In whatever direction we turn our eyes, we behold some triumph of mind over matter. We cannot see a ship, a book, a gun, a watch--scarcely the commonest implement or utensil--without being made sensible of the wonders achieved by human science and art,--the result of the combined efforts of a thousand minds and ten thousand hands, embodied in a form that has added incalculably to man's power and enjoyment. If we take the departments of knowledge separately, we are filled with admiration at the labor by which it has climbed, and the elevation it has attained. Astronomy, not content with teaching us the motions of the planets and moons of our system, and by them, enabling us to traverse the pathless ocean with the certainty with which we travel by land--of itself a glorious achievement of science--now undertakes to estimate the weight and density of these bodies--their influence on one another--of the smallest on the largest--the flight of comets, and even some of the changes of position in the stars themselves. Optics has taught us new laws of light, and has subjected the most subtle and the most rapid body in nature to measurements, of as much certainty as the gross portions of matter. We now know the weight, density, motions, elasticity of the air we breathe, and which encompasses the earth; the laws of sound--its velocity, force, repercussion, musical tone. By electricity, magnetism, galvanism, are revealed to us new fluids of the existence of which we did not formerly dream. Their laws have been investigated with all the accuracy, acuteness and unwearied diligence which belongs to modern science; and though this branch of physics is every day receiving new accessions, it already forms a copious science of itself. While yet in the full career of discovery, it affords persuasive evidence of the close affinity if not identity of light, heat, magnetism, electricity and galvanism. The progress of chemistry, shows us the growth of the human intellect in its numerous useful results. In the power it has acquired over brute matter, it has added infinitely to our means of comfort or enjoyment, by improving the useful arts of husbandry, metallurgy, dying, bleaching, tanning, brewing and medicine. Some of these improvements have, indeed, been the effect of accident; but many, nay the most of them, have been the result of human inquiry and sagacity. And the _atomic theory_, which gives us an insight into some of the primary laws of matter, is a pure deduction of reason.