their dependencies, it may fairly be asserted that the greater part of the other sciences is held by books, and not by living memories. It is true that there are, in Europe and America, a few dozens of professors, who, by dint of perpetual repetition, have imprinted on their recollections immense stores of facts, which they can reproduce at pleasure, almost without an effort of thought. But in these cases the memory is too often developed at the expense of the active faculties; and besides they are so rare, and, though we take in the whole planet, so easily enumerated, that they only prove, by their single tall heads, how many memories of smaller stature are sleeping an unknowing sleep under the oblivious waters. Indeed I am obliged to conclude, from my own experience, as well as from the observations of others, that in the noblest of the physical sciences, I mean physiology, the scientific memory is lethargic and oppressed; while the public memory refuses to hold, even for a brief hour, any considerable number of the details of that important subject.

The literary class is especially to be pitied for the awkward position which it occupies in relation to the sciences. With every motive to refresh the mind from the deeper fountains of nature, and to cultivate a sincere amity with the votaries of all knowledge, the literary man, by his very education, by the refinement of his tastes, by his appreciation of beauty, by his practical grasp of the value of order, by the habitude of appealing to the human heart, is incapacitated for entertaining dry, dull, and juiceless subjects, and consequently is for the most part singularly ignorant, and not seldom hostile to the prosecution, of the sciences. If there be a series in the art of forgetting, if oblivion can attain different velocities, then we should say, that the man of letters, generally remarkable for studious habits and retentiveness of mind, has the shortest memory of all for scientific particulars; that he forgets them with a power and rapidity far surpassing that of other men.

It appears then that the experience which supplies the materials of all our knowledge, is, from some cause, ill adapted to that first faculty which is destined to receive it; that the memory refuses to retain the greater part of those facts which ought to

nourish the intellect; and furthermore it is found that in proportion as the facts are related to the living or organic kingdoms, in the same proportion they are indigestible, and their stay in the mind is short and unsatisfactory. What is the resolution of this knotty difficulty? Is the common memory ill constructed, or has it been wrenched, or become diseased? Or, on the other hand, may we resort to so daring an explanation, as to affirm that the particulars of the sciences are not worthy or proper food for the unsophisticated human powers?

As to the fact itself, I believe the largest portion of every miscellaneous audience will fully bear me out. Who has not tried, with a painstaking almost amounting to martyrdom, to read, and carry away, the information contained in works on Botany, Zoology, Organic Chemistry, Comparative and Human Physiology? Who has not tried to persuade himself, or herself, of their interest and value? And who has not miserably failed in the attempt; and though he commenced with a will strong as Hercules, yet, after a brief space, has he not slunk away from the distasteful duty, with his mind emptied of all motives to renew the enterprise? For, like a tired horse which has been once overdriven, or, as the vulgar saying is, dead-beaten on a particular road, the mind no sooner finds itself on a track which suggests a parallel experience, than it becomes obstinate, restive, and immovably stationary, or only active in retracing its steps, and quitting the compulsion of the journey.

I know indeed of no task at all comparable in difficulty and hopelessness to that of really publishing or popularizing the present sciences of observation so as to make them apprehensible and retainable by the world at large, unless it be that other task of propagating the current notions and doctrines of Christendom among heathen nations. If there are no degrees in mere impossibility, then the one achievement is as impossible as the other. Those who are in immediate contact with the missionaries, and who are the favored recipients of coins, tools, or blankets, may learn by rote a few formularies, and repeat them when bidden and rewarded, just as those who live in the central glow and focus of Mechanics' Institutes may retain for a longer or shorter time a few of the details of the sciences; but to expect

the English, or any other European people, to be converted to Botany, or Zoology, or Physiology, as those branches of know- . ledge are at present taught, is as wild as to expect the conversion of the Hindoos, or Australians, or Hottentots, as nations, to the received doctrines of Protestantism or Catholicism. The fact is, that the African, Asiatic, and American Indian, cannot learn the Christianity of the churches; and not only are the same great divisions unable to learn or remember the science of the schools, but this incapacity extends to by far the larger part of our own male population, and to the better half of Europe besides; of course I mean the ladies.

