explained by Agassiz, has assumed not merely a character of sublimity, but of demonstration. This I shall enter upon in another article, to which I shall also defer some necessary remarks on the supposed causes of that great and general refrigeration which Agassiz assumes, and the facts support. But even now I cannot refrain from answering a question which may possibly be asked by some, Why do you place so abstruse and difficult a subject before the readers of a popular work? I do so, because, though assuredly of no easy solution, the boulder question is one replete with interest, and calculated to excite the attention of many who perhaps never before thought that in those time-worn stones was matter to exercise the deepest reflection of the philosopher. But this is not all. To follow up the theories of the astronomer, instruments, and “appliances to boot,” are necessary, which few can possess; but to seek for geological data, the inquirer needs only health, his hammer, and his bag. When, therefore, as so powerfully urged by Mr Patterson, in his beautiful address to the Natural History Society of Belfast, our national system of education shall include within it an elementary course of natural history, we may hope to see in each of its trained schoolmasters not a “village Hampden,” but a “village White” or “village Saussure,” and in each locality around him a group of young and ardent naturalists growing up with a taste and enthusiasm for scientific research which not only will infuse happiness over their own breasts, but multiply the data for correct deductions. And in what branch of geological inquiry is such a multiplication of materials more required than in the one we have been discussing? Happy times, then, for science, morality, and religion, when a taste for research shall have been budded on the earliest shoot of man’s intelligence! J. E. P. * * * * *