the system of Newton, either that celestial machinery of Des Cartes, which was impelled by whirlpools of ether, or that still more cumbrous planetarium of cycles and epicycles which was the progeny of a remoter age? It is thus that at the commencement of the observational process there is the abjuration of beauty. But it soon reappears in another form, and brightens as we advance, and at length there arises on solid foundation, a fairer and goodlier system than ever floated in airy romance before the eye of genius. Nor is it difficult to perceive the reason of this. What we discover by observation is the product of divine imagination bodied forth by creative power into a stable and enduring reality. What we devise by our own ingenuity is but the product of human imagination. The one is the solid archetype of those conceptions which are in the mind of God: the other is the shadowy representation of those conceptions which are in the mind of man. It is just as with the labourer, who, by excavating the rubbish which hides and besets some noble architecture, does more for the gratification of our taste, than if by his unpractised hand he should attempt to regale us with plans and sketches of his own. {116} And so the drudgery of experimental science, in exchange for that beauty whose fascinations it withstood at the outset of its career, has evolved a surpassing beauty from among the realities of truth and nature. ... "The views contemplated through the medium of observation, are found not only to have a justness in them, but to have a grace and a grandeur in them far beyond all the visions which are contemplated through the medium of fancy, or which ever regaled the fondest enthusiast in the enchanted walks of speculation and poetry. But neither the grace nor the grandeur alone would, without evidence, have secured acceptance for any opinion. It must first be made to undergo, and without ceremony, the freest treatment from human eyes and human hands. It is at one time stretched on the rack of an experiment, at another it has to pass through fiery trial in the bottom of a crucible. {117} In another it undergoes a long questioning process among the fumes and the filtrations and the intense heat of a laboratory; and not till it has been subjected to all this inquisitorial torture and survived it, is it preferred to a place in the temple of Truth, or admitted among the laws and lessons of a sound philosophy."