Author Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1849 Excerpt:... Come, frankly read the rocks, and see In them the Earth's biography; Let mountain pil'd on mountain tell Its antique age, and every shell In fossil form, its tale unfold, Of life's bright day, through time untold. And gathering use from great and small, See good in each, and God in all. TTTONDERS are the prolific offspring of our cir ' cumscribed experiences. When brighter rays of intelligence enter, and dissipate the mists that oftentimes surround objects, or delusively reflect them, then their wonderment ceases, and, like the Spectre of the Brocken, or the beautiful illusion of the Fata Morgiana, the marvellous revelation may raise our astonishment indeed, but not our incredulity. Apparently there are no wonders so extraordinary as Nature's wonders; no disclosures so marvellous as those which she is constantly unfolding--not as miracles, out of the course of her regular path, but as the result of those grand perpetual laws which her Divine Author has affixed upon her evolutions, for the evolving of His own gracious purposes in the government of the world But in strict propriety of speech, there are, in reality, no wonders in Nature; nothing is in her domain impossible; nothing there, beyond the range of the conceivable and the attainable. Nature is but the name for an effect Whose cause is God. And who can put a limit to Omnipotence! who can set a boundary around the Eternal Mind! or circumscribe how long, how magnificently, or how variously His power may exert itself, either in peopling the immensity of space with living worlds; or in occupying the immensity of time with continuous revolutions of those worlds; or in re-arranging their primeval elements into new creations; or applying their imposed laws in evolving new combinations and results;--producin...