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In my rambles about Jerusalem, I passed on several occasions through the quarters of the lepers. Apart from the interest attached to this unfortunate class of beings -arising from the frequent allusion made to them in the Scriptures-there is much in the appearance and mode of life to attract attention, and enlist the sympathy of the stranger. Dirt and disease go revoltingly together here; gaunt famine stalks through the streets; a constant moan of suffering swells upon the dead air; and sin broods darkly over the ruin it has wrought in that gloomy and ill-fated spot. Wasted forms sit in the doorways; faces covered with white scales and sightless eyes are turned upward; skeleton arms, distorted and fetid with the ravages of leprosy, are outstretched from the foul moving mass; and a low howl is heard, the howl of the striken, for alms,-alms, oh, stranger, for the love of God!-alms to feed the inexorable destroyer!-alms to prolong this dreary and hopeles misery! Look upon it, stranger; you who walk forth in all your pride and strength, and breathe the fresh air of heaven; you who have never known what it is to be shunned by your fellow-man as a thing unclean and accursed; you who deem yourself unblessed with all the blessings that God has given you upon earth; look upon it, and learn that there is a misery upon all that you have conceived in your gloomiest hours-a misery that can still be endured; learn that even the leper, with death gnawing at his vitals, and unceasing tortures in his blood, cast out from the society of his fellow-man, forbidden to touch in friendship or affection the hand of the untainted, still struggles for life, and deems each hour precious that keeps him from the grave.

The quarter of the lepers is a sad and impressive place. By the laws of the land, which have existed from Scriptural times, they are isolated from all actual contact with their fellow-men; yet there seems to be no prohibition to their going out beyond the walls of Jerusalem, and begging by the road-side. Near the gate of Zion, on the way to Bethlehem, I saw many of them sitting on the rocks, their hideous faces uncovered, thrusting forth their scaly

hands for alms. Their huts are rudely constructed of earth and stones, seldomwith more than one apartment, and this so filthy and loathsome that it seemed unfit to be occupied by swine. Here they live and propagate, whole families together, without distinction of sex; and their dreadful malady is perpetuated from generation to generation, and the groans of the aged and the dying are mingled with the feeble wail of the young that are brought forth branded for a life of misery. Strange and mournful thoughts arise, in the contempla tion of the sad condition and probable des tiny of these ill-fated beings. Among so many, there must be some in whose breasts the power of true love is implanted,-love for woman in its purest sense, for offspring, for all the endearments of domestic life which the untainted are capable of feeling, -yet doomed never to exercise the affections without perpetuating the curse; some, too, in whom there are hidden powers of mind, unknown save to themselves; ambition that corrodes with unavailing aspirations; a thirst for action that burns within unceasingly, yet never can be assuaged; all the ruling passions that are implanted in man for great and noble pur poses, never, never to give one moment's pleasure unmixed with the perpetual gloom of that curse which dwells in their blood.

As I plodded my way for the last time through this den of sickening sights, a vision of human misery was impressed upon my mind that time cannot efface. I passed when the rays of the sun were cold, and the light was dim; and there came out from the reeking hovels leprous men, gaunt with famine, and they bared their hideous bodies, and howled like beasts; and women held out their loathsome and accursed babes, and tore away the rags that covered them, and, pointing to the shapeless mass, shrieked for alms. All was disease, and sin, and sorrow, wherever I went; and as I passed on, unable to relieve the thousandth part of the misery, moans of despair and howling curses followed me, and lepers crawled back into their hovels, to rot in their filth, and die when God willed.

THE LIFE OF CHRIST.

Yet well may he hesitate who under takes to write the life of Christ. Who, indeed (as Herder finely answered Lavater), could venture, after John, to write the life of Christ ?" Who will not agree with Anna Maria von Schurmann, that such an attempt is to paint the sun with charcoal! The life of a Christian is the best picture of the life of Christ.-Neander.

Natural Bistory and Philosophy.

MINUTENESS OF ANIMAL ORGANIZATIONS.

