, rejoicing in the light. The
_terra incognita_ of future discovery lies enveloped in cloud on the
other--an untried region of fogs and darkness.

The history of this publication for the last seventy years--for so
slow has been its growth, that rather more than seventy years have now
elapsed since its first appearance in the world of letters--would
serve curiously to illustrate the literary and scientific history of
Scotland during that period. The naturalist, by observing the rings of
annual growth in a tree newly cut down, can not only tell what its
exact bulk had been at certain determinate dates in the past--from its
first existence as a tiny sapling of a single twelvemonth, till the
axe had fallen on the huge circumference of perchance its hundredth
ring--but he can also form from them a shrewd guess of the various
characters of the seasons that have passed over it. Is the ring of
wide development?--it speaks of genial warmth and kindly showers. Is
it narrow and contracted?--it tells of scorching droughts or of biting
cold. Now the succeeding editions of this great work narrate a
somewhat similar story, in a somewhat similar manner. They speak of
the growth of science and the arts during the various succeeding
periods in which they appeared. The great increase, too, at certain
times, in particular departments of knowledge, is curiously connected
with peculiar circumstances in the history of our country. In the
present edition, for instance, almost all the geography is new. The
age has been peculiarly an age of exploration--a locomotive age:
commerce, curiosity, the spirit of adventure, the desire of escaping
from the tedium of inactive life,--these, and other motives besides,
have scattered travellers by hundreds, during the period of our long
European peace, over almost every country of the world. And hence so
mighty an increase of knowledge in this department, that what the last
age knew of the subject has been altogether overgrown. Vast
additions, too, have been made to the province of mechanical
contrivance: the constructive faculties of the country, stimulated
apparently by the demands of commerce and the influence of competition
both at home and abroad, have performed in well-nigh a single
generation the work of centuries.

Even the _Encyclopaedia_ itself, regarded in a literary point of view,
is strikingly illustrative of a change which has taken place chiefly
within the present century in the republic of