The same enthusiasm surrounds the world of science with that creative imagination which has startled even men of science by its peculiar discoveries.  WERNER, the mineralogist, celebrated for his lectures, appears, by some accounts transmitted by his auditors, to have exercised this faculty.  Werner 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 not always philosophers, were always men of genius, saw, or imagined they saw, a divinity within the man.  This enthusiasm is alike experienced in the silence of study and amidst the roar of cannon, in painting a picture or in scaling