Page:The Hunterian Oration,1838.djvu/43

THE HUNTERIAN ORATION. history of "the earth, and of the waters under the earth.”

Our minds sink prostrate before conceptions of such awful grandeur and sublimity as the lapse of thousands of centuries, the disappearance and succession, not of individuals only, but of families,—not of tribes, but of nations! But mind, like matter, is imperishable,—its capacities and powers infinitely various, and, for aught we know, infinitely perfectible. We are raised and fitted to the conception of the boundless extent of the mental faculties, as of time and space, by our unceasing observation of the increase of what remains to be known beyond the increase of knowledge. Since it has pleased the great Author of Nature to ordain that man’s powers should be exalted by the sense of extension, as his hopes are encouraged by the sense of progress—

is it irrational to believe that in the revolution of ages our hemisphere may again be visited and gladdened by Bacons and Newtons, Shakspeares and Miltons, Hunters and Cuviers, who are even now maturing in the womb of time, whilst their great prototypes repose in the sunshine of eternal beatitude?