every endeared one is passed into eternity, it is the spot where the only surviving member may repose, and revel in the most interesting reminiscences, and luxuriate in the most brilliant prospects.

So simple, so beautiful, so endeared by a thousand interesting associations, shall we venture to put this among our "neglected things?" We fear we must-not, indeed, for the sake of making a chapter, or filling a page, but simply because it is in real life frequently slighted and neglected.

We rejoice to be able to certify, as the result of careful observation in the walks of Christian life, that there are hundreds and thousands of godly families who conscientiously attend to this duty; but in others it is criminally set aside. Perhaps it is observed in the morning, and omitted in the evening; or neglected in the morning, and attended to in the evening.

It has been said, that "those families who pray, do well; those who read and pray, do better; and those who sing, and read, and pray, do best of all." In many cases the reading of the Scriptures is omitted altogether. In other cases some members of the family are overlooked in this duty. "Some mornings since," says a writer in the Presbyterian Advocate, "I was at the house of a very worthy man, whose wife was behind him in no proposal to do good. The family were called in; husband, wife, children, and stranger; but no servants. I had read a portion of Scripture, and was leading in prayer, when I heard a rattling of knives and forks. As I knew all that belonged to the house, I could very easily tell why, and also by whom. The absence was not from any false pride, or shame to have the servants appear in the dress in which the duties of the kitchen or house were performed, or any objection; but simply sheer thoughtlessness. They did not think; which was supposed to be a sufficient excuse for neglecting it."

Reader, hast thou an altar in thy house? Perhaps thy father had; and often didst thou bend the knee there. Perhaps thou hadst an altar thyself, reared with thine own hands in brighter, better days; but those same hands have aided to break it down, and God has written Ichabod upon the ruin. Make haste to repair it; and "blessed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy ground, and the fruit of thy cattle, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep. Blessed shall be thy basket and thy store. Blessed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and blessed shalt thou be when thou goest out." If, however, thou bend not the knee, nor lift the eye, nor sing the hymn, nor read the chapter, nor offer the prayer, tremble. The "curse" pronounced on those nations and those families which call not upon God's name hangeth over thee.

A HINT TO MOTHERS ON PRAYING WITH THEIR CHIL DREN.-Lately I was much struck with a little piece of history related to me by a Christian lady; and hoping that, by God's blessing, it may be useful to mothers and those who have the care of children, I give it, as nearly as I can recollect, in the words of my friend:

"How careful mothers should be to inquire into the state of their children's minds! I shall never forget what I suffered when I was a child, through my own shyness, and through my poor dear mother never questioning me as to what I felt and desired, etc. Mother never knew, but I used to be so anxious at times about ¦ my soul. I would have given any thing for her to have

talked to me; and I used to wonder how ever it could

be that she did not. One thing I especially remember,

because it occasioned me most grief. Mother used to retire for prayer and reading once or twice in the day: I knew her times, and what she went up-stairs for; and many a time have I left my play and followed her. I used to go and lister at the door, to hear if she prayed for me; and, O! I should have been delighted to have gone with her. Sometimes I used to play with the handle of the door, hoping she would come and ask me what I wanted; but instead of that, she would come out and tell me not to interrupt her, but to go to play. O! my heart was ready to break. I never went to play; no, I used to go and shut myself in another room, and cry and sob dreadfully, and think to myself, 'I have a soul as well as mother; and I as much want praying for. I wish mother would call me in, or ask me what I have been crying for.'

"Now, my mother was one of the best and holiest of women: I never knew a fault in her, unless it was this. Had she but known my feelings, she would have taken me by the hand with delight, and have prayed with me; but she never questioned me, and I was too shy to speak. I have often been grieved to think of it." Mothers! this simple narrative speaks volumes. Have your children ever suffered in the same manner?

JOY OVER REPENTING SINNERS." There is joy among the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth,” said the Lord Jesus: he who knew what transpired far above yon azure ceiling, as well as on the green sward beneath his feet.

Who can tell the intensity of the flame thus burning within those "ministers of fire?" Who discover the depth of love that finds utterance in their exulting joy? "Who can tell the joys that rise

Through all the courts of paradise,
To see a prodigal return,

To see an heir of glory born?"

