the same corn which four thousand years ago was raised from an improved grass by an inventor worshipped for two thousand years in the ancient world under the name of Ceres, still forms the principal food of mankind; and the potato, perhaps the greatest benefit that the Old has derived from the New World, is spreading over Europe, and will continue to nourish an extensive population when the name of the race by whom it was first cultivated in South America is forgotten. "I will now call your attention to some remarkable laws belonging to the history of society, and from the consideration of which you will be able gradually to develop the higher and more exalted principles of being. There appears nothing more accidental than the sex of an infant, yet take any great city or any province and you will find that the relations of males and females are unalterable. Again, a part of the pure air of the atmosphere is continually consumed in combustion and respiration; living vegetables emit this principle during their growth; nothing appears more accidental than the proportion of vegetable to animal life on the surface of the earth, yet they are perfectly equivalent, and the balance of the sexes, like the constitution of the atmosphere, depends upon the principles of an unerring intelligence. You saw in the decline of the Roman empire a people enfeebled by luxury, worn out by excess, overrun by rude warriors; you saw the giants of the North and East mixing with the pigmies of the South and West. An empire was destroyed, but the seeds of moral and physical improvement in the new race were sown; the new population resulting from the alliances of the men of the North with the women, of the South was more vigorous, more full of physical power, and more capable of intellectual exertion than their apparently ill-suited progenitors; and the moral effects or final causes of the migration of races, the plans of conquest and ambition which have led to revolutions and changes of kingdoms designed by man for such different objects have been the same in their ultimate results--that of improving by mixture the different families of men. An Alaric or an Attila, who marches with legions of barbarians for some gross view of plunder or ambition, is an instrument of divine power to effect a purpose of which he is wholly unconscious--he is carrying a strong race to improve a weak one, and giving energy to a debilitated population; and the deserts he makes in his passage will become in another age cultivated fields, and the solitude he produces will be succeeded by a powerful and healthy population. The results of these events in the moral and political world may be compared to those produced in the vegetable kingdom by the storms and heavy gales so usual at the vernal equinox, the time of the formation of the seed; the pollen or farina of one flower is thrown upon the pistil of another, and the crossing of varieties of plants so essential to the