dictation. We admire and learn, until we become drunken with these viands. Too soon we become devotees at the altar of science, we climb its heights, partake of its labours, and sit down at the table of its chieftains. We become at length satiated, and perceive the vanity of earthly science and its impotence to afford happiness. We again see the apparition of Deity, and return to the altar of beauty and holiness. The unchanged and unchangeable face of nature, its sun and moon, its stars, its mountains, its rivers, the unfathomable sea, again present themselves, and we dwell over them, regarding them as associates of our first love. We are led to examine our own fashion and being, and we discover assimilations of contour and shape which yield pleasing emotions. There we perceive the same line of beauty, which is the source of so much delight, whilst reflecting on the shape of the world, the fashion of the sun, the moon, and their starry children. We admire the structure of the various organs which minister to our existence, intelligence, and life; for we then recognize the same lines and shapes, which have yielded us so much pleasure in the heyday of our youth. The line of beauty is the line of life; the line of power and motion; the very perfection and being of beauty is expressed in the sphere or its features, which are curves: to behold it is to delight; and to describe its effect on our general nature demands a cultivated and unprejudiced mind. As we have said, beauty rests in her bower amidst the petals of the lily; high on the arched heaven; by the rocky shore where billows roll; surrounds the golden sun, and beams in the softer radiance of the moon; in the smile of childhood; in woman's form, and in the globe of sight. There she sits in majesty eternal, repeating in every age and clime,—" The light of the body is the eye."

APPENDIX.

How variously do philosophers explain the nature of light! Some have called it the traction of lines in radial action. That a ray of light is a radius, having two extremities, different from each other, one turned towards the sun, and one coming in contact with the planets; and that that light is a splitting, rending action: that it is the life of ether. Some have said (strangely) that the sun is an undulating sea of flame, and that combustions or electrical processes of light, appearing to us as light, occur in its atmosphere, and that the velocity of rotation hurls about the light particles, which are again, by an unknown route and unknown means, brought back to the sun.

Some consider that the sun appears to have only the density of water, being four times less dense than the earth, and, therefore, nearly in the condition of water; and that it gives out light merely because it is water; for as such it is in eternal motion, and is moved by the planets. That at every point of the sun, opposite to which a planet stands, there is flow; there illumination is stronger. That there must be several seas of light upon the sun opposite to the planets, and that there is nowhere a perfectly quiescent point in the These philosophers remind us the ebb and flow of the sea give out light; and that, as they say, the sun is a body trembling through its mass, and thereupon phosphorescent.

sun.

We trust we shall not fatigue by some further observations,-for instance, colour or decomposition of light fairly claim a few words. Light cannot enter unchanged into mutual operation with matter. The tension of ether changes itself in matter, and this change is a debilitation of the tension of ether; and, lastly, its complete cessation. There can, therefore, be no absolutely transparent matter, the ether only being the absolutely transparent. The denser a material is, by so much the more will it be capable of suppressing in itself the tension of light. This suppression or expiration of the tension of light in bodies has received the name of absorption. This absorption is not a mechanical adherence of the particles of light in the pores of bodies-there are no

pores for light, and this requires none

e-this absorption is regarded as a retrogression of light into the indifference of ether; indeed, light in conflict with matter does not continue light, but becomes a mean condition between light and darkness.

Colour orginates only in the confinity of light and dark, or in the limit between the two great antipodes, white and black. Darkness is the cause of colours. There is nothing visible but colour, the coloured matter. The non-corporeal itself is invisible; darkness is the cause of visibility; were there no darkness there would be no world for the eye. Colours are only illuminated darkness. In the limit between light and dark there is neither white nor black, but their possible mediate conditions or the proper colours, the material tensions of ether. Colour agrees essentially with the elements, and is itself nothing different from element. Fire is in its essence red, as being the impartient of light and heat; air is in its essence nothing else than the blue ether, by virtue of its being gaseous; water is the green ether; earth the yellow. If the ether is tensed, it then becomes red or fire if it attains its blue stage it becomes air; at the green stage water; upon the yellow, earth.

The elements are only gradations of light-colours. They have, therefore, been formed according to the laws of light; for colours are, without doubt, the legitimate developments of light. Red, as being the solar, or fire colour, ranks parallel with oxygen; the more powerful indeed the combustion, the more powerful is the oxidation, and by so much redder the flame. Matter also becomes red through oxidation. The red vanishes lastly into white, and thus the highest oxidation is white. Red is the warmest colour, and blue the coldest. Red retains its presence to the eye at a far greater distance than blue and green; though it is true an effect produces a colour of blue at a distance beyond the red, but this is only atmospheric effect. The greatest distance creates white. The sun in the firmament may be viewed as the bright opening in a darkened chamber. Colours, are, therefore, nothing but images of the sun in darkness; self-manifestations of the sun in dark matter. A point of light thrown into darkness is colour.

A. P. SHAW, PRINTER, 10, DEVONSHIRE STREET, BISHOPSGATE.