I do not state this idea either as new, or as applicable solely to naval affairs. The same thing occurs, in a still more striking degree, in politics, and, generally, in all those branches of civil as well as military authority, or any other kind of rule, where the passions and interests of men are placed under the guidance of their fellow-creatures. But, without launching forth on such a sea of topics, it will be admitted to be highly important that officers, and particularly young officers, should be made sensible how much caution is necessary in their discipline, since we know that even the wisest and the most experienced arrive, at last, only at this conclusion, that much still remains beyond their grasp, which they have not yet learned; and that every day may be expected to produce complicated cases of such doubt and difficulty, as will require the exercise of all their patience and attention. But, although we cannot get to the bottom of the subject, or ever hope to frame a set of regulations to meet one thousandth part of the cases of ordinary discipline, we ought not to despair upon this point, any more than upon other perplexing questions. Nor should we relax in our efforts to investigate those laws in the moral organization of our nature, merely because they are complicated. It is a fine remark of La Place, that even the motes which we see dancing in the sun-beam are regulated, in their apparently capricious movements, by the very same laws of gravitation and momentum which determine the orbits of the planets. In like manner, there can be no doubt that, if we only knew how to trace it, this beautiful analogy would be found to extend to the laws regulating the minutest of those moral influences, which we are apt so hastily to pronounce irregular and uncertain. The science of moral government, whether afloat or on shore, and whether the scale be great or small, is like that of physical astronomy, and has what may be called its anomalies and disturbances, sometimes very difficult to be estimated, and requiring numberless equations, or allowances, to set them right; but the pursuit is not, on that account, one whit the less true to our nature, or less worthy of that patient investigation by which alone truth can ever be reached, and all such apparent discordances reconciled. CHAPTER X. DANGERS OF A NOVA SCOTIA FOG.