d by her younger sister-rivals--the late Mrs. Mary
Somerville, who united an entirely feminine and gentle character to
masculine powers of mind.

[Illustration: Sir James Simpson.]

[Illustration: Michael Faraday.]

Only to catalogue the recent discoveries and inventions we owe to men
of science, from merciful anaesthetics to the latest applications of
electric power, would occupy more space than we ought here to give.
All honour to these servants of humanity! We rejoice to find among
them many who could unite the simplest childlike faith with a wide
and grand mental outlook; we exult not less to find in many Biblical
students and commentators the same patience, thoroughness, and
resolute pursuit of the very truth as that exemplified by the
devotees of physical science. God's Word is explored in our day--the
same clay which has seen the great work of the Revised Version of the
Scriptures begun and completed--with no less ardour than God's world.
And what vast additions have been made to our knowledge of this
earth! We have seen Nineveh unburied, the North-West Passage
explored, and the mysterious Nile stream at last tracked to its
source. To compare a fifty-years-old map of Africa with one of the
present day will a little enable us to estimate the advances made in
our acquaintance with the Dark Continent alone; similar maps
including the Polar regions of North America will testify also to a
large increase of hard-won knowledge.

[Illustration: David Livingstone.]

[Illustration: Sir John Franklin.]

Exploration--Arctic, African, Oriental and Occidental--has had its
heroic devotees, sometimes its martyrs. Witness Franklin, Burke and
Wills, and Livingstone. The long uncertainty overhanging the fate of
the gallant Franklin, after he and the expedition he commanded had
vanished into the darkness of Arctic winter in 1845, and the
unfaltering faithfulness with which his widow clung to the search for
her lost husband, form one of the most pathetic chapters of English
story. The veil was lifted at last and the secret of the North-West
Passage, to which so many lives had been sacrificed, was brought to
light in the course of the many efforts made to find the dead
discoverer. As Franklin had disappeared in the North, so Livingstone
was long lost to sight in the wilds of Africa, and hardly less
feverish interest centred round the point, so long disputed, of his
being in life or in death--interest freshly awakened when the