same document informs us.

It must therefore have consisted | Restore Christianity, and the arts and sciences will flourish ! in the likeness of the spirit of man to the spirit of God, but in Restore Christianity, and the nations will become civilized!

an infinitely inferior degree; it consisted in a finite degree of knowledge, righteousness and holiness, such as became a created being. When God placed man in Eden and held communion with him there, it is plain that his knowledge must have been such as to render him fit to speak with God, since God condescended to speak with him; his righteousness must have consisted simply in his innocence, or freedom from the transgression of God's law, for God holds no man guiltless who breaks his law; and his holiness must have consisted in freedom from moral pollution, for God cannot look upon sin, much less can he have communion with the wicked.

Moreover, whatever was necessary to his comfort and wellbeing, both as to the necessaries of life and to his future happiness, he was taught by God to perform, while he lived in this innocent and contented state. But man fell from the holy and happy state in which he was created, by sinning against God. Now all was changed; man lost the image of God; he became vile and degraded. He was conscious that this change was his own fault; he hid himself. When he was discovered, his lips belied his heart. Notwithstanding his sin, God clothed him, and taught him how to clothe himself. God gave him work to do, and taught him how to do it. God laid the foundation of civilization, and taught man the arts and sciences. God did more than this, and wonderful was the deed! God laid the foundation of Christianity by giving the first sinner the Protevangelium, the first glad tidings of the Gospel. No doubt the arts and sciences are great civilizers of nen, but Christianity is the GRAND CIVILIZER. Without Christianity we should fall into barbarism and become savages, with all our knowledge of the arts and sciences.

LESSONS IN ENGLISH.-No. LX VI.

By JOHN R. BEARD, D.D.
NOUNS.

VARIOUS FORMS OF THE SUBJECT OF A PROPOSITION.

We now come to the noun man in our model sentence,
The sick man copiously drinks.

The noun man is the subject to the verb drinks. We thus see that
a noun may be the subject of a proposition. Is there any other
part of speech that may be the subject of a proposition?

1. An adjective may be the subject of a proposition; e. g., The sick drink.

But here it must be observed that for drinks I have substituted drink, the plural for the singular form of the verb. The rule then is, that adjectives when used in the plural and preceded by the definite article may be the subject of a proposition.

2. A pronoun may be the subject of a proposition; e. g., I, the sick man, drink.

These additions to the subject modify the signification; and offer instances of what is called apposition. Apposition (from ad, to, and pono, I place) exists when a noun is added to a pronoun or a noun in order to explain the intended meaning. Thus here it is not I merely that drinks, but I, the sick man. Instead of a pronoun you may have a noun, as,

Alexander, the son of Philip, conquered Darius. Apposition takes place in the object as well as in the subject ; e. g., Wine overcame Alexander, the son of Philip.

3. An infinitive mood may be the subject of a proposition; e. g.,
To labour is pleasure.

Other words may be connected with the infinitive mood; as,
A noun. To drink water is pleasant.

A noun and adjective. To drink good water is wholesome.
A noun,
adjective, and adverb. To drink good water copiously is whole-

some.

4. A present participle may be the subject of a proposition; as, Drinking is bad.

Drinking has here
participial force.
ject to the verb is.
clear from its power

the force of a noun, while it retains also its That it is a noun is clear from its being the subThat it has also the force of a participle is to govern an object; as, Drinking spirits is bad.

In proof of this assertion we have only to turn to the history of all the ancient empires that have ever existed in the world. Where is ancient Egypt, with all her primitive glory, and all her boasted knowledge of the arts and sciences? Gone, with the years before the flood! Where is Assyria, with all her early civilization, and all her knowledge of the most ennobling sciences? Entombed in the bowels of the earth, and only at the distance of thousands of years, just beginning to show her dead carcase above the surface! Where is Greece, with her mighty warriors, her glorious arts, her splendid' sciences? Groaning under the tyranny of ages, or but emerging from the grasp of gross ignorance and horrid superstition and fanaticism? Where is Rome, the proud mistress of the world? But enough we have said and shown enough to prove that the true source of civilization is Christianity, in the germ, in the bud, and in the full flower. Its beams have shone upon the world, and have lightened every land. Christianity has now opened the impenetrable gates of China, the mightiest empire the world ever saw, and has cast down to the ground the accumulated folly and stupidity of ages. China will soon be the great, the glorious, and the free; and three hundred and sixty millions of men, one-third of the human race, will be emancipated in a day by the invisible progress of Christianity. The passions of men will no doubt tarnish the glory of this revolution of revolutions, this one great wonder of the world in our day; but the truth is no less sure and certain. "I will overturn, overturn, overturn," said Jehovah, "until he come whose right it is, and I will give it him." The words of ancient prophecy are now being most wonderfully fulfilled; "Ask of me, and I shall give the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.' Christianity is the GRAND CIVILIZER, the only preserver and encourager of the Arts and Sciences, God himself being their founder. After this, our theory of Civilization is plain: God made man civilized, and taught him the arts and sciences. So long as man continued in the knowledge of the true God, and in communion with him, he retained the former; when he fell Here is a clear and striking instance of the advantage of the from that knowledge he lost them, and became savage! Wit- term subject over the term nominative or nominative case. These ness the South Sea Islanders! Witness the aboriginal inha-words are the subject, but they are not the nominative of the verb bitants of Malaysia and Australasia ! Witness the North may. The nominative case must be restricted to drinking. American Indians, the South American Indians, the Negroes I subjoin another example of this compound subject :— of Africa, the Hottentots of the Cape, and the aboriginal inhabitants of all countries on the face of the globe. What were the Buying books which you do not read will not make you wise. Greeks and Romans, with all their boasted learning and skill? A In this subject you have a sentence within a sentence; that is, the set of civilized savages! What are the Hindoos, the Chinese, proposition is not a simple but a compound sentence, the included and the Japanese at the present day? Only civilized savages or subordinate sentence being which you do not read.