He that has once seen the wings of a butterfly or moth through that invaluable aid to scientific research and discovery-the microscope, will never forget the gorgeous and magnificent scene which so unexpectedly presented itself, as the exquisite organization of its downy dust lay exposed before his admiring eyes. The framework of the wing is tendinous, or horny, while the membrane itself is covered with what to the unassisted eye appears dust, which comes off upon the fingers when the insect is handled, but which on examination proves to be a collection of exquisitely wrought feathers, which, if of larger size, many a noble dame would think the richest and loveliest head-dress that ever entered a royal drawing-room. Each of these feathers has had for its formation its own artery, each artery its own vein, its own absorbent, and its own nervous branch. Who can estimate the extreme minuteness of the parts of these vessels, not crowded, but with wisest and most skilful arrangement duly placed in one atom of this feathery dust? As every one knows, these wings are variously and sometimes most gorgeously and artistically coloured, displaying every hue of the rainbow. There is reason to believe that these colours are produced by reflecting surfaces, demanding very accurate mechanisms. What must be the accuracy of the mechanism producing the precision and minuteness of workmanship in a wing of many colours, and determined and regular patterns? Are we not lost in the attempt to conceive the numbers, the distribution, and the actions of the arteries in the wings, say, of the argus? Or, can we appreciate the delicacy and accuracy of mechanism, which, in millions upon millions of wings, never prodaces a misplaced colour, or gives a false pattern either in shape or in hue! The carpet-weaver, or the silk-weaver, must calculate carefully that his far-simpler web may produce the right colours and the desired forms. And has this downy dust, this assemblage of feathers, covered the membrane of the insect's wing without design, without intelligence? The palate of the whale, with its fringed plates of whalebone, acting like a sieve or filter, carries not with it more proof of skill on the part of the Divine Artist, than does one

atom of dust on the butterfly's wing. Special arteries were necessary for each colour, and a determined number of them. What must be the skill that produces so many arteries from one trunk, that gives them all such precise and proportionate lengths, that places each feather-making point so exactly that not a feather is misplaced, nor is there any error of colour or of outline? This is God continually doing. Annually he does this for hundreds of species, and for millions of individuals. His instruments are invisible atoms; his materials, the elements of the atmosphere. These are a part of his wondrous works:

"Himself how wondrous then!"

The minuteness and cleverness of animal organizations are strikingly manifested in the instruments or tools by which insects saw, bore, and gnaw, the hardest woods, and perforate stone itself. The sting of a bee is so small that we can scarcely discern it, even when we have opened the sheath within which it is contained; consisting as it does of two barbed spears, extremely small, but so strong, that when the irritated insect has left them in our skin, we have some difficulty to extract the envenomed instrument. The proboscis of a midge, an animal not so large as the eye of a bee, is a tube; and, though to the unassisted vision utterly invisible, contains an organization incredibly more minute, but not a whit less wondrous, complete, and welladapted to the habits and necessities of the insect, than the trunk of the elephant. With this delicate tool it will penetrate the skin of man, as the aphis perforates the bark of plants and trees, or as the asilus bores its way through the hard wing case of the lady-bird. The wanderer upon the sea-shore has often observed the jetties and piers pierced into numerous cavities. A long worm-like molluscteredo navalis, has done this mischief. The very existence of Holland was at one time endangered by the ravages made by this animal upon the embankments which, it is well known, save the industrious inhabitants of that country from inundations that would be destructive. Many a vessel arrives in port after a voyage from Africa, completely riddled in its hull by this wonderful race. Alas! too striking an emblem of man, who is his own worst enemy.

NATURAL HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY.

"For as the ship by hidden shipworm spoil'd;
Or as the rock by briny wavelet ruin'd;
Or as the rusted sword by rust is soil'd;

Or booth unused the tiny moths unbind:
So gnaw'd and nibbled, without hope of rest,
By cares unceasing is my tortured breast!"
Stone is no greater defence than wood
against these little excavators, who rival
rail-road contractors in tunneling, when
the smallness, and apparent feebleness of
the insect tools are taken into consideration.
Rocks of chalk, sand-stone, blue lias, are
found perforated all over by the Pholas
dactylus, as we wander at low water on the
sea-beach, with the clever excavator nicely
sheltered in the castle her own powers have
excavated in the rock.