Great was the joy of the woman on recovering her lost piece of silver, and that of the man on recovering his lost sheep; but what is angelic joy at the return of the penitent soul? We are unable to fathom its depth; but a faint conception may, however, be awakened on a perusal of the following, related in the writer's hearing:

A pious ship captain had long prayed to a prayer-hearing and answering God for the conversion of his godless wife and daughter. The heavens were as brass: the prayers long seemed ineffectual. Years rolled by, and no spiritual change had taken place in either of the subjects of his intercession. One morning, however, he perceived tears, and heard broken accents, and gathered the words as they escaped from the lips of wife and daughter, "God be merciful to me a sinner!" His joy knew no bounds. They obtained a sense of God's favor; and with a speed to which he had for years been unaccustomed, he flew to his vessel, hauled the flags on deck in great haste, knotted them on to the flag-ropes, and ran them up to the mast-head. With one hand he pressed upon his fluttering heart; the tears of "joy and not of grief" chased each other down his weather-beaten cheeks; his other hand pointed upward; and as, with an eagle gaze, his eye penetrated the very clouds, far beyond the masthead, "There," said he, "there they wave, and silent shout, 'Victory through the blood of the Lamb!'"

But, dear reader, far above the ken of his vision, discernible only by the eye of faith, even in "the heaven of heavens," there was joy among the angels of God over these repenting sinners. Happy he who thus raises the joys of heaven.

THE WORLD A WORKSHOP.

Salt springs are also more or less common in all countries. Were it required to quote particulars respecting the sources of rock salt, we might refer to one bed of it in Gallicia, which is four hundred and sixty miles long, ninety miles wide, and twelve hundred feet thick."

Let us turn our attention now to the vegetable products of the earth. Why did not God make trees to grow lengthwise or horizontally on the ground instead of growing up perpendicularly or straight? Can any tell? Had trees grown horizontally, nearly or quite every inch of the earth's surface would have been occupied with closely interlaced timber, and the earth itself would have looked like a spherical raft, floating and plunging through space, asking some other planet or world to buy the stock of cord wood on hand. Why were not the sections of the boles of trees in some other form than that of circles? Simply because, had they grown up in wide slabs, in square or angular masses, the same quantity of material would have taken up a vast deal more of space, and the trees themselves would have been less able to resist storms of wind, and would seriously have interrupted the passage of animals through forests.

As in the case of metals, vegetables are presented to man in manageable masses. "Had they generally ap

"In nothing are the manufacturing purposes of the Creator more obvious than in the article of fuel. Of what value indeed could metallic ores and soft earths have been without it? To meet the constant demand, wood, peat, turf, and other inflammable materials, are spread over the earth's surface, while its interior is surcharged with coal. It is a magazine of fuel and of materials to be heated. As long as it remains a factory, coal must be provided, and will be. There is reason to believe that the formation of this substance is now going on in the depths of our oceans-preparing a supply for workinen under new configurations of the surface."

The supplying of food does not belong to the mineral kingdom; but it furnishes that which gives food its best relish-salt. And how do you suppose, reader, salt is obtained? In most countries it is quarried as men would quarry minerals. "The mines of England have long been worked, and some are among the richest yet discovered. The consumption of salt in Great Britain is estimated at 616,000,000 pounds. Counting twenty-two pounds for each individual, and assuming this as a fair allowance for the world's consumption-and we should suppose it under rather than over the truth, since there are immense quantities consumed by cattle, and more still in various manufactures and arts not included-then the thousand millions of human beings require an annual supply of twenty-two thousand millions of pounds.

"In warm climates, the sea is a magazine of salt, the water being evaporated in wide basins, formed in the soil. That little Atlantic patch, known as Turk's Island, furnishes about fifty thousand bushels of sea salt weekly.

