early life, or any physiological investigation as to the condition of the mind in youth, it cannot so early have acquired its full store of knowledge, nor its complete power of judgment and manifestation; and that we thus seem to trace from year to year the growth of the mental with the increase of the corporeal powers. It follows also that it is not so in the downward course, that the mind will increase in power whilst the body remains stationary at its matured development, and that the decline of the one does not imply the decay of the other; but that often whilst the body is losing power daily, the perception is still accumulating knowledge, the judgment is comparing and resolving with increased vigour, and the light of reason shines sometimes most brightly towards the termination of our earthly career; shewing the great superiority of the mind over its corporeal tenement, of which it never was an essential part, but which only served as the means of its activity and communication with the world around it.

When we thus contemplate a man in the full maturity of growth and power, there does not seem to be any reason why this glorious condition of humanity should not endure for ever. The food received and digested supports and renovates the animal powers. The regularity of the circulation and the due supply

of nervous energy keep these organs of nutrition in vigorous activity. The refuse is duly cast off by the organ of excretion. Life seems to be a perpetual round, a series of circles acting harmoniously together, each performing its own course, yet each connected with and dependent on the others, and all uniting in one homogeneous revolution, even as Astronomy teaches us that the earth we inhabit, whilst moving on its own prescribed orbit, is but one of many worlds moving in similar orbits, all connected with each other, to form one solar system; and that system, perhaps, but a small fraction of the great universal whole.

Why may not the circles of the human microcosm go on in a round as the planetary bodies do, or have those orbs, like our frail tenements, a determined period of existence? Are we now contemplating the universe in its period of maturity? Had it ever a period of gradual development, and will there ever be a period of gradual decay? a time when not only the bodies of men, but the material framework of the universe shall be gone, and the spirit of the great God, the Soul of the Universe, shall remain; and with it those glorious emanations, the souls of men, which, innately conscious of their immortality, defy decay.

during which she is capable of propagating her species, and that from the commencement to the cessation of menstruation is the period of complete womanhood; but, however satisfactory this may appear at first sight, I believe it may more correctly be regarded only as the period during which one of the greatest duties of the female economy can be performed. We cannot surely consider young girls of from 14 to 16 years of age as perfect women, although they might undoubtedly bear children and nourish them. Their physical power is not fully developed, their minds are not fully matured, and nature requires five or six years longer to complete her work, and until then the work of procreation should not be begun. As little would it be just to regard a woman at 45 or 50 as aged, merely because the catamenia may have ceased to appear. If she be vigorous in body and of clear intellect, if the external form bears no mark of wasting or decay, if all the functions of organic and animal life, with that one exception, be well performed, she has ceased to be fitted to perform one of the highest duties of her vocation on earth, but is not therefore entered on the last division of her life.

If we were to be guided by such a rule, how could we estimate the period of maturity in man? The commencement and termination of the procreative power