the police of the sky; Dr. Franklin began that work. The lightning must no longer burn up meeting-houses, a favorite errand which the devil used to send him on of old time, as Cotton Mather said, he must keep the peace now; swift-footed, he must run of errands for the family. We say "Go!" and the lightning has gone; "Come!" and the lightning is at our hand; "Do this!" and the lightning sets about it. Now the difference between the New-England of three hundred years ago and the New-England of to-day, was all a reserved power once. The Merrimac was the same river to the Indian that it is now to the American; the ground and sky were the same; the earth does not secrete a different form of lightning from that which of old crinkled through the sky, uttering its thunder as it went. The change in the human race from the beginning till now is immensely greater than the change from the Massachusetts of red Governor Massasoit to the Massachusetts of pale Governor Clifford. All the difference between the first generation of men on earth - without house or garment, without wife or speech, without consciousness of God or consciousness of self-and the most cultivated society of religious men of England and America, was once a power of progress which lay there in human nature. The savage bore within him the germ of Michael Angelo, of La Place, and Moses, and Jesus. The capability of the nineteenth century lay in the first generation of men, as the New-England of to-day lay in the New-England of three hundred years ago, or as the wheat of the Tuscan harvest lay in those few Egyptian grains; it lay there in the human faculties, asleep, unseen, and unfelt, with the instinct of progressive development belonging thereto. All the mighty growth of the Pagan civilization, of the Hebrew, the Buddhistic, the Mahometan, and the Christian, lay there unseen in A thousand years ago, who would have dared to prophesy the industrial civilization of New-England today? When Sir Francis Drake scoured the seas, capturing every vessel that he could overmaster, great pirate that he was, murdering the crews of Spanish galleons, and burning them at sea after he had taken the man. |