I might indicate without difficulty a series of other unfortunate predicaments in the existing sciences considered as the means of public education, or as capable of being generally diffused; but it is quite sufficient to show that they are heterogeneous with the exercise of memory, and that by a natural necessity, ordinary mortals find themselves thinking about something else when these dry specimens of knowledge are taught or discussed. For if the mind refuses to house or hold them, if they are dismissed from the very threshold, how can they ever be embodied in the human constitution, or partake of the deeper life of the affections or the understanding? If they gave pleasure, or even pain, they would then be remembered by their effects; but, causing apathy, weariness, and sleep, it is no wonder that ordinary dreams should leave a more vivid impression, and enter more into the tissue and connexions of the workday world.

There is, however, one consequence flowing from the difficulty which even the learned experience in recollecting the facts of the organic sciences, and which is not unworthy of our consideration, because it furnishes some reason why those sciences remain so barren of principles or generalizations. It is clear that although the memory is in itself a comparatively passive faculty, yet as the receptacle of all the materials upon which the understanding is to work, its enrichment with multitudes of well collected instances and particulars, representing in a prerogative manner the just divisions of each subject, is quite necessary to the constructive exertions of the other and more active powers. For the building of the sciences, the rational

mind must have a ready servant in the imagination, which is the spirit of the memory; and the imagination must have all its subordinates ready to present themselves, as it were spontaneously, as the intuitions of the reasoning mind flash through and stir the lower brain of the memory. But when the greater portion of knowledge on any subject is laid on the shelves of our libraries, in place of furnishing our recollections, how can the imagination do its own rapid work upon it, so that the result shall appear to be the native offspring of the human mind? The just intermediate is wanting; one part of the process has not been performed; it is as though the architect had the labor and responsibility of hewing from the quarry the stones which ought to have been ready to his hand. Thus it is that sciences formed under such a state of things, whatever abundance of facts may exist in the world, how multiple and how faithful soever books may be, will still be laid upon a small basis of particulars, and will exhibit a preponderance of unchecked and shapeless imagination, without however developing integral views, or taking in the whole compass of the given subject. This, I greatly fear, is the case with much of that knowledge which finds so difficult an abiding place at present in our vulgar brains.

But the question recurs, where is the fault? Is the shortness of our memory to be laid to our own stupidity; or to a wrong conception of our rights in relation to the sciences? If either of these suppositions be accepted, there is an end to further attempts at the diffusion of knowledge. I believe that the main explanation is to be sought elsewhere. I justify the badness of our memories by alleging the badness of the materials which are offered to them. Facts are indeed facts, but in nature they occur in a certain order, and out of that order are fantastic and artificial that order invests them with a beauty that is the highest object of sense, shorn of which their native face is obliterated, and we cannot attend to them. Facts also take for granted principles homogeneous with the principles of the human mind; and if these are ignored or disregarded, the soul and motive of the sciences die. Now the data of the sciences are laboring under this triple disfranchisement, and this is the

reason of that secret consciousness which we all feel of an inability to receive them, even at a time when the necessity for knowledge is greatest, and the thirst intense; and when duty, not less than interest, prompts us to seek instruction wherever it may be found.

If this be the fault, or a principal fault, what then is the remedy for it? Are a catholic science and a catholic theology both impossible, putting all dogmatism and infallibility out of the question? I think it will be answered in this room that a catholic theology at all events may exist, nay does exist; that there is one creed now in the world, which is capable of being taught to all colofs and races of men; that there is one religion which may take up serpents, and they shall not harm it; which may absorb false doctrines grounded in ignorance, and lead the heathen world, by even its wildest superstitions, through an easy and continuous path, to the temple of its own worship, and the shrine of its own invisible but human God. And are we to despair of a catholic science answering to the catholic theology? Let us answer, No! with all our might. Let us take that exceptional portion of it which is now in the world, as a sure promise that the whole is coming. Let us accept our own faith in the issue, and our own deep want of natural truth, as the prophecies of human nature, that the everlasting doors of the world are about to be opened, and to be thronged by no partial procession, but by all God's children of either sex, and of every age and rank and grade and clime.

But if to doubt of the sure advent of this integral and unexceptionable knowledge of nature would be to doubt of Providence, and to reject our own profoundest intuitions and instincts, we have still to consider what are the avenues to it, or, in other words, as we said before, what is the remedy for the present state. This must undoubtedly be sought in a new method, wielded by those new affections which are inwardly prompting the whole world to an unwonted quest of knowledge, and which have also animated and supported the present "diffusers," however unsuccessful they may have been. Let us, then, consume a few moments, in regarding the main parts of that scientific instrument, through the curious and manifold