to higher conceptions than it could otherwise have formed of the omnipotence and grandeur of the Almighty Creator. Without this property of the rays of light we should likewise have wanted the use of the microscope--an instrument which has disclosed a world invisible to common eyes, and has opened to our view the most astonishing exhibitions of Divine mechanism, and of the wisdom and intelligence of the Eternal Mind. We should have been ignorant of those tribes of living beings, invisible to the unassisted eye, which are found in water, vinegar, and many other fluids--many of which are twenty thousand times smaller than the least visible point, and yet display the same admirable skill and contrivance in their construction, as are manifested in the formation of the larger animals. We should never have beheld the purple tide of life, and even the globules of the blood rolling with swiftness through veins and arteries smaller than the finest hair; or had the least conception that numberless species of animated beings, so minute that a million of them are less than a grain of sand, could have been rendered visible to human eyes, or that such a number of vessels, fluids, movements, diversified organs of sensation, and such a profusion of the richest ornaments and the gayest colours could have been concentrated in a single point. We should never have conceived that even the atmosphere is replenished with invisible animation, that the waters abound with countless myriads of sensitive existence, that the whole earth is full of life, and that there is scarcely a tree, plant, or flower, but affords food and shelter to a species of inhabitants peculiar to itself, which enjoy the pleasures of existence and share in the bounty of the Creator. We could have formed no conception of the beauties and the varieties of mechanism which are displayed in the scenery of that invisible world to which the microscope introduces us--beauties and varieties, in point of ornament and delicate contrivance, which even surpass what is beheld in the visible operations and aspect of nature around us. We find joints, muscles, a heart, stomach, entrails, veins, arteries, a variety of motions, a diversity of forms, and a multiplicity of parts and functions--in breathing atoms. We behold in a small fibre of a peacock’s feather, not more than one-eighth of an inch in length, a profusion of beauties no less admirable than is presented by the whole feather to the naked eye--a stem sending out multitudes of lateral branches, each of which emits numbers of little sprigs, which consist of a multitude of bright shining globular parts, adorned with a rich variety of colours. In the sections of plants, we see thousands and ten thousands of tubes and pores, and other vessels for the conveyance of air and juices for the sustenance of the plant; in some instances, more than ten hundred thousand of these being compressed within the