How, we may well ask, are such strength, such hardness, such sharpness, given to instruments and tools so minute? Man with all his science, and with so many models in nature to aid him, cannot give this strength to gold or to steel. Gold is more feeble than the weakest membrane, long before it arrives at the tenuity of the larger of these; and yet this is not the thousandth part of the tenuity of the material of which the minuter ones are constructed. It has been calculated that the sting of a bee would bear a greater weight than gold wire ten times its thickness ! What must be the tenacity of a membrane much thinner than the thinnest cellular texture, or of a tendon much more slender than the least conceivable fibre, when both these bear all the strain through which the muscles of a beetle will force the animal against the strong pressure of the human hand! Look at the common gnat. Observe its quick and active motions. how minute are its limbs, its articulations, Consider its ligatures, its muscles, and its tendons. Then let the devout admirer of the Creator's works reverentially ask, how is it that this minute and tender workmanship is not destroyed by the active movements of this ever-moving insect? Why is not the invisible tendon broken by the muscular force exerted by the cockchafer, the beetle, the lady-bird, the ant? The ligaments are a hundred times thinner than goldbeaters' skin, and yet they resist a force that would tear the latter like a spider's web. How slender the forty-jointed leg of the gnat! How minute the muscles of this slender limb! How much more minute the bundles of muscular fibres that make the muscles! How inconceivably minute the arteries, the veins, the nerves, the absorbents, the lymphatics, contained in this small but incomprehensible machinea gnat's leg! What can be the sizes of the fifty tubes contained in this one tube? Or, what the minuteness of the valves of their veins and lymphatics? And how minute the atoms of the fluids that circulate through

There

so liliputian a vascular system! are insects smaller than the gnat, having antennæ constructed on the same principle. Imagine then, how small must be the organization! The whole eye of some is not larger than a single lens in the eye of a dragon-fly; yet each of these minute organs of vision contains hundreds of lenses, with blood-vessels, retina, and nerve, of which last it is calculated that between three and four hundred tubes, enclosing numerous fibres, occupy no more room than the diameter of a small pin! The smallest. insect has its oesophagus, its stomach, its viscera. The smallest insect has its ovaries, containing a large collection of eggs, each being a shell, with at least a fluid and a germ within. Can we estimate the diminutive sizes of these organs, and of the membranes of which they consist?

Microscopical crustaceous animals exist perfect in all their external and internal organization, as the crab or the lobster. Their limbs are similarly constructed, and their power, compared with their bulk, is much greater. Their motions are violent and sudden, while the shell that bears the force of these actions is of inconceivable thinness. These animals will spring through water several hundred times their own length. A grain of sand is said to equal in bulk ten thousand living organized structures. Five hundred millions, not larger than the 24,000th part of an inch, according to Ehrenberg, are contained within the space of a cubic line. Here we are thoroughly bewildered. Imagination itself gives up the vain pursuit of following the glorious Creator in the microscopic worlds which he has created. The microscopic atom bewilders man not less than a planet. The invisible population of a leaf, the innumerable inhabitants that have ample sea-room in one drop of water, challenge our admiration of God, not less than the huge animals that roam in the ocean, or that dwell in the forest, or prowl throughout the widely extended desert. God is infinite in the minute.

