Litchfield Enquirer

Universality of Nature.—After Europe has changed her languages ten times, the terms of the material revelation are unaltered.—Does Africa jabber in a thousand ruleless languages? Does Asia forsake her venerable tongues? Is America, the modern Babel, forming a new race of languages, from the refuse of the old families? Nature changes not here; she owns no authority, she suffers no provincialism in her universal speech. The larks now carol the same song and in the same key as when Adam first tuned his enraptured ear to catch the moral. The owl first hooted in B flat, and it still loves the key, and screams through no other octaves. In the same key has ever ticked the death watch; while all the three noted chirps of the cricket have ever been in B. since Tubal Cain first heard them in his smithy, or the Israelites in their ash ovens. Never has the buzz of the gnat risen above the second A, nor that of the house fly's wing sunk below the first F. Sound had at first the same connection with color as it has now; and the right angle of life's incidence might as much produce a sound on the first turrets of Cain's city, as it is now said to do on one of the pyramids.—The tulip, in its first bloom in Noah's garden, emitted heat four and a half degrees above the atmosphere, as it does at the present day. The stormy petrel as much delighted to sport among the first billows which the Indian ocean ever raised as it does now. In the first migration of birds they passed from north to south, and fled over the narrowest parts of the seas as they will this autumn. The cuckoo and the nightingale first began their song together, analogous to the beginning of our April, in the days of Nimrod. Birds that lived on flies laid bluish eggs in the days of Joseph, as they will two thousand years hence, if the sun should not fall from his throne, or the earth not break her harness from the planetary car. The first bird that was caged oftener sang in adagio than its natural spirit. Corals have ever grown edgeways to the ocean stream. 8,280,000 animalculæ could as well live in a drop of water in the days of Seth as in ours. All flying insects had on their coats of mail in the days of Japhet, over which have ever waved the plumes of more gaudy feathers than the peacock ever dropped. The bees that afforded Eve her first honey, made their combs hexagonal; and the first house fly produced 20,080,329 eggs in one year, as she does at present. The first jump of the first flea was two hundred times its own length, as it was the last Summer. That concubinal sinner, the ursine sloth, who scorns at all the anathemas against polygamy, kept ten or twelve wives before Moses was born, as he will when we are forgotten. There was iron enough in the blood of the first forty-two men to make a ploughshare, and there is this to-day, from whatever country or men you select. The lungs of Abel contained a coil of vital matter 150 feet square, as mine; and the first inspiration of Adam consumed 17 inches of air, as do those of every adult reader. The rat and the robin followed the footsteps of Noah, as they do ours. Bayley.