Besides the primary materials which Nature casts forth from every cleft of the earth, and every cave of the sea,—which she makes to sprout under every passing cloud, and expand beneath every sunbeam, there are new and illimitable classes of productions perpetually attainable by bringing her forces to bear upon each other. By such combination, not only new materials, but fresh powers are discovered, which, in their turn, develop further resources, and confound our imaginations with the prospect of the wealth which awaits man’s reception. It is a great thing to possess improved breeds of animals in the place of their forefathers,—the lean wild cattle with which our forefathers were content; and to see golden corn-fields where coarse, sour grasses once struggled scantily through a hard soil: but it is a much greater thing to have made even the little progress we have made in chemical and mechanical science;—to have learned how to change at will the qualities of the very soil, and bring new agents to increase its fertility and vary its productions;—to have learned to originate and perpetuate motion, and guide to purposes of production the winds of heaven and the streams of earth;—to have learned how to bind the subtlest fluids in the chains of our servitude, and appoint their daily labour to the flying vapours. Truly the Psalmist would scarcely have called man lower than the angels if he could have foreseen that such as these would in time be his slaves. While there was nothing known but a spontaneous or comparatively simple production,—while men reaped only what Nature had sown, or sowed at random, trusting that Nature would bring forth the harvest,—while there existed only the brute labour of the coral insect, or the barbaric labour which reared the wall of China, and planted the pyramids, and scooped out the temples of Elora, there was assurance of incalculable wealth in the bosom of Nature and in the sinews of men. What is there not now, when a more philosophic labour has won a kingdom from the ocean, and planted a beacon in the region of storms, and made an iron pathway from steep to steep before bridged only by clouds, and realized the old imagery of vapoury wings and steeds of fire, promising, not only to ransack the sea and the far corners of the earth for wealth which already exists, but to produce more than had been hitherto imagined? There is nothing dark in this prospect. What dimness there is, is in the eyes of some who look upon it.