at the hour of recreation, when the masters were walking about, and the schoolboys playing in the court. I thought then, that, along with three boys of my own age, I had been the happy witness of a striking miracle, or at least that I was in possession of a splendid discovery. The entrance to the fourth class was, on account of the cold, shut with two doors, at six or seven feet from one another, making a little vestibule where it was perfectly dark when they were closed. One of our comrades, to pass the time, had just bored a little hole in the outer door with a gimlet, when two or three of us ran to shut ourselves up between the two doors; and what was our delight, when, on the inner door, which had been whitened with chalk, we saw the whole court of the college painted in bright coloursthe trees, the house of the principal, the walls, the boys, the teachers, but all turned upside down, and yet all so clear and distinct, that we saw the boys running about, and could recognise them, especially one who had a red vest. You would have seen, too, the masters passing, walking together with their hands behind their backs. We believed it a miracle; no one, we thought, had ever seen the like; and we ran to our homes to tell about it; but then they answered us that the phenomenon could be very easily explained by the radiation of light. All the objects of nature, they told us, reflect in every direction, like suns, the white or coloured light which they receive from the great luminary. Each leaf of a cherry-tree, for example, is a sun of green rays, which it constantly throws out by the million in every direction as the sun does his; each cherry is a sun of red rays, which it likewise throws out; each lily a sun of white rays. And thus, for example, they added, in the court of your school, among all these millions of rays, which, going out from every object, passed invisibly into the air, there were always some which, passing in feeble pencils the little hole in the door of your class-room, crossed one another behind it, and just because each formed a very small distinct

pencil of coloured light, they depicted themselves on the white door opposite. That, they said, is what is called the phenomenon of the camera-obscura, or dark chamber; and to make us understand it better, they showed us a number of little portable camera-obscuras which painters use, and in which, to have more light and greater precision, a much larger hole is made, with a convex glass in it, which gathers together the pencils of light, and makes each respectively converge into a distinct point.

My dear children, it is very easy to demonstrate all that to you, since the invention of daguerreotypes. Go to-morrow with your mother to one of our photographic artists; ask her to sit down, and ask the artist to turn on her his camera-obscura. Then if you go near him to look at the interior of his instrument under the veil with which he covers it, you will see the rays of light, reflected by the person of your mother, paint themselves on the background and perfectly reproducing her dear features. There then, young friends, you see these wonderful rays of light caught in the act.

But now, will you believe me in what I have yet to tell you regarding another fact still more remarkable? It is this, that your eye is itself a camera-obscura in perfection. Yes, a very little dark chamber, at the bottom of which all the objects placed before you depict themselves on a little white skin half an inch in diameter, which is called the retina. The pupil of your eye is the little hole in the door, and this hole is at most one-sixth of an inch in size. The crystalline of your eye is the convex lens of the instrument, and the retina, the white wall on which objects are painted. Thus, my dear young friends, when you see me in this pulpit, it is not really me whom you see; it is only my image painted on your retina by the reflected rays of light. And when a mother smiles on her child, when her affection is drawn forth at sight of him, it is not on him directly that she gazes, it is on his lovely image traced within

her eye by the rays of light. Go to the slaughter-house, and ask them to sell you a bull's eye. If you fix that eye properly in a dark place, and then put it opposite a field lighted up by the sun, taking care to put a white paper at a short distance behind the eye, you will see the field painted on this paper.

You understand then, that such is our eye, and such in our eye the wonderful refractions of light. Ah! there is there a whole world of beauties and glories; but there is also a whole world of greatness and immensity, and of immensity far surpassing all that my words could tell.

