"The progress of communication during the last twenty years, leaves us almost nothing to wish, and yet entitles us to expect every thing. Many of you remember what a passage up the Hudson was, thirty years ago. You remember the uncertain packet, lingering for a wind at the wharf, till patience was almost exhausted; and then, at length, pursuing its zigzag course, now waving in the breeze, now halting in the calm, like a crazy traveller, doubtful of his way, or whether to proceed at all. And now, when you set your foot on the deck of one of our newly invented fire-ships, you feel as if the pawings of some reined courser were beneath you, impatient to start from the goal; anon, it seems to you as if the strength and stride of a giant were bearing you onward; till at length, when the evening shadow falls, and hides its rougher features from your sight, you might imagine it the queenly genius of the noble river, as it moves on between the silent shores, and flings its spangled robe upon the waters." Scarcely less beautiful, are the following reflections upon the moral tendencies of the mechanic arts, in leading the mind to the infinite wisdom of Nature and of the Author of Nature: "If an intelligent manufacturer or mechanic would carefully note down in a book all the instances of adaptation that presented themselves to his attention, he would in time have a large volume; and it would be a volume of philosophy--a volume of indisputable facts in defence of a Providence. I could not help remarking lately, when I saw a furnace upon the stream of the valley, and the cartman bringing down ore from the mountains, how inconvenient it would have been if this order of nature had been reversed; if the ore-bed had been in the valley, and the stream had been so constituted as to rise, and to make its channel upon the tops of the ridges. Nay, more; treasures are slowly prepared and carefully laid up in the great store-houses of nature, against the time when man shall want them. When the wood is cut off from the plains and the hills, and fuel begins to fail, and man looks about him with alarm at the prospect, lo! beneath his feet are found, in mines of bitumen and mountains of anthracite, the long hid treasures of Providence--the treasure-houses of that care and kindness, which at every new step of human improvement, instead of appearing to be superseded, seems doubly entitled to the name of _Providence_." * * * "All nature is not only a world of mechanism, but it is the work of infinite art; and the mechanic-inventor and toiler is but a student, an apprentice in that school. And when he has done all, what can he do to equal the skill of the great original he copies; to equal the wisdom of Him who 'has stretched out the heavens