twinkling of an eye, to his brother man at the ends of the earth; -now conveying to us war's dread tidings from the shores of the Crimea, or the wide-spread plains of India; and now preparing to circulate daily and instantaneously between the Old and New Worlds-even though the deep and stormy waters of the Atlantic roll between them-the hourly transactions in the Exchanges of London and New York. And with the results of this one invention, ever and anon more and more marvellously revealed, we may again unhesitatingly inquire, Who will venture to set bounds to the changes which may ensue over our globe to its furthest limits, and throughout its unnumbered families, from the Electric Telegraph?

As we contemplate such inventions, and attempt to anticipate their results, we are called to form a still more elevated conception than we had previously entertained of the genius of man, by whom such powers of nature have been discovered and controlled, and to raise a new song of praise to that God whose "inspiration giveth men understanding."

But there are other most valuable inventions of recent days, which society at large is not so ready to remember; perhaps because they stand less closely connected with the daily pursuits and material enjoyments of the world. Chief among these inventions we venture to class the Telescope and the Microscope. What worlds, vast beyond conception, and by human eye previously altogether unseen, have been brought to view by the Telescope, as, in the hand of a Newton or Rosse, this instrument has swept the face of the sky!-as directed by the mind of Adams, or Leverrier, it has revealed a new planet, dwelling up to that moment beyond the ken of man in the remotest distance of the limitless universe, and thus achieved a discovery more wondrous, if possible, than when Columbus sought and found a new world beyond the Atlantic wave!

Not less marvellous than the Telescope is that other instrument which we have named, the Microscope, which reveals to us the minute worlds which lie ever near and around us, and which, but for its use, would never have been disclosed to our view. It is, indeed, hard to say which of these two instruments, the Telescope

or the Microscope, has most fully evidenced the powers of man, and most clearly illustrated the perfections of God; for the universe which the Microscope subjects to our ken seems as boundless in its very minuteness as that other universe which, in its magnitude, still eludes the far-searching glance of the Telescope.

When declaring the care of the Almighty and the Infinite One for the smallest as well as the greatest of his creatures, and marking the singularly gracious providence by which the Telescope and the Microscope, that reveal alike the mightiest and the minutest of God's worlds, were invented about the same time, Dr. Chalmers, with equal truth and beauty, says of these instruments: "The one led me to see a system in every star ;-the other leads me to see a world in every atom. The one taught me that this mighty globe, with the whole burden of its people and of its countries, is but a grain of sand on the high field of immensity;the other teaches me that every grain of sand may harbour within it the tribes and the families of a busy population. The one told me of the insignificance of the world I tread upon;-the other redeems it from all its insignificance; for it tells me that in the leaves of every forest, and in the flowers of every garden, and in the waters of every rivulet, there are worlds teeming with life, and numberless as are the glories of the firmament. The one has suggested to me, that, beyond and above all that is visible to man, there may lie fields of creation which sweep immeasurably along, and carry the impress of the Almighty's hand to the remotest scenes of the universe; the other suggests to me, that, within and beneath all that minuteness which the aided eye of man has been able to explore, there may lie a region of invisibles; and that, could we draw aside the mysterious curtain which shrouds it from our senses, we might there see a theatre of as many wonders as astronomy has unfolded, a universe within the compass of a point so small as to elude all the powers of the microscope, but where the wonder-working God finds room for the exercise of all his attributes, where he can raise another mechanism of worlds, and fill and animate them all with the evidences of his glory."

FERGUSON.

LONDON AND ITS FOOD.

IF, early on a summer morning, before the smoke of countless fires had narrowed the horizon of the metropolis, a spectator were to ascend to the top of St. Paul's, and take his stand upon the balcony, that with gilded rail flashes like a fringe of fire on the summit of the dome, he would see sleeping beneath his feet the greatest camp of men upon which the sun has ever risen. As far as he could distinguish by the morning light he would behold stretched before him the mighty map of the metropolis; and could he ascend still higher, he would note the stream of life overflowing the brim of hills which enclose the basin in which it stands.

