A Discourse on the Character and Services of Thomas Jefferson: More Especially as a Promoter of Natural and Physical Science. Pronounced, by Request, Before the New York Lyceum of Natural History, on the 11th October, 1826, Issue 3

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G. & C. Carvill, 1826 - 67 pages

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Page 5 - If the view from the top be painful and intolerable, that from below is delightful in an equal extreme ; it is impossible for the emotions arising from the sublime to be felt beyond what they are here : so beautiful an arch, so elevated, so light, and springing as it were up to heaven ! the rapture of the spectator is really indescribable!
Page 9 - Such is the economy of nature, that no instance can be produced, of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken.
Page 26 - Education is here placed among the articles of public care, not that it would be proposed to take its ordinary branches out of the hands of private enterprise, which manages so much better all the concerns to which it is equal ; but a public institution can alone supply those sciences which though rarely called for are yet necessary to complete the circle, all the parts of which contribute to the improvement of the country and some of them to its preservation.
Page 26 - ... without employment. I suppose an amendment to the constitution, by consent of the States, necessary, because the objects now recommended are not among those enumerated in the constitution, and to which it permits the public moneys to be applied.
Page 26 - The present consideration of a national establishment, for education particularly, is rendered proper by this circumstance; also that, if Congress, approving the proposition, shall yet think it more eligible to found it on a donation of lands, they have it now in their power to endow it with those which will be among the earliest to produce the necessary income.
Page 21 - The expedition of Messrs. Lewis and Clarke, for exploring the river Missouri, and the best communication from that to the Pacific ocean, has had all the success which could have been expected.
Page 7 - I believe there are, as I see to be the case in the races of other animals. I only mean to suggest a doubt whether the bulk and faculties of animals depend on the side of the Atlantic on which their food happens to grow, or which furnishes the elements of which they are compounded. Whether Nature has enlisted herself as a Cis- or Trans-Atlantic partisan.
Page 56 - I strongly suspect that our geographical peculiarities may call for a different code of natural law to govern relations with other nations from that which the conditions of Europe have given rise to there.
Page 40 - The crystallized form, observable everywhere on the original surface of the metal that has been left untouched or undisturbed, leads me to presume that the fusion it has sustained was by a process of nature; since this crystallized surface can only be supposed to have been produced by a slow and gradual cooling, whereby the copper assumed regular figures as its heat passed into other substances, and the metal itself lay exposed to the air. "As to the properties of the copper itself, it may be observed...
Page 26 - The subject is now proposed for the consideration of Congress, because, if approved by the time the state legislatures shall have deliberated on this extension of the federal trusts, and the laws shall be passed and other arrangements made for their execution, the necessary funds will be on hand and without employment.

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