hundred and twenty-five feet high and ninety-two feet in circumference at the ground; eighty-eight feet at four feet, and sixty-six feet at ten feet above the groundwhat could have been done with them-with logs, one of which, laid along the pavement of some streets, would fill them to the roofs of three-story houses?" Like human kind trees have their infancy and their age. The one grows up, attains its complement of years, and dies; so with the other. Any experienced wood-chopper or lumberman can tell when a tree is ripe or ready to be cut down, or, rather, when they acquire no more sound wood! After this period they may swell, like a man with the dropsy, but it will only be a swelling and a puffing up. "Gigantic trees are almost always hollow. Emigrants' wagons are often backed into the interior of ancient buttonwoods. The great dragon-tree of the Canaries, sixteen feet in diameter, was as thick and hollow in A. D. 1402 as it is now. The largest European oak-in France-is twenty-three feet diameter, but within the trunk is a natural chamber, over ten feet one way and twelve another. Besides the mammoth tree of California, already mentioned, there are others in Oregon and California of the same kind; some even larger, but not sound. One offers a more commodious room than many miners' lodges. Of some blown down, a gentleman rode his horse through one, from end to end; another is mentioned one hundred and ten feet in circumference and four hundred and ten feet in length. This, too, is hollow; and if the hollow was a little enlarged it would make a very good ropewalk."

"The widest planks," continues our author, "to be met with in the Atlantic cities are in boxes in which sugar comes in from the interior; namely, from two and a half to three feet. The tree that furnishes them is the jequi taba, one of the largest of Brazilian trees. The wood is white, soft, and light, something like our white-wood. I heard of the most extraordinary one on the upper waters

of the Macacu river, which runs into the bay of Rio Janeiro. It was said to surpass in magnitude all others in the province. It was a straight, slightly tapering shaft, clear of branches and foliage for one hundred feet up. Near the ground it was thirty-two feet in circumference, and three feet above the ground twenty-seven feet. Its roots at one part presented the appearance of a range of vertical wall or rock, and fifty paces from the trunk they appeared half out of the ground, in longtmasses, two and a half and even three feet in diameter. A few feet above the ground there was a handsomely formed round hole in the trunk, naturally formed, and through it I pushed a stick in a horizontal position seven feet, so that the stately trunk was hollow-a mere tube, whose walls were so thin as to cause surprise at their stability. A few years more, and it will be prostrated by age and decay." The hickory-tree never grows to the size of the poplar in its bole or circumference, or the black walnut, neither is the oak half as heavy as the fir-tree. Hence, the largest trees are light in their texture, and are easily worked by man. The baobab, or monkey-bread-tree, of Senegambia, grows frequently to a size of twenty and even thirty feet in diameter. One is still standing which is thirtytwo feet in diameter, and is supposed to be between five and six thousand years old; but these trees, like the chestnuts of Mount Etna, are very limited in their hight, and their trunks could not be worked up by man into any very useful purpose. Their work is to furnish food for animals, not lumber for man.

"A new world of thought and of art is opened in wood simply: so different from minerals, in its being developed before our eyes, in the system of perpetuating its varieties, in the diverse magnitudes of trees and their variegated crowns of foliage; in the mechanical properties of the ligneous fiber; in its diverse degrees of hardness, softness, flexibility, elasticity, and texture; every feature offering a class of advantages in the arts; in its ornamental attributes, too, as exhibited in colors-jet in ebony, black and dark brown in walnuts and oaks, purple and light greens in the munjaddy and myle-ellah of India, red in mahogany and cedar, yellow in box, satin-wood, and the maples; then there is the red ebony of Australia, the cream-tinted and snow-white tulip-tree, and every shade and tint in others. Moreover, how still more attractive are these colors made by straight, curved, waving, and involved graining! In addition to which, there is always more or less shading; and in cocoa and other rich woods are cloud-like dashes of India ink-some after the manner of tortoise-shell, and others resembling jaguars' and leopards' skins-invariably producing such pleasing ef fects that decorative artists incessantly labor to imitate

them.

"Then woods, besides furnishing examples of painting in colors, provide us with material for giving to other substances colors which they do not always themselves possess. Each pigment, too, besides imparting its every tint, contributes to develop other and very different colors. Logwood yields blacks and purples; fustic, olive-browns and yellows; barwood, camwood, Brazil, and sappan woods impart reds, blacks, and browns; woad and indigo, blues and greens; madder, the brilliant scarlet or turkey red; turmeric, bright yellows; orchil, purples, reds, and blues; annatto, orange; safflower, crimson, scarlet, rosecolor, and pink. There is the green ebony, and a thousand more dyewoods, known and unknown."

