the sand and ruins till a tomb broke forth, or an inscription became legible. Accompanied by some friend whom his enthusiasm had inspired with his own sympathy, here he dictated his notes, tracing the mouldering sculpture, and catching the fading picture. Thrown back into the primitive ages of Christianity, amid the local impressions, the historian of the Christian catacombs collected the memorials of an age and of a race which were hidden beneath the earth.[B] [Footnote A: Shelley caught much of his poetry in wandering among the ruins of the palace of the Caesars on the Palatine Hill; and the impression made by historic ruins on the mind of Byron is powerfully evinced in his "Childe Harold."--ED.] [Footnote B: A large number of these important memorials have been since removed to the _Galleria Lapidaria_ of the Vatican, and arranged on the walls by Marini. They are invaluable as mementoes of the early Church at Rome. Aringhi has also devoted a work to their elucidation. The Rev. C. Maitland's "Church in the Catacombs" is an able general summary, clearly displaying their intrinsic historic value--ED.] The same enthusiasm surrounds the world of science with that creative imagination which has startled even men of science by its peculiar discoveries. WERNER, the mineralogist, celebrated for his lectures, appears, by some accounts transmitted by his auditors, to have exercised this faculty. Werner often said that "he always depended on the muse for inspiration." His unwritten lecture was a reverie--till kindling in his progress, blending science and imagination in the grandeur of his conceptions, at times, as if he had gathered about him the very elements of nature, his spirit seemed to be hovering over the waters and the strata. With the same enthusiasm of science, CUVIER meditated on some bones, and some fragments of bones, which could not belong to any known class of the animal kingdom. The philosopher dwelt on these animal ruins till he constructed numerous species which had disappeared from the globe. This sublime naturalist has ascertained and classified the fossil remains of animals whose existence can no longer be traced in the records of mankind. His own language bears testimony to the imagination which carried him on through a career so strange and wonderful. "It is a rational object of ambition in the mind of man, to whom only a short space of time is allotted upon earth, to have the glory of restoring the history of _thousands of ages which preceded the existence of his race, and of thousands of animals that never were contemporaneous with his species_." Philosophy becomes poetry, and science imagination, in the enthusiasm of genius. Even in the practical part of a science, painful to the operator himself, Mr. Abernethy has declared, and eloquently declared, that this enthusiasm is absolutely requisite. "We have need of enthusiasm, or some strong incentive, to induce us to spend our nights in study, and our days