Yet these cases are not more striking than one related of the Abbe LA CAILLE, who ranked among the first astronomers of the age. La Caille was the son of the parish clerk of a village. At the age of ten years his father sent him every evening to ring the church bell, but the boy always returned home late: his father was angry, and beat him, and still the boy returned an hour after he had rung the bell. The father, suspecting something mysterious in his conduct, one evening watched him. He saw his son ascend the steeple, ring the bell as usual, and remain there during an hour. When the unlucky boy descended, he trembled like one caught in the fact, and on his knees confessed that the pleasure he took in watching the stars from the steeple was the real cause which detained him from home. As the father was not born to be an astronomer, he flogged his son severely. The youth was found weeping in the streets by a man of science, who, when he discovered in a boy of ten years of age a passion for contemplating the stars at night, and one, too, who had discovered an observatory in a steeple, decided that the seal of Nature had impressed itself on the genius of that boy. Relieving the parent from the son, and the son from the parent, he assisted the young LA CAILLE in his passionate pursuit, and the event completely justified the prediction. How children feel a predisposition for the studies of astronomy, or mechanics, or architecture, or natural history, is that secret in nature we have not guessed. There may be a virgin thought as well as a virgin habit--nature before education--which first opens the mind, and ever afterwards is shaping its tender folds. Accidents may occur to call it forth, but thousands of youths have found themselves in parallel situations with SMEATON, FERGUSON, and LA CAILLE, without experiencing their energies.