As a noun, drinking may be qualified by an articls, an adjective, and a personal pronoun; e. g.,

Article. The drinking was injurious.

Adjective. Much drinking is very injurious.

Pers. Pron. His drinking has been injurious to him. Equally may the participial force carry with it words qualifying the object; as,

Drinking pure water is wholesome.

Drinking even a glass of wine may be blamed.

This last sentence presents a subject compounded of several words, for the subject to the verb may is the clause, drinking even a glass of wine.

invaded its bosom, an immense mass of the glacier is snapped, and an enormous fragment of ice is separated from the parent glacier and begins to float. It is this snapped or loosed fragment of ice, as large as a mountain, that is called an iceberg. All navigators who have sailed to polar regions, whether to

ON THE INFLUENCE OF ATMOSPHERIC AGENTS ON THE the north or to the south, have borne witness to the extreme EARTH'S CRUST.

SECTION VIII.-ON ICEBERGS.

rapidity with which these icebergs are formed. When a mass of ice has been separated from a glacier, or from an icy barrier, it drifts away with the waves, and is again broken into many pieces. From the accumulation of snow which falls upon its upper surface, such a mass assumes a flat or table-topped shape, and continues to increase in height. As these successive layers of snow accumulate, the iceberg becomes more heavy, and consequently sinks deeper into the sea.

Şi, ON THE FORMATION AND THE DRIFTING OF ICEBERGS. Our last three lessons have instructed you in the formation and the operations of glaciers. The diagrams have explained to you, in a very graphic and striking manner, how glaciers extend from high glens among the ridges of the Alps down to the lower vales where orchards and vineyards are cultivated. This accession of layers is formed not by snow only, but also Still, what you have learnt about glaciers in the Alps, or by frozen rain, and even by the dense fogs which prevail in among any inland mountains, will give you no idea of an ice-high latitudes. The American navigator WILKES relates, that berg. In order to have an accurate conception of an iceberg, when he was near the south pole, ice had accumulated on the imagine that a glacier-valley runs down to the sea-shore, and riggings and spars of his ship to the thickness of a quarter of that the glacier pushes its icy body to a considerable distance an inch, in the course of a few hours, though neither rain nor into the sea. Then, by a change in the temperature of the snow fell at the time. The icebergs, therefore, are at all times season, and by the action of the sea upon the glacier that has on the increase; for there are but few days in such climates in

which some mode of precipitation does not take place, and | float, appear near the sea-shore like enormous mountain cliffs. where ice seldom melts. As even in summer the temperature Scoresby saw one iceberg of this kind, that was cleven miles is rarely above the freezing point, icebergs, a thousand feet in length and four hundred feet in height above the level of thick, would require but a few years to form. the sea at the water's edge, but towards the middle it attained the height of sixteen hundred feet. The upper surface of a land iceberg is generally somewhat hollow, and the hollow is, during summer, filled with pools or lakes of the purest water. This water often wears channels for itself through the substance of the ice, and sometimes falls over the edge in the Lieut. WILKES found such an iceberg form of a cataract. near the south pole, in the centre of which he found a large pond of most delicious water which rested under a scum of ice about ten inches thick. From this natural reservoir his ship was supplied with five hundred gallons of water, and about twelve times that quantity was left behind in the hollow surface of the iceberg.

Navigators frequently meet with floating icebergs in all stages of formation, rising from five feet to 250 feet above the surface of the sea, and exposing their stratification in horizontal layers from six inches to four feet in thickness. When they are fully formed they have a tabular or stratified appearance, have their sides perfectly perpendicular, and vary in height from 180 to 210 feet above the waves. The magnitude of such icebergs will be better conceived when you consider that, the mass of ice below the water is nearly eight times greater than what is seen above. In some cases it is ten and even fifteen times greater.