The cod's roe has been estimated to contain nine millions of eggs. Leuwenhoeck reckons that the roe of the sturgeon contains the incomprehensible number of one hundred and fifty thousand millions of eggs! Each egg is a shell; each shell contains a germ; each germ is enclosed in a membrane, and floats in a fluid. How overwhelmingly minute must the parts be! The Divine Artist alone can discern them. He alone can comprehend this truly atomictheory. The crystalline lens of a cod, to all appearance, is perfectly homogeneous. Microscopically examined, with the skill of organization. Sir David Brewster, it is a most wonderful Although it is scarcely

larger than a pea, this spherical body consists of upwards of five millions of fibres, locking into one another by means of more than sixty-two thousand five hundred millions of teeth. Such is the complication of a portion only of the eye. How intricate must be the structure of other parts of it, and what exquisite elaboration must those textures have received, whose functions are still more refined, and whose modes of action surpass all our powers of conception! This minuteness of structure equals that of the vegetable kingdom. Kieser states that the cellular structure of the Fucus resiculosus consists of cells varying from the 330th to the 50th part of an inch in diameter, and therefore containing from 3,000 to 100,000 cells in a square inch of surface. He also asserts

that the cells are sometimes not more than 1,000th part of an inch in diameter. In warm-blooded animals, the temperature of the body is always sufficient to preserve the fat a compound substance, consisting of stearin and elain-in a fluid form. It is, however, preserved from being diffused through the cellular tissue by being contained in separate vesicles of extreme minuteness. Dr. Munro estimated their diameter at between the 800th and 600th part of an inch.

One of the polypes-Flustra carbasea—has usually twenty-two tentacula; on each side of a tentaculum there are about fifty cilia, making 2,200 cilia on each polype. In each square inch of surface there are above 1,800 cells. Each polype presents about ten square inches of surface in its branches. An ordinary specimen of this zoophite, therefore, presents more than 18,000 polypes, 396,000 tentacula, and 39,600,000 cilia. Dr. Grant calculates that on a single specimen of the Flustra foliacea there are no less than 400,000,000 cilia. How minute the parts that compose these necessary instruments of the polype races! Microscopic species of Medusa occur in every part of the ocean. The luminous property of sea-water, or its phosphorescence, generally arises from the presence of these minute forms of animal life. In some parts of the Greenland seas, they swarm to such an extent as to colour the waters of the ocean for hundreds of miles. The numbers thus dispersed, or rather crowded into this space, surpasses our utmost stretch of imagination. Dr. Scoresby says, that a cubic foot of water, taken indiscriminately, contained above 100,000 of these diminutive creatures. "Manifold are thy works, O God! In wisdom hast thou made them all," is a sentiment which may well express the admiration with which we view these more minute portions of the great fabric of nature. Nor is this

the only, or chief use to be made of these minute organizations. When Christ would inspire his disciples with confidence in the providential care of God over his people, natural history furnished the Great Teacher with his text and its illustration. "Behold," says He, who spake as never man spake, "the fowls of the air; for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your Heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?" So these views of God's wisdom and power applied to the minute organizations of animal life, may read the Christian believer an instructive and impressive lesson, whose moral is, that the Glorious Being, who has skilfully and thoughtfully exercised his resources upon an atom of dust-upon a fly's wing-does not leave man, created in the divine image, redeemed by his own Son, and destined to an unending duration of being, without innumerable and unequivocal proofs that he loves

"His favourite creature, Man."

attest

"Fearfully and wonderfully made," man, in common with all animal life, presents, in every portion of his structure, evidence of the workmanship of the Divine Artist, while his mental and moral powers that God has taken more pains with man than with any other mundane creature. "Thou madest him a little lower than the angels; thou crownedst him with glory and honour, and didst set him over all the works of thy hands: Thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet." Such a workman cannot neglect this workmanship of his hands. He has made us, and he will care for us.

INTERESTING DISCOVERY.

The Paris correspondent of a newspaper says a most beautiful discovery has lately been made by a celebrated horticulturist, of the name of Herbert. Beneath a large case, four or five feet in height, and as many in circumference, are placed pots of roses, japonicas, pinks, dahlias, china asters, &c., all in bud. By means of a certain gas invented by himself, and which is made to pass by a gutta-percha tube to any pot required, Mr. Herbert causes the instantaneous blooming of flowers. The ladies in the room asked successively for roses, dahlias, and japonicas, and saw them into full bloom in a second. It was really wonderful. Mr. Herbert is now trying to improve on his discovery, and to make the gas more portable, and its application less visible. When he has made a little more progress he intends to get out a patent, and deliver his discovery to his friends and the public.