Suppose that on closing this lecture, I were to take you together to the top of the tower of Bessinge.1 From it we see to the south-west the town of Geneva, the towers of St. Peter's, Fort de l'Ecluse; to the north, our lovely lake as far as Coppet, and opposite us the smiling villas of the other side, and its hillocks as far as the foot of Jura. Our eye thus embraces a space of at least 120 square miles. Who can say how many millions of millions of objects are there radiating light on all sides? who can say how many millions of millions of radiations send their pencils of rays to the top of the tower of Bessinge that there these pencils, reduced to a line and a half in breadth, may pass our pupil, cross in our eye, and paint themselves on our retina ! And take good notice of this, that while these myriads of rays, issuing from myriads of objects, cross one another in myriads of different directions, each ray, nevertheless, passes through the other in perfect order; and if there were 200,000 spectators covering the hill of Bessinge, if there were also thousands in the air in balloons,—all of them, without excepting the smallest boy, would each receive in his pupil, which is only a line and a half in breadth, the pencils of rays necessary to see the same objects as we. And if we ourselves were to change our position on the top of the tower, we would still

Bessinge-The name of a hill a short way from Geneva, on the south side of the lake, surmounted by a tower of the same name.

see them by means of other pencils of light which would come in place of the former and penetrate our eyes! Think of the little space on which all these objects are drawn, half an inch! And think, nevertheless, of the perfect distinctness of that magnificent picture of the lake, of the town, and its country houses. All that landscape of 120 square miles is there depicted by radiations of light in a square of half an inch in extent. Still further, while I am at the top of the tower, my eye follows for half an hour the progress of a steamboat on the lake from Geneva to Versoix. These five miles, which make one-third of the landscape, occupy then on my retina only one-third of half an inch, or the space of two lines, and if the boat is 66 feet long, or the 400th part of these five miles, it will occupy on my retina only the 200th part of a line, and yet my eye can follow its progress constantly for half an hour in the space of five miles! What would you say of a painter who could draw distinctly this great landscape with all its details and all its colours on the surface of a fourpenny-piece? Well, my young friends, this work which surpasses all the power of art, light accomplishes by its radiations everywhere and every day in millions and millions of men and children. What do I say it accomplishes it in the eye of a sparrow, or of a swallow which traverses the air, in the eye of an eagle which soars above the clouds.

Ah! dear children, let us not say anything more about it; but let us adore the power of Him, who, after having created light on the first day, created the Lights of heaven on the fourth. Let us adore God in the majesty of his works.

Only one reflection more on a word of our verses which I have not yet explained. I refer to a precious assistance which God was preparing for man for the development of his soul, and for the sanctification of his life, when he should afterwards inhabit the earth. "Let these Lights," it is said in the 14th verse, "be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and for years."

God wished man to be able to measure time, in order to

learn its value and regulate its employment; and what did he do for that end? He put in the sky a perfect, magnificent clock, which shows the hours, the days, the weeks, the months, the seasons, and the years; a clock, which no one winds up, and which yet goes always, and never gets out of order! Observe, indeed, these words in the 14th verse: "And God said, let there be Lights in the firmament of heaven, to divide the day from the night;" but was it only to divide the day from the night (which is certainly necessary to regulate the repose and work of man)? No, for it is added, "And let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and for years."

You hear there is the clock of the world. The face of that clock is the vault of heaven which revolves over our heads, a vault starry at night, and shining with light during the day, whose edges, like those of a watch, rest at Geneva on the hills, elsewhere on the horizon of the sea. But where on this glorious face are the hands? God to point out the hour on it has placed two hands there, the great and the small. They are two glorious hands which always go on, and which never go too slow or too fast. The big hand is the greater Light which rules the day, as our text says, and which, while it seems to move above our heads from the east to the west, with the whole of the heavenly canopy, rising each morning above the Alps to retire to rest every night on the Jura, goes at the same time on the face of the heavens in an opposite direction, that is to say, from the west to the east, or from Jura towards the Alps, traversing each day a space twice its own size. And the little hand is the lesser Light which rules the night, and which moves also in the same direction as the sun, but twelve times as quickly, going each day over a space of twenty-four or twentyfive times its own size, proceeding thus in a month all round the face of the clock. So that if this evening, for example, you look at the moon setting on Jura, and examine carefully the stars which it covers, you will to-morrow see it set on the