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16 and occasional scientific discoveries are made, they are induced to suppose that everything is in transit, and that all old things are worthless and should be cast away. Give them the pruning knife and nothing would be left but mushrooms of their own raising. The laws which the Creator gave to matter are quite too old to have authority with them, and he who believes in their integrity and permanency is, in their opinion, and old fogy. Their cry is Progress! Progress! This is one great mistake. Every generation in all past time have supposed that their own period was most extraordinary,—every new discovery became a subject of wonder and astonishment, and every succeeding age looked with derision upon the ignorance of all preceding. The path of time has ever been strown [sic] with new things, yet how few of all the supposed discoveries have stood the test of experience.—The disciples of Paracelsus who taught the wonders of Alchyma, and the thousands who engaged in the vain search for the Philosopher's stone, more than two thousand years ago, all supposed that they had made discoveries that were to illuminate the world,—which would wholly change the condition of human life, and bury in undistinguished oblivion, all the knowledge of the past. Yet all those golden dreams fled,—their hopes perished, and little remains of all their proud schemes but a history of their extravagance and folly. In the arts and sciences, in intellectual and metaphysical philosophy, theory, after theory, hypothesis, after hypothesis, has been promulgated only to be refuted and abandoned. Throughout all the long line of ages, bubble after bubble has burst, and every succeeding explosion has only made room for something still newer. In