than ever before in the world of scientific inquiry, the masses of the people are doing little or nothing to avail themselves of it.
Complex and difficult the scientific study of human nature may he, but it is demanded by the imperative exigencies of the age. What is wanted is a better knowledge of human relations in the social state; and that resolves itself immediately into a better knowledge of the beings which exist in that state, for society is what its human units make it. Ignorance of men, of the nature of their weaknesses and vices, and the springs and laws of their action, is at the root of the chief impostures by which society is scourged. The quackeries of the platform, the bar, the state-house, and the pulpit, the gigantic swindles of speculators, and the frauds of petty traders, the omnipresent over-reachings and deceptions by which people are victimized in the intercourse of life, are but legitimate consequences of the gross and wide-spread ignorance of human nature. We are deafened with the discordant cries of political and social reformers; but here is where they must begin, if any thing valuable and permanent is to be accomplished in the way of reform.
THE DISCOVERER OF OXYGEN.
Several thousand people assembled the other day in the Central Park to unveil the statue of Shakespeare. The ceremonies were impressive. The illustrious English poet, newly done in bronze, was celebrated prosaically by the most illustrious of American poets, and then he was glorified poetically by another distinguished American poet, while this effect was heightened by the fine vocalization of our eminent interpreter of the great dramatist, and altogether it was a most poetic and Shakespearian affair.
Such an event will suggest different reflections in different minds; we are in the mood of contemplating it chemically. As the symposium is ever qualified by the libations, it will be asked what they had to drink. As befitted the exaltation of the hour, they drank the invisible ether that is never conveyed in goblets—a solar distilment of the beautiful foliage of the park, and to this they owed all the inspiration of the occasion. The afflatus was an immediate effect of oxygen gas. It was through it and by it that the entire concourse lived, and moved, and had its poetic being. As the first condition of cerebral action is a constant stream of oxygenated blood driven through the brain, the broad current of thought and feeling in the assembled multitude was sustained by this element of the vital stream. That withdrawn, the prose of Bryant, the poetry of Stoddard, and the elocution of Booth, with the appreciative applause of the audience, would have suddenly and simultaneously ceased. For, whatever may be the case in other spheres of being, in this sphere the spiritual world of thought and feeling is created, instant by instant, by the chemical energy of oxygen. Let none accuse us of materialism, for this doctrine has high and sacred authority. In its account of human creation, the oldest scripture declares that God "breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul;" and the breath of life we now know to be oxygen gas.
But, for many thousands of years, it was not known. Humanity had run through a vast career before this truth was reached. Mighty empires had come and gone; great cities had been built and had perished; civilizations had risen and passed away; arts, literatures, philosophies, and religions, had become ascendant and had declined before men found out the constitution of the air—what and why they breathe.
We owe this most brilliant and important of modern discoveries to Dr. Joseph Priestley, of England. He was
