progress, containing the results of the scientific surveys of New York. These researches are not confined to the old and long-settled states on the Atlantic coast. No, sir, if you or any one of your learned associates were to visit the newest of this new family of republics, he would find that his fame, and a taste for the science you cultivate, had preceded him. He would every where find that, amidst all the inconveniences, and under all the difficulties, which attend literary and scientific pursuits in new countries, not a few have made themselves familiar with the latest results of European inquiry, and explored the phenomena around them, under the lights thrown upon geology by the most recent foreign discoveries.

Mr Lyell has told you something, sir, of the reception which he met with personally from the geologists of America; but there is one portion of what befell him in the United States which his modesty has not allowed you to learn from him. A few years since, a young Bostonian, (Mr John Lowell, Jun.,*) who had increased a handsome inherited property by the successful pursuit of commerce, formed the design of founding an institution in his native city, for courses of lectures on the most important branches of moral and natural science. This generous project was matured and consummated during an extensive tour in Europe and the East. His last testamentary dispositions were made in a state of declining health, while he was at Thebes, in Egypt, on his way to India, where he died. The ample funds which he bequeathed for the purpose above mentioned, having been applied with great judgment by the kinsman to whom, as the sole trustee, the execution of this important trust was confided, the Lowell Institute is now in the fourth year of most successful operation. Classes as large as were ever perhaps assembled, have, from the first, attended the courses of lectures delivered on this foundation.

It was before this institution that Mr Lyell was invited to deliver a course of lectures on geology. The lecture-room,

See the Memoir on John Lowell, Jun., the founder of the Lowell Institute, at Boston, in an earlier part of this volume.

sir, is probably as large an apartment as was ever before appropriated to such a purpose, having been built as a theatre; and this immense hall, orchestra, parterre, and boxes, from the stage to the roof, was, as I am informed, (for I was not myself then in the country,) regularly filled by Mr Lyell's audiences; which, after all, composed but half the class, so that it was necessary to repeat the lectures at a different hour for the other half.

My esteemed colleague, the French ambassador, (the Count de Ste Aulaire,) in the very handsome remarks with which he has just favored the company, in his native language, has established the connection between the duties of our official station and those of literary and scientific men. He has remarked to us that, in the peculiar province of a foreign minister to cultivate the relations of peace between friendly states, he has no coadjutor more efficient than the enlightened man of science, engaged in those studies which have a common interest for all mankind. Of no science can this just remark be more emphatically made, than of that which is the peculiar object of your labors; for there is none where a comparison of facts, as they exist in different and distant countries, is more necessary; and where the final generalizations draw in such magnificent spaces on the surface of the globe.

What an illustration of this truth, if illustration be necessary, was contained in the discourse of your learned ex-president this morning! In speaking of those extraordinary footmarks described by Professor Hitchcock of Massachusetts, discovered by him in the old red sandstone of Connecticut River, and which he has called ornithichnites, Mr Murchison, in doing the fullest justice to the labors of Professor H., said that he himself had long hesitated in admitting that these footprints belonged to an animal of an ornithological character. He was reluctant, in opposition to the analogy of the science, to recognize the traces of such an animal in the formation in which these marks are found. And how did he overcome these doubts? By calling comparative anatomy to his aid; by evoking a witness, if I may so express myself,

from Western Australia; by conjuring up from beneath the soil of New Zealand a monstrous ostrich, - Deinornis, I think he told us Professor Owen had called it, to authenticate the not less monstrous footmarks in the red sandstone on the banks of Connecticut River. How beautiful, sir, this mutual scientific dependence of remotest countries, and the different branches of inquiry! Do I doubt the character of these paradoxical marks? Here are the remains of a winged animal that could have made them. Do I hesitate as to the existence of a bird of these stupendous proportions? Agnosco vestigia: here are his footsteps impressed on the everlasting rocks.

But it was certainly not my purpose to engage in so bold an undertaking as a geological discourse before an audience like this. My duty - and a most pleasing one it is—is performed, when I have thanked you, sir, my friend, Mr Lyell, and this enlightened company, for the honor done me, and especially for the liberal and friendly feeling evinced towards my country; and if you are disposed to think that there is any exaggeration in what Mr Lyell has told you of his kind reception in the United States, I will only express the wish, that whoever entertains that doubt would do us the favor to come and see for himself.

ROYAL ACADEMY OF ART.*

SIR MARTIN ARCHER SHEE AND GENTLEMEN :

I RISE, at the request of my colleagues of the diplomatic body, to make our joint acknowledgments for the honor done to us in the toast just drank. I beg to assure you, on their behalf and my own, that we esteem it one of the most agreeable of the privileges of our position, that it procures us, by your courtesy, the gratification of being present at the opening of your exhibition, and of partaking the hospitality of the Royal Academy on an occasion so important to all who take an interest in the fine arts.

It is in fact, sir, not an unnatural view to take of the delightful arts to which the Academy is devoted, to regard them as furnishing a common language to cultivated men in all countries; a mode of expressing some of the finest conceptions of the human mind in a dialect equally intelligible in all nations. The different forms in which man embodies the creations of his intellect or fancy have each its peculiar advantage; generally perhaps what is gained in precision is lost in universality. Painting and sculpture, the arts which you cultivate, in this respect have an advantage over the sister arts of poetry and eloquence; which, however superior in range of subject, and in capacity of descriptive or historical illustration, must certainly yield to sculpture and painting in

In reply to a toast in honor of the foreign ministers, at the anniversary dinner of the Royal Academy of Art, on the 6th of May, 1843, Sir Martin Archer Shee, president of the Academy, in the chair. This dinner is given in the principal gallery of paintings, at the opening of the annual exhibition of painting and sculpture.

this power of addressing all ages and nations without an interpreter. If Demosthenes could rise up at the present day, the eloquence which "shook th' arsenal and fulmined over Greece" would be a brutum, not to say a mutum fulmen, to the greater number of modern hearers; but what time has spared from the chisel of Phidias is as significant to us as it was to the Athenian, who gazed upon it the first morning that the scaffolding was thrown down from the friezes of the Parthenon. The strains of Tasso and Ariosto are a dead letter to the great majority of those whose spirits are attuned by nature to the music of poetry; but there are no Alps for the canvas of Raphael. It addresses the same language to the cultivated eye upon the Tiber and the Thames, the Neva and the Hudson. This idea has been admirably expressed by a great master (Dryden) of one of the arts alluded to, in his address to Sir Godfrey Kneller :

"But poets are confined in narrower space,

To speak the language of their native place.
The painter widely stretches his command, -
Thy pencil speaks the tongue of every land."

Yes, sir, although there may be no two of the diplomatic body, on whose behalf I have now the honor to address you, who speak the same language as their native tongue, the beautiful works which look down upon us from these walls, the product of English taste and skill during the past season, address each one of us in an idiom which needs no translation.

Before I take my seat, sir, you will pardon me, and my respected colleagues will bear with me, if I say a single word as the American minister. In that capacity I cannot but have the highest satisfaction in reminding you of my countrymen, living and departed, who have filled and still occupy a distinguished place among your associates or fellow-laborers. I might with propriety allude to the venerable artist (Mr West) who so long presided over the Royal Academy; and when I repeat the names of Copley, of Stuart, and of his nephew, Stuart Newton, among the deceased; of Allston