It is an excellent circumstance that hospitality grows best where it is most needed. In the thick of men it dwindles and disappears, life fruit in the thick of a wood; but where people are planted sparely it blossoms and matures, like apples on a standard or an espalier. It flourishes where the inn and lodging-house cannot exist.

Prayer is so mighty an instrument that no one ever thoroughly mastered all its keys. They sweep along the infinite scale of man's wants and God's goodness.

All geologic history is full of the beginning and the ends of species-of their first and last days; but it exhibits no genealogies of development.

Nature is a vast tablet, inscribed with signs, each of which has its own significancy, and becomes poetry in the mind when read; and geology is simply the key by which myriads of these signs, hitherto indecipherable, can be unlocked and perused, and thus a new province added to the poetical domain.

But, in truth, the existing premises, wholly altered by geologic science, are no longer those of Hume. The footprint on the sand — to refer to his happy illustration — does not now stand alone. Instead of one, we see many footprints, each in turn in advance of the print behind it, and on a higher level.

Problems are only opportunities with thorns on them.

Because science flourishes, must poesy decline? The complaint serves but to betray the weakness of the class who urge it. True, in an age like the present,-considerably more scientific than poetical,-science substitutes for the smaller poetry of fiction, the great poetry of truth.