Clearly wood was specially designed for man; for no other occupant of this globe is so well able to appreciate

its worth; at any rate none but man can use it, or the lacs and dyes which it furnishes, as does he. Look at the vegetable materials for ropes, for wicker and basket-ware, cotton, hemp, flax, and other fibrous plants, and specially at the profusion of vegetable aliments. The amount of thread produced each year is all but inconceivable. During the year 1852 one billion, four hundred and eightyone millions of pounds of cotton were worked up into it. "At the London Exhibition one manufacturer furnished samples of one pound of cotton spun into nine hundred hanks of eight hundred and forty yards each, making nearly four hundred and thirty miles. Another firm exhibited four thousand, two hundred hanks of the same number of yards each, making two thousand miles from a single pound of cotton! If we, therefore, multiply the above amount only by four hundred and thirty, the length of thread that a single crop of cotton could make, would be over six hundred billions of miles, or sufficient for a web of stout calico, a yard wide, and containing eightyfive threads to the inch, that would be more than enough to reach from us to the sun.

"We inclose our bodies in artificial cocoons: in winter a lady is inwrapped in a hundred miles of thread; she throws over her shoulders from thirty to fifty in a shawl. A gentleman winds between three and four miles round his neck and uses four more in a pocket handkerchief. At night he throws off his clothing and buries himself, like a larva, in four or five hundred miles of convolved filaments."

No proof exists that either the flax or the cotton plant existed on the earth before the creation of man; but, on the other hand, the strong presumption is, that they were created after man and for man. To know to what extent food may be raised for our sustenance and well-being, take the following: "There were raised in 1850 in the United States upward of five hundred and ninety-two million bushels of maize or Indian corn. Counting the bushel at one and a quarter cubic feet, the grain would have filled a store-room twenty feet wide, ten feet deep, and seven hundred miles in length. The yield of wheat in 1851-125,607,000 bushels-would require an additional twenty miles to the structure; rye thirteen, buckwheat nine, barley four, between eight and nine for peas and beans, three or four for rice, and not less than five hundred for potatoes, beets, and other tubers. Partitions, miles apart, would also be required for apples, peaches, grapes, plums, cherries, and orchard produce; for sugarover 200,000,000 pounds-nuts, strawberries, gooseberries, currants; for peppers, mustard, spices, and condiments, and all the produce of market gardens, over a thousand miles more would be taken up.

"Of tea, England imported in 1853, 66,360,555 pounds. of coffee, the world's product is between three and four hundred thousand tuns. The world's crop of sugar from cane, beet-root, and maples, can not be less than 900,000 tuns, since the amount recognized in commerce is 840,365 tuns. The demand is rapidly swelling, but however much it may increase, there are no limits to the means of supply."

Let us turn our attention, now, to the third storehouse of matter, animal products. Man is supplied by animals, to an unlimited extent, with materials for his fabrics, and such as he could not obtain elsewhere, as wool, hair, feathers, down, silk, leather, glue, horn, ivory, wax, oils, bone, pearl, tortoise, sperm, whalebone, isinglass, coloringmatters, etc. It is not pretended at all that man can create birds or animals, or any thing with life; but while

It is quite impossible to furnish any thing but a few specimens of the products furnished by domestic animals. Glance at the article of leather. In England, in 1851, 2,330,901 hides were tanned, and yearly she uses up 60,000,000 pounds of leather, and the value of the manufactured article can not be less than $70,000,000. A single state in this country-Massachusetts-manufactures not less than twelve millions of dollars worth of shoes annually. There is the article of wool, the clip of which, in the United States, for 1850, was 52,516,959 pounds. In 1854 there were estimated to be 32,000,000 sheep in Great Britain, the clip of which amounted, last season, to 120,000,000 pounds. Beside this 70,000,000 pounds were received the same year into England from Australia. In the article of tallow, in the year 1853, Russia, after supplying all her own wants, sent to other parts of the world 137,000,000 pounds.

Man can work in the waters of the ocean and enrich himself to an extent which the pen can not describe; for the fecundity of the ocean surpasses even that of the land, and the streams which man can turn into his garners never cease to flow. Birds and insects do not elabo rate as much matter for manufactures as quadrupeds; but the value of their labors is nevertheless incalculable. Our limits, however, forbid a further discussion of this part of our author's treatise, and we pass to another.