Miscellany.

SATAN IN COUNCIL. A TEMPERANCE ALLEGORY.

ONCE upon a time, far back in the remote past, Satan, the "Prince of the power of the air," called a council in Pandemonium. Upon his throne of fire sat Lucifer himself, and upon his awful brow gleamed a burning liadem, that glowed and flashed like living lightning in the murky air; myriads upon nyriads of fallen spirits; rank upon rank of "principalities and powers," thronged to the hall of audience. All forms of evil, grim and horrible, gathered around him, like satellites around a blazing star. Silent they sat in that illimitable hall, which the sulphurous flames lighted up, while the lurid smoke hung like a mighty canopy over the scene.

Then rose up Satan-born to rule-who "dwelt like a star apart," matchless in evil as in power, and to the infernal multitude thus spake:

"Princes and potentates, who do my bidding, and who best serve me when most ye thwart the Almighty, listen! Ye know that we have tried our subtlest wiles upon the race of man, that we have tempted him at all points, and yet he is so hedged in by holy influences, and watched over by good angels sent from above, that scarcely can we destroy a single soul. I cannot glut my vengeance upon him as I would, to spite heaven's Monarch. Most noble chiefs, I have called you together to take counsel of your wisdom, how we may best ruin mankind while they dwell upon earth, and afterwards to bring them to this pit of woe. Speak ye each his mind, and to him who shall give wisest counsel, and offer strongest means to effect this, our royal purpose, I will give the dominion of the earth and the inhabitants thereof, and a seat ot my right hand for ever."

Thus spake the fiend, and hell to its utmost centre resounded with applause.

Then rose up Moloch, "horrid king, besmeared with blood of human sacrifice,' and spake:

"O chief of many throned powers, that led the embattled seraphim to war, I claim the offered prize! I am the spirit of cruelty; I hardened the heart of the first murderer. Give me the dominion of the earth, O Satan, and I will make it one vast Aceldema. I will sharpen the assassin's knife. I will bring the rack, the wheel, the fire of persecution upon man. I will make him to be a pirate and man stealer, and millions

shall rot in dungeons and in chains. I will bring war upon the earth; and amid the smoke of burning cities I will teach men to rend each other like wild beasts, until the earth shall reek with midnight massacre. I will call them together by tens and hundreds of thousands to gash each other with horrid wounds. I will give them devilish engines, that in a moment shall blow whole squadrons into the air. Then shall they come, O master, shrieking from the red battle-field, to people thy dark dominions."

Scarce, amidst applause, had the fierce Moloch taken his seat, when Belial arosethe fairest seeming, but withal the subtlest of the fallen potentates. Graceful in form and aspect, eloquent in speech:

"To make the worse appear

The better reason, and perplex and dash Matured counsels; for his thoughts were low; To vice industrious, but to noble deeds Timorous and slothful, yet he pleased the ear;" and thus he spake :

"I am the spirit of discord, without whom war and cruelty could never be. Be mine the task to rule the world. I will spread all false reports, and set every man against his neighbour, and darken the counsels of the nations, until anarchy and confusion and hatred shall arise and fill the whole earth. I will point the tongue of the slanderer as the serpent's tooth, and set his heart on fire of hell. I will be the author of all evil counsels and false witnessings, and fraud, and secret malignity, until even good men in despair shall deny there is a God, and die blaspheming, to come and dwell for ever with the damned. Let the dominion of the earth be mine, O master, and thy realms shall be peopled with the souls of men!"

Then Mammon, "the meanest and least erect of all the spirits that fell from heaven," arose and said,

"Listen to me, O Satan, for thou knowest my power upon the sons of men. Give me dominion over them, and hell shall never be empty. I will make men lunatics and fools, and send them through polar snows and torrid burnings, at the risk of life and happiness, to dig among the holes and corners of the earth, amid savage beasts and men more savage, for a few handsfull of yellow dust. So intent shall they be sifting and grasping the paltry ore, that they shall forget the starry crowns that heaven offers them; and fever and famine shall come and sweep them like chaff from

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