The ignorant in all ages have wondered at the exception; the wise, in proportion as they have become wise, have wondered at the rule.  Pestilences, prodigies, portents, the results of seeming accidents, excite the vulgar mind.  Only the abnormal or casual is worthy of their attention.  The man of science finds a deeper and more awful charm in contemplating the results of law; in watching, not what seem to be occasional failures in nature:  but what is a perpetual and calm success.

The savage knows not, I am told, what wonder means, save from some prodigy.  Seeing no marvel in the daily glory of the sunlight, he is startled out of his usual stupidity and carelessness by the occurrence of an eclipse, an earthquake, a thunderbolt.  The uneducated, whatever their rank may be, are apt to be more interested by the sight of deformities, and defects or excesses in nature, than by that of the most perfect normal and natural beauty.

Those, in the same way, who in the infancy of European science, thought it worth while to register natural phenomena, registered exclusively the exceptions.  Eclipses, meteors, auroras, earthquakes, storms, and especially monstrosities, animal or vegetable, exercised their barbaric wonder.  The mystery and miracle which underlies the unfolding of every bud, the development of every embryo, the growth of every atom of tissue, in any organism, animal or vegetable—­to all this their intellectual eye was blind.  How different from such a state of mind, that calm and constant wonder, humbling and yet inspiring, with which the modern man of science searches into the “open mystery” of the universe; and sees that the true marvel lies, not in the infringement of law, but in its permanence; not in the imperfect, but in the perfect; not in disease, but in health; not in deformity, but in beauty.

These words are true of all nature; and specially true, it seems to me, of our outward senses and faculties; true of sight, hearing, speech.  The wonder, I think, with the wise man will be, not that there are deaf and dumb persons to be found here and there among us:  but that the average, nay, the majority of mankind, are not deaf and dumb.  Paradoxical as this assertion may seem at first, a little thought I believe will prove it to be reasonable.

Whatever view you take of the origin of sight, hearing, voice, the wonder to a thoughtful mind is just the same; how, under the storm of circumstances, and through the lapse of ages, those faculties have not been lost again and again, by countless individuals, nay, by the whole species.  For we must confess that those faculties are gradually developed in each individual; that every animal and every human being which is born into the world, has built up, unconsciously, involuntarily, and as it were out of nothing, those delicate and complex organs, by which he afterwards learns to see, hear, and utter sounds.  Is not the wonder, that he should, in the majority of cases, succeed without any effort of his own?