often said that "he always depended on the muse for
inspiration." His unwritten lecture was a reverie--till kindling in his
progress, blending science and imagination in the grandeur of his
conceptions, at times, as if he had gathered about him the very elements
of nature, his spirit seemed to be hovering over the waters and the
strata. With the same enthusiasm of science, CUVIER meditated on some
bones, and some fragments of bones, which could not belong to any known
class of the animal kingdom. The philosopher dwelt on these animal ruins
till he constructed numerous species which had disappeared from the globe.
This sublime naturalist has ascertained and classified the fossil remains
of animals whose existence can no longer be traced in the records of
mankind. His own language bears testimony to the imagination which carried
him on through a career so strange and wonderful. "It is a rational object
of ambition in the mind of man, to whom only a short space of time is
allotted upon earth, to have the glory of restoring the history of
_thousands of ages which preceded the existence of his race, and of
thousands of animals that never were contemporaneous with his species_."
Philosophy becomes poetry, and science imagination, in the enthusiasm of
genius. Even in the practical part of a science, painful to the operator
himself, Mr. Abernethy has declared, and eloquently declared, that this
enthusiasm is absolutely requisite. "We have need of enthusiasm, or some
strong incentive, to induce us to spend our nights in study, and our days
in the disgusting and health-destroying observation of human diseases,
which alone can enable us to understand, alleviate, or remove them. On no
other terms can we be considered as real students of our profession--to
confer that which sick kings would fondly purchase with their diadem--that
which wealth cannot purchase, nor state nor rank bestow--to alleviate the
most insupportable of human afflictions." Such is the enthusiasm of the
physiologist of genius, who elevates the demonstrations of anatomical
inquiries by the cultivation of the intellectual faculties, connecting
"man with the common Master of the universe."

This enthusiasm inconceivably fills the mind of genius in all great and
solemn operations. It is an agitation amidst calmness, and is required hot
only in the fine arts, but wherever a great and continued exertion of the
soul must be employed. The great ancients, who, if they were