In the space swept by his vision would lie the congregated habitations of two millions and a half of his species,—but how vain are figures to convey an idea of so immense a multitude! If Norway, stretching from the Frozen Ocean down to the southern extremity of the North Sea, were to summon all its people to one vast conclave, they would number little more than half the souls within the London bills of mortality. Switzerland, in her thousand valleys, could not muster such an army; and even busy Holland, within her mast-thronged harbours, humming cities, and populous plains, could barely overmatch the close-packed millions within sound of the great bell at his feet. As the spectator gazed upon this extraordinary prospect, the first stir of the awakening city would gradually steal upon his ear. The rumbling of wheels, the clang of hammers, the clear call of the human voice, all deepening by degrees into a confused hum, would proclaim that the mighty city was once more rousing to the labour of the day; and the blue columns of smoke climbing up to heaven would intimate that the morning meal was at hand. At such a moment the thought would naturally arise in his mind,-In what manner is such an assemblage victualled? By what complicated wheels does all the machinery move by which two millions and a half of human beings sit down day by day to their meals as regularly and quietly as though they only formed a snug little party at Lovegrove's on a summer's afternoon? As thus he mused respect

ing the means by which the supply and demand of so vast a multitude are brought to agree, so that every one is enabled to procure exactly what he wants, at the exact time, without loss to himself or injury to the community, thin lines of steam, sharply marked for the moment, as they advanced one after another from the horizon and converged towards him, would indicate the arrival of the great commissariat trains, stored with produce from all parts of these isles and from the adjacent continent. Could his eye distinguish in addition the fine thread of that far-spreading web which makes London the most sensitive spot on the earth, he would be enabled to take in at a glance the two agents-steam and electricity—which keep the balance true between the wants and the supply of London.

The inability of figures to convey an adequate impression to the mind of the series of units of which the sums are composed, renders it impossible to give more than a faint idea of the enormous supplies of food required to victual the capital for a single year. But the conception may be somewhat assisted by varying the process. Country papers now and then astonish their readers by calculations to show how many times the steel pens manufactured in England would form a necklace round their own little town, or how many thousand miles the matches of their local factory would extend if laid in a straight line from the centre of their market-place. Let us try our hand on the same sort of picture, and endeavour to fill the eye with a prospect that would satisfy the appetite of the far-famed Dragon of Wantley himself.

If we fix upon Hyde Park as our exhibition-ground, and pile together all the barrels of beer consumed in London in a single year, they would form a thousand columns not far short of a mile in perpendicular height.

Let us imagine ourselves on the top of this tower, and we shall have a look-out worthy of the feast we are about to summon to our feet.

Herefrom we discover the Great Northern Road stretching far away into the length and breadth of the land. Lo! as we look, a mighty herd of oxen, with loud bellowing, is beheld approaching from the north. For miles and miles the mass of horns is conspicuous winding along the road, ten abreast, and even thus the

last animal of the herd would be seventy-two miles away, and the drover goading his shrinking flank considerably beyond Peterborough. On the other side of the park, as the clouds of dust clear away, we see the Great Western Road, as far as the eye can reach, thronged with a bleating mass of wool, and the shepherd at the end of the flock (ten abreast), and the dog that is worrying the last sheep, are just leaving the environs of Bristol, one hundred and twenty-one miles from our beer-built pillar. Along Piccadily, Regent Street, the Strand, Fleet Street, Cheapside, and the eastward Mile End Road line, for seven and a half miles, street and causeway are thronged with calves (still ten abreast); and in the great parallel thoroughfares of Bayswater Road, Oxford Street, and Holborn, we see nothing for nine long miles but a slowly-pacing, deeply-grunting herd of swine. As we watch this moving mass approaching from all points of the horizon, the air suddenly becomes dark—a black pall seems drawn over the sky-it is the great flock of birds (game, poultry, and wild-fowl) that are come up to be killed: as they fly wing to wing, and tail to beak, they form a square whose superficies is not much less than the whole enclosed portion of St. James's Park, or fifty-one acres. No sooner

does this huge flight clear away than we behold the park at our feet covered with hares and rabbits. Feeding two thousand abreast, they extend from the marble arch to the round pond in Kensington Gardens at least a mile.

Let us now pile up all the half-quartern loaves consumed in the metropolis in the year, and we shall find they form a pyramid which measures two hundred square feet at its base, and extends into the air a height of one thousand two hundred and ninetythree feet, or nearly three times that of St. Paul's.

Turning now toward the sound of rushing waters, we find that the seven companies are filling the mains for the day. If they "were allowed to flow into the area of the adjacent St. James's Park, they would in the course of the twenty-four hours flood its entire space with a depth of thirty inches of water, and the whole annual supply would be quite sufficient to submerge the City part of London (one mile square) ninety feet.