of his daring prophecy, he besought the astronomers of the succeeding generation to watch for its return in 1759, and in that year it came. INVENTIONS AND DISCOVERIES. Whoever will in a spirit of impartiality examine what had been done by Catholicism for the intellectual and material advancement of Europe, during her long reign, and what has been done by science in its brief period of action, can, I am persuaded, come to no other conclusion than this, that, in instituting a comparison, he has established a contrast. And yet, how imperfect, how inadequate is the catalogue of facts I have furnished in the foregoing pages! I have said nothing of the spread of instruction by the diffusion of the arts of reading and writing, through public schools, and the consequent creation of a reading community; the modes of manufacturing public opinion by newspapers and reviews, the power of journalism, the diffusion of information public and private by the post-office and cheap mails, the individual and social advantages of newspaper advertisements. I have said nothing of the establishment of hospitals, the first exemplar of which was the Invalides of Paris; nothing of the improved prisons, reformatories, penitentiaries, asylums, the treatment of lunatics, paupers, criminals; nothing of the construction of canals, of sanitary engineering, or of census reports; nothing of the invention of stereotyping, bleaching by chlorine, the cotton-gin, or of the marvelous contrivances with which cotton-mills are filled--contrivances which have given us cheap clothing, and therefore added to cleanliness, comfort, health; nothing of the grand advancement of medicine and surgery, or of the discoveries in physiology, the cultivation of the fine arts, the improvement of agriculture and rural economy, the introduction of chemical manures and farm-machinery. I have not referred to the manufacture of iron and its vast affiliated industries; to those of textile fabrics; to the collection of museums of natural history, antiquities, curiosities. I have passed unnoticed the great subject of the manufacture of machinery by itself--the invention of the slide-rest, the planing-machine, and many other contrivances by which engines can be constructed with almost mathematical correctness. I have said nothing adequate about the railway system, or the electric telegraph, nor about the calculus, or lithography, the airpump, or the voltaic battery; the discovery of Uranus or Neptune, and more than a hundred asteroids; the relation of meteoric streams to comets; nothing of the expeditions by land and sea that have been sent forth by various governments for the determination of important astronomical or geographical questions; nothing of the costly and accurate experiments they have caused to be made for the ascertainment of fundamental physical data. I have been so unjust to our own century that I have made no allusion to some of its