I was here this morning, and in
its spacious halls I found stores of the wonders worked by nature
in the air, in the forest, in the cavern, and in the sea--stores of
the surpassing engines devised by science for the better knowledge
of other worlds, and the greater happiness of this--stores of those
gentler works of art, which, though achieved in perishable stone,
by yet more perishable hands of dust, are in their influence
immortal. With such means at their command, so well-directed, so
cheaply shared, and so extensively diffused, well may your
Committee say, as they have done in one of their Reports, that the
success of this establishment has far exceeded their most sanguine
expectations.
But, ladies and gentlemen, as that same philosopher whose words
they quote, as Bacon tells us, instancing the wonderful effects of
little things and small beginnings, that the influence of the
loadstone was first discovered in particles of iron, and not in
iron bars, so they may lay it to their hearts, that when they
combined together to form the institution which has risen to this
majestic height, they issued on a field of enterprise, the glorious
end of which they cannot even now discern. Every man who has felt
the advantages of, or has received improvement in this place,
carries its benefits into the society in which he moves, and puts
them out at compound interest; and what the blessed sum may be at
last, no man can tell.
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