"That's beautifu'!" "Tuts, haud your tongue, and tak a chow. There's some shag." "Is he gaun to be lang, Hamish?" "Wheesht! you micht as weel be speakin in the kirk." But to see what he owes to inventive art, we should compare man, not with inferior creatures, but with himself, looking over the face of human society, as history or observation shows it. We shall find him almost sharing the life of brutes, or removed from them by innumerable differences, and incalculable degrees. In one place we see him harbouring in caves, naked, living, we might almost say, on prey, seeking from chance his wretched sustenance, food which he eats just as he finds it. He lives like a beggar on the alms of nature. Turn to another land, and you see the face of the earth covered with the works of his hand--his habitation, widespreading stately cities--his clothing and the ornaments of his person culled and fashioned from the three kingdoms of nature. For his food the face of the earth bears him tribute; and the seasons and changes of heaven concur with his own art in ministering to his board. This is the difference which man has made in his own condition by the use of his intellectual powers, awakened and goaded on by the necessities of his physical constitution. The various knowledge, the endlessly multiplied observation, the experience and reasonings of man added to man, of generation following generation, which were required to bring to a moderate state of advancement the great primary arts subservient to physical life--the arts of providing food, habitation, clothing, and defence, _we_ are utterly unable to conceive. We are _born_ to the knowledge which was collected by the labours of many ages. How slowly were those arts reared up which still remain to us! How many which had laboriously been brought to perfection, have been displaced by superior invention, and fallen into oblivion! Fenced in as we are by the works of our predecessors, we see but a small part of the power of man contending with the difficulties of his lot. But what a wonderful scene would be opened before our eyes, with what intense interest should we look on, if we could indeed behold him armed only with his own implanted powers, and going forth to conquer the creation! If we could see him beginning by subduing evils, and supplying painful wants--going on to turn those evils and wants into the means of enjoyment--and at length, in the wantonness and pride of his power, filling his existence with luxuries;--if we could see him from his first step, in the untamed though fruitful wilderness, advancing to subdue the soil, to tame and multiply the herds--from bending the branches into a bower, to fell the forest and quarry the rock--seizing into his own hands the element of fire, directing its action on substances got from the bowels of the earth--fashioning wood, and stone, and metal, to the will of his thought--searching the nature of plants to spin their fibres, or with