for the singular accompaniment of a few leaves in its armpits, and the complete preservation of their forms, although they had lost their colour. Here there certainly was a very suggestive fact and a striking contrast. The leaves themselves required no embalming, no curious case, no balsamic preservatives. Simple things as they were, they had once quivered in the cool breezes of evening, they had not withered under the burning meridian beams of an Egyptian sun, they had been refreshed through every tiny pore, and along every thin vein by the drenching dews of heavy night. They had been plucked, before they naturally faded and fell, by some human hand, on the banks of the Nile; and now here they were in the city of Paris, after having been torn from a living tree some three thousand or more years ago, by a living human hand, and placed under a dead human arm. Here they were as well preserved as the human body itself, though as dry and as sapless!

Who was it that placed these leaves under the dead arm? Did he do so thoughtfully or carelessly? Did he thereby mean to teach a symbolic lesson, or did he regard these leaves as themselves conservative in their effluence?

Did he thereby purpose to speak to a remote posterity on earth, or thus to influence the spirit of the deceased? We cannot determine, but this we see-here lie together two kinds of once living organisms-the vegetable and the human, and these two are both symbolic of a short life; both distinct in outline, yet both unrecognized in their minute features; both alike in their end, yet each very different in its previous existence.

Although nothing precise could be pronounced relating to the kind of plant to which these leaves belonged, and although nothing definite could be deciphered of the rank and character of the individual who once animated this human body, yet they both came from that land of marvels and mysteries, where even language lies entombed in strange pictures, and where care for the dead often exceeded care for the living. They came from a land where the Fleeting and the Enduring stand in more conspicuous contrast than in any other country.

While men died and leaves decayed, while animate forms lived out their little span, and passed away as though they ne'er had been, there slowly rose up by their side those gigantic monoliths, those tall, slender obe

lisks, and those massive pyramids; those mysterious sphinxes and vast temples, of which many to this day remain, and long will remain, to testify to the bold conceptions and the patient toil of dynasties otherwise unrecorded, and of races of men utterly unknown. Men of to-day can remove obelisks from Egypt to Paris and to Rome, and in those great cities can exhibit to the moderns the scarcely injured works of the ancients; but the men and the women, the natural growths of those remote periods, are gone from this earth for ever. Sometimes a mass of dried flesh and a few dried leaves are exhumed and displayed as singular relics rescued from general decay and departure. By stones in temples, by pyramids, by monoliths, Egypt still in part endures; in her Pharoahs, in her priests, and in her many generations of common people; while in the human race, and in nearly all that appertained to the daily life of the race of oldest days, Egypt has been as fleeting as the leaves that once rustled on the shores of her great river.

Nearly the same tenor of comment is applicable to the great world of Nature in which men live and die year after year and century after century. Mountains and rocks-those

huge pyramids of Nature-remain to us through all time, and we must learn from them what we best can. Natural hieroglyphics are recorded in the strata composing rocks and mountains, and we may interpret them when, after long study, we have discovered the key to their meaning. But the once living things themselves-those forms which once had voices that might have sounded forth to us-those forms which once performed actions, and displayed motions which would have instructed us —which were born and grew and died upon a soil or in a sea adapted to their existence-all those living things have vanished away, as though they had never lived at all. The scanty remains of them which are now found embedded in various deposits have been safely sepulchred like the mummies of Egypt, and they alone are our natural hieroglyphs. They alone are the enduring relics of innumerable fleeting existWe ourselves are also passing away with like resultless lives. We are the fleeting things in the midst of an apparently enduring world of matter.

ences.

Should not we, then, who are so rapidly passing away, investigate and interrogate the outward world which has appeared in immea

surable time before us-which is marked by an eventful history of change and life-which has ever been under the sway of wonderful, irresistible, and divinely-originated laws and which may yet remain under those laws for unknown ages to come? If by assiduity and thought we can learn and record and leave behind us some certain knowledge of this vast external world, of its hidden secrets, of its general constitution, of its majestic order, and of its impressive grandeur; above all, if we can show how these its characteristics illustrate the Omnipotence, Providence, and Bounty of the Creator of the entire universe of things, and how He designs that we should discern them in His works, and be drawn nearer to Him in spirit by the close examination of what He has set in glorious order before our eyes; then we shall have served one principal object of our earthly existence. The purpose of our present life is not to live in mental blindness, but to learn as we live, and to become full of knowledge and wisdom in proportion to our years. He who has passed through our great School of Nature without learning its important lessons-without regarding it, and listening to it as a teacher of great truths, and a symbol of things higher and