In section second we have man discussed, his nature, his instincts, and his achievements, all of which indicate the nature and purposes of his being. "Observe the perfect freedom of his upper limbs to operate on matter, in consequence of their being released from the labor of sustaining the body and aiding in its locomotion; a feature peculiar to his species, and the one which specially proclaims him an artisan. Mark the termination of those limbs in the hands; the adaptation of these to work in all substances, their duality, the double jointed-levers they are attached to, their lithe and diverse movements, their power to grasp objects of every shape, their durability under incessant wear and tear; the articulations of the wrist and fingers to avoid the necessity of always moving the arm with them, and of a consequent waste of power: the sense of touch in the fingers, so exquisite and so active in a thousand acts. In the large development of the thumb man's superiority as a manipulator largely consists; it has been named a second hand. Still, it was in the unoccupied levers at whose extremities the fingers are, that his instincts as an artisan resided, and through which they have been manifested. Had those levers been employed as in their nearest analogues, man had been at best but an improved orang-outang, but in disengaging them from other service, and placing them as it were like laborers in the market-place waiting to be employed, the Creator gave us in them the prime instruments of our elevation."

Mr. Ewbank contends with great strenuousness that man, at his creation, was made a worker-an artisanthat on the first opening of his eyes he beheld "nothing but a vast factory crowded with work." The raw materials, not finished goods, were at hand, and he had to go to work. He had wheat, but no bread; wood, but no furnace; clay, but no brick; sand, but no glass; iron, but none in bars, and so he had to use his hands or die. Speaking of the climates of all colored men as rich in materials for the arts, our author digresses somewhat from the main topic on hand to deliver himself of the

Who or what could have prompted such a thing we shall not pretend to determine.

In discussing the question of several centers of population, Mr. Ewbank takes occasion to state that in spinning, the art of pottery, the use of the hand-mill, and a knowledge of the lamp, the early inhabitants of the American continent were quite as fully civilized as any other portion of the earth. Hence the inference that civilization is "an independent development."

As to natural mechanisms, these are constantly giving hints to man. "Whenever a stone ax is plowed up we do not want an ancient Indian to rise out of a mound to tell us what use it was put to. A knife, a pen, or any other manufactured article is a tangible thought, or a congeries of thoughts, in which the mind and workings of the mind of the designer is perceived; and so it is, that the ideas and reasonings, if the terms be allowable, of the Creator stand out in all his works. To those who study his mechanisms, his intentions are as perceptible in forms, motions, and proportions; in levers, joints, valves, tubes, mechanical equivalents, and results; as those of a human engineer in any one of his works."

In the beauty every-where perceptible in the natural world, man is taught a lesson of most pertinent and valuable instruction. But beauty must not be confounded with elegant outlines simply or wholly; for a thing to be beautiful must have its outlines accord with the uses for which it was made. No tea-cup formed like a pipe-stem, ever so beautifully worked, and no railroad track running in a circle could be called beautiful, as the ends for which each was designed are frustrated. "Such," contends our author, "is the sense of beauty pervading the mind of the divine Proprietor, that he has introduced an adjunct to it in colors. With these he has embellished every thing on earth, in air, and in water. We tread on a carpet of tapestry the richness of which we do not appreciate, while the canopy over us is an ever-changing series of paintings. What pleasures, physical, moral, and intellectual, we had never known if the earth and sky, and all objects between them, had been of a uniform hue! But colors serve more purposes than to please the eye. There shines not a tint on the breast of a thrush, nor a gleam of iridescence on a humming bird's throat, nor a golden spot on a common trout's body, nor a feather of flame in the flamingo's wing, but has its uses, although naturalists have not yet divined what they are. The summer dresses of arctic animals and birds are regularly thrown off, and winter ones put on; but as yet little progress has been made in the investigation of such matters, and of the laws by which colors are developed and defined, notwithstanding the pleasures and profit the knowledge must bring."

Like all enthusiasts, Mr. Ewbank runs his theme of labor to the very extreme. He deems it man's highest and only mission on earth to labor; and while he acknowledges the existence of an immortal principle in man, he goes to work to show that the spiritual needs not a tithe of the attention that the physical does. But we forbear any remarks here. With a quotation on mind, as the main operator on matter, we must conclude our already too long dissertation. We have to regret that Mr. Ewbank could not have been more explicit in his allusions to the soul as the immaterial and immortal part in man.

"It is marvelous that any created being should be able to study its own organization, and reason on the causes