The number of these icebergs is as astonishing as their dimensions. SCORESBY Counted 500 of these icebergs drifting in latitudes 69° and 70° north, and these were from 100 to 200 feet high. In Baffin's Bay, Captain Ross saw several of them aground in water fifteen hundred feet deep. Every four or five years a large number of icebergs float from Greenland and are stranded on the west coast of Iceland. In the Antartic regions, "the sight of the icebergs around us," says Lieut. WILKES, "all of large dimensions, was beautiful. The greatest number in sight was found to be more than a hundred, varying from a quarter of a mile to three miles in length."

When icebergs are met with in low latitudes, the whole of their outward aspect is found to have been altered by the distance, and by the different temperature, through which they have floated. Sometimes they are apparently much worn, by the action of the sea, into cavities, and exhibit large fissures as though they were ready to fall in pieces. Others exhibit lofty arches of many coloured tints, arches that lead into deep caverns open to the swell of the sea, which rushing in with impetuosity produces a sound like a loud and distant thunder. These caverns worn in the perpendicular sides of the icebergs, appear the more strange, as in some cases, the flight of birds in and out of them, remind the navigator of ruined abbeys, dilapidated castles, and mountain caves. Icebergs that have been long afloat, lose the tabular form and the stratified aspect which they had when they first started from the parent icefield or glacier. At starting, these tabular icebergs were like vast mountains of beautiful alabaster. But, through the influence of increased temperature and by the action of the waves, they have the appearance of an immense city, with houses built of alabaster grouped together, with long lanes and streets, but now in ruins, the Palmyra of the ocean. As their distance from the pole increases, the upper surfaces of the tabular icebergs incline at a considerable angle towards the horizon. This inclination is caused by a change which the abrading action of the waves produces on the position of the centre of gravity. In their decayed state, they rarely exhibit any signs of stratification, but appear as if they had been formed of soft and porous ice; though, at other times, the ice seems as hard as flint. In many cases their upper surface indicates that by the motion of the sea they have been completely overturned.

The process of their dissolution is frequently very rapid. On the coast of Newfoundland, for instance, these floating islands of dazzling crystal, are seen every year to melt away in the warm waters supplied by the gulph stream of the Atlantic, and they disappear in a few weeks.

The magnificent dimensions and the awful movements of these icebergs, as found afloat, render an inquiry into their formation and origin interesting. It is well known that the glens and ravines of the islands of Spitzbergen are filled up with solid ice, which has been accumulating for many ages. it is probable that the glaciers of polar regions began in the nows of winter. The summer suns melted the surface of this snow, and the water, thus produced, penetrated into the snow beneath, and, by saturating it, increased its density. The successive winters froze this glacier into a mass of porous ice, and superadded fresh layers of snow. These processes being repeated every summer and winter, changed the lowest stratum of the melted snow into dense and transparent ice. Centuries upon centuries, of alternate summers and winters, completed their operations in the production of icy aggregations of proligious dimensions.

Icebergs formed by land glaciers, and before they begin to

You have already been informed that the ice of these bergs is porous and fissured. The water that is formed on the surface will necessarily percolate through the pores of the iceberg. When this water becomes frozen in these pores and fissures, it expands with irresistible force, and tears off immense fragments from the outer edge, which, with accelerated velocity, fall with an awful crash into the sea. A similar result is produced by the action of high spring tides which, lashed by frequent storms, rush into the fissures at the bottom and in the sides of the icebergs, undermine portions of the base, and shiver the awful mass into huge fragments, which float away as separate icebergs.

In the Arctic regions, a little to the north of Horn Sound, there is a fixed iceberg which occupies eleven miles in length of the sea coast. It rises precipitously from the sea, with a side perfectly smooth, to the height of above four hundred feet. It extended back towards the summit of the mountain, to about four times that elevation. These fixed icebergs become slowly corroded by the salt water, whose temperature has been raised by the Gulph stream. As the ice of glaciers in the polar valleys is still pressing downward from behind, the mass projected into the sea can no longer support its own weight; it therefore snaps off, plunges into the deep sea, and splits into several masses, forming as many icebergs. Sea currents waft them towards different coasts. The great glaciers generated in the valleys of Spitzbergen, in 79° of north latitude, are almost all cut off at the beach. But in Baffin's Bay on the west coast of Old Greenland, where the temperature of the sea is not mitigated by the waters of the Gulph stream, the glaciers stretch out from the shore, and furnish repeated crops of mountainous masses of ice which, when dislocated from the parent glacier, float off into the ocean.

In Terra del Fuego, Mr. Darwin found lofty mountains covered by a wide mantle of perpetual snow, and in many parts magnificent, glaciers which extended from the mountain side to the water's edge on the sea-shore. The fragments which had fallen from one of these glaciers into the sea, were floating away, and the channel, with its icebergs, presented, for