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To God alone glory is to be ascribed, and peace is man's choicest possession, which is never so pure and so profound as in the perception and the feeling of that very glory which governs the universe. My highest ambition is the delight of discovering some new rays of it, and, henceforward, my most ardent wish is to have the remainder of my days illuminated by it, to the exclusion, as far as I am personally concerned, of that vain, fantastical, unsatisfying, inconstant glory, which the world gives and takes away at pleasure. p. 24.

May it be my lot, to reside far remote from fickle and treacherous man, on the border of a wood, and under the roof of a small rustic cot, which I can call my own. The experience of misery has taught me to succour the miserable.

If I have communicated to my readers some new pleasures, let them reflect, that, after all, they are the perceptions but of a man; that they are a mere nothing compared to that which is; that they are the

shadows only of that eternal truth, collected by one who is himself a shadow, and that a small ray of that sun of intelligence which fills the universe, has been playing in a drop of troubled water. p. 27.

Nearly nine thousand men perished on both sides. The historians of each nation, as usual, éxalted the glory of their own fleet up to the skies. One thing is certain, that nine thousand human bodies, mutilated and half burnt, given up to sharks and sea-dogs, presented to the monsters of the deep, the spectacle of a ferocity which has no example, except in the annals of the human race; and that this prodigious number of round tops, sail yards, and masts, floating about, mixed with flags, bearing red crosses and white crosses, must have conveyed some information to the barbarians of all the southern regions of the Atlantic Ocean, in what manner the powers, who pretend to be subjected to the laws of Jesus Christ, settle their quarrels. p. 49.

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Now the ground of this quarrel between England and Holland was precisely the African slave trade.

Here I close these nautical disquisitions, in which there are undoubtedly, inaccuracies of style, and manifold imperfections of various kinds; I reckon on the indulgence of the really intelligent, and presume to hope they will have the goodness to rectify my mistakes. p. 53.

The field appeared to me so vast, that I could not believe the possibility of its being entirely pre-occupied.

I was farther prompted to the execution of my great design in the view of rendering an acceptable service to my fellow-creatures. Studies, p. 1.

I have employed in my researches, all the powers of reasoning I possess; and though my means may have been slender, I can say, with truth, that I have not permitted a single day to pass, without picking up some agreeable or useful observation.

Nature is of unbounded extent, and I am a human being, limited on every side. Not only her general history, but that of the smallest plant, far transcends my highest powers. p. 2.

In the course of three weeks, no less than thirty-seven species of insects, totally distinct, had visited my strawberry plant. Some alighted on it to deposit their eggs; others, merely to shelter themselves from the sun. But the greatest part paid this visit from reasons totally unknown to me. However minute these objects may be, they, surely, merited my attention, as nature deemed them not unworthy of hers. Could I refuse them a place in my general history, when she had given them one in the system of the universe? p. 3.

We have preserved, for example, in the Royal Cabinet at Paris, arrows, whose points are impregnated with the juice of a plant so venomous, that, though exposed to the air for many years, they can, with the

slightest puncture, destroy the most robust of animals in a few minutes. The blood of the creature, be the wound ever so trifling, instantly congeals. But if the patient, at the same instant, is made to swallow a small quantity of sugar, the circulation is immediately restored. Both the poison and the antidote have been discovered by the savages which inhabit the banks of the Amap. 11.

zon.

When man begins to reason, he ceases to feel. p. 15.

I have an unbounded respect for the memory of these great men, whose very deviations have assisted us in opening great highways through the vast empire of nature; but on more occasions than one, I shall combat their principles, and especially, the general applications which have been made of them, in the full persuasion, that, if I renounce their systems, I promote their intentions. p. 23.

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