Nevertheless it was a foolish wish of mine that gas-lights might supersede the use of train-oil; foolish because a little foresight might have made me apprehend that oil-gas might supersede coal-gas; and a little reflection would have shown that tho' collieries are much more necessary than the Greenland fishery can be pretended to be, far greater evil is connected with them, and that this evil is without any incidental good. For the Greenland fishery unquestionably makes the best seamen; and a good seaman, good in the moral and religious, as well as in the nautical sense of the word, is one of the highest characters that this world's rough discipline can produce. Aye, says an old Lieutenant, living frugally upon his poor half-pay, aye that he is, by ——. But it was not otherwise a foolish wish; for that the whale was made for the use of man in any such way as the whalers take for granted, I am very far from believing. All creatures animate and inanimate, are constituent parts of one great system; and so far dependent upon each other, and in a certain sense each made for all. The whale is a link in the chain, and the largest that has yet been found, for no one has yet caught a Kraken. Cicero makes Crassus the orator commend the ancient philosophy which taught that all things were thus connected:—_mihi quidem veteres illi, majus quiddam animo complexi, multo plus etiam vidisse videntur, quam quantum nostrorum ingeniorum acies intueri potest; qui omnia hæc, que supra et subter, unum esse, et unâ vi atque unâ consensione naturæ constricta esse dixerunt. Nullum est enim genus rerum quod aut avulsum a cæteris per seipsum constare, aut, quo cætera si careant, vim suam atque æternitatem conservare possint._ He expresses a doubt indeed that _hæc major esse ratio videtur, quam ut hominum possit sensu, aut cogitatione, comprehendi_: and with the proper reserve of such a doubt, our Philosopher gave a qualified assent to the opinion, restricting it however religiously to the inferior and visible creation: but as to the notion that all things were made for the use of man, in the sense that vulgar men believe, this he considered to be as presumptuous and as absurd as the converse of the proposition which Pope puts into the mouth of the pampered Goose. “The monstrous faith of many made for one,” might seem reasonable and religious when compared with such a supposition.