tainment of so great an object excited in them. Electro-magnetisın, Pneumatics and Mechanics, are daily and hourly ransacked, and every feasible notion that is suggested to the brain of the ardent enquirer, is eagerly experimented on.

In ancient times, if a number of philosophers had exhibited machines travelling at the rate of thirty miles an hour, they would have been worshipped as gods or prophets; in later ages they would have been burnt as wizards; in modern days, such locomotion is pointed at as an instance of the high ingenuity of man, and advanced as an argument to show what endless improvement may be expected, when proper arrangements shall be instituted for the production of superior knowledge and feeling among the whole people. The present improvements, say the moral philosophers, have taken place while science has been confined to the few, and the many have never had that cultivation which is essential to enable them to become contributors to the general stock of knowledge; but when all shall be made scientific, each enabled to yield some useful suggestion, then will a rapidly accelerating progression commence, the contemplation of which, at present, can only tend to dazzle us. Man's existence has been a series of improvements; but these are now becoming of a more and more stupendous nature, and promise ere long, to completely alter his condition and the character of his pursuits; the time seems coming, when he will no longer be the ignorant plodding labourer, but the intellectual director of natural powers, reduced to a state of subserviency to his will. All natural powers may

be directed to purposes conducive to human interests, all that is requisite is the knowledge of the means of reducing them to subserviency. Man has hitherto depended too much on his physical powers; the steam engine, however, has shown to a demonstration that his greatest power is knowledge, for by it he may gain inanimate servants, powerful, tractable and utiring; and qualified to do that for which animal strength is totally incapacitated.