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gether appalling. There is not a public building, I suppose, which is not sprinkled with the blood of slain workmen. Every railway is inaugurated, as if we were pagans, by the sacrifice of human victims. Our ships bury every year in the sea thousands whose lives are not half spent, and, as Jeremy Taylor long ago said, "you can go nowhere but you tread on dead men's bones."
I do not refer here to injuries or deaths occasioned by great physical agencies, such as changes in temperature, or storms, which influence the lower animals as much as us, or to anything coming, with reasonable fairness, under the title, always questionable, of "accident;" or to such as are determined by moral causes, as inattention and carelessness. My reference is solely to those which proceed from our imperfect, though honest, observation of phenomena; our similarly imperfect knowledge of the physical laws, which we try to guide whilst we obey them; and our similarly imperfect application of these laws in practice, to the extent that we know them. For example: no more marvellous industrial work was ever achieved by man, than that of hanging a steel needle, rubbed with a piece of black iron ore, on the deck of a ship, and sailing by its guidance in search of unknown lands, across unknown seas. This needle—the mariner's compass—has been one of the greatest revolutionising agents of the world. Yet, we know so very little of the laws of magnetism, although, as sailors, we unreservedly submit to them, that the steel needle, which, unlike us, knows and obeys them all, has often unwittingly led goodly fleets to destruction, and innocently consigned navies to their fate. At this moment, the seamen of the world are aghast at the certainty, that their compasses, especially in iron vessels, have often betrayed them; and our men of science, anxiously communing with each other, are painfully struggling to be better ministers and interpreters of the mysterious needle. Now, contrast our condition in this matter with that of the birds of passage. We trust to magnetism, as a swallow does to an instinct, that will guide us north, if we would go north, and south, if we would go south; and yet it fails us when we need it most, and dashes us against some Arctic iceberg, when we thought we were heading towards Tropical seas. The birds of passage are never misled in this way; their unerring instinct, which is God's finger pointing the way, bids them go, and they go; and return, and they return. They hold, we may be sure, our magnetic needles in small estimation, and they well may, for instinct here has the victory over
