about to relinquish forever his feelings were quite overcome, and the tears rolled down his cheeks: "I leave it," said he, "to my people, and to him whom they may elect as my successor!" This remarkable scene is recorded in some of the notices of deaths for the year 1788. The delusion, though most painful to his friends, was far from an unhappy one to its victim: his feelings were gratified to the last while thinking he was occupied with the good of his fellow-creatures--an occupation best suited to his benevolent disposition. MYSTERIES! "I believe nothing that I do not understand," is the favorite saying of Mr. Pettipo Dapperling, a gentleman who very much prides himself on his intellectual perspicacity. Yet ask Mr. Pettipo if he understands how it is that he wags his little finger, and he can give you no reasonable account of it. He will tell you (for he has read books and "studied" anatomy), that the little finger consists of so many jointed bones, that there are tendons attached to them before and behind, which belong to certain muscles, and that when these muscles are made to contract, the finger wags. And this is nearly all that Mr. Pettipo knows about it! How it is that the volition acts on the muscles, what volition is, what the will is--Mr. Pettipo knows not. He knows quite as little about the Sensation which resides in the skin of that little finger--how it is that it feels and appreciates forms and surfaces--why it detects heat and cold--in what way its papillæ erect themselves, and its pores open and close--about all this he is entirely in the dark. And yet Mr. Pettipo is under the necessity of believing that his little finger wags, and that it is endowed with the gift of sensation, though he in fact knows nothing whatever of the why or the wherefore. We must believe a thousand things that we can not understand. Matter and its combinations are a grand mystery--how much more so, Life and its manifestations. Look at those far-off worlds majestically wheeling in their appointed orbits, millions of miles off: or, look at this earth on which we live, performing its diurnal motion upon its own axis, and its annual circle round the sun! What do we understand of the causes of such motions? what can we ever know about them, beyond the facts that such things are so? To discover and apprehend facts is much, and it is nearly our limit. To ultimate causes we can never ascend. But to have an eye open to receive facts and apprehend their relative value--that is a great deal--that is our duty; and not to reject, suspect, or refuse to accept them, because they happen to clash with our preconceived notions, or, like Mr. Pettipo Dapperling, because we "can not understand" them.