Page:M F Maury address before the Philodemic Society.pdf/13

 the schools. They work in a circle. In the schools they begin, to the schools they return. Improvements in education gave rise to the spirit of research, of discovery, and invention, which now pervades the world. Action and re-action are reciprocals. This spirit reflects its achievements back upon education, and every time it returns to Alma Mater, it acquires fresh energies, and continues its round with renewed vigor.

Beauties far more lovely, poetry far more sublime, lessons inexpressibly more eloquent and instructive than any which the classic lore of ancient Greece or Rome ever afforded, are now to be seen and gathered in the walks of science. Physics have ceased to be considered a dry study; they are called beautiful. The discoveries of modern science have realized the wildest imaginings of the poet; its realities far surpass in grandeur and sublimity the most imposing fictions of romance; its empire is the earth, the ocean, and the heavens; its speculations embrace all elements, all space, all time—objects the most minute, objects the most grand. Carrying its researches to the smallest atoms which the microscope can render accessible to our visual organs, it comprehends all those glorious and magnificent objects which the telescope reveals in the boundless regions of space.

It is a discovery of modern science that the atmosphere in one point of view is a sort of laboratory for receiving dead organic matter, and that the plants and trees are condensing machines for preparing it again for animal use. All breathing creatures, with every respiration, cast out into the air a quantity of matter that has coursed their veins, and exhausted its force in giving vitality to their systems. Every moment millions and millions of pounds of this