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allude to; and I still flatter myself, that had I had the courage to have saved Campbell's life when probably it was in my power, our mutual regard would have suffered no diminution, wherever our future lots might have been cast.

The teachers of youth, in the university of the western capital of the kingdom, had fallen, about that time, into the great and presumptuous error of letting their pupils loose in a desert and boundless field, as if the truth could be found every where by searching the wilderness; and error was only to be stumbled upon by chance, and immediately detected and avoided. Wiser surely it had been to consider truth and error as at least equally obvious to the youthful mind, and therefore to rein in the minds of their pupils, and oblige them to conform to the safe and long established modes of reasoning and thinking.

One lamentable consequence of this presumptuous system was, the effect it had upon the young men of my own age, in arousing in our minds a disregard for the standards of our faith in religion; for instead of studying nature by the help of revelation, we reversed the order of induction, and, pretending to follow the works of the Deity as our principal guide, endeavoured to illustrate the revealed will of God by the analogy of nature. This may appear somewhat foreign to the subject, but a similar train of thought always mingles with my recollections, and it is not the least cause of my unceasing regret, that I should, in the pride and rashness of youthful enthusiasm, have encouraged Campbell, and even often led the way in these dangerous speculations. It was our last year at Principal ———'s^[1] class! and, alas! I have to endure the remembrance that my friend was snatched to a premature death, while he was yet an unbeliever in some of the most sublime mysteries of our holy faith.

As I said already, Campbell and I, after a winter of hard study, proposed to ourselves, and set out on, a journey of six weeks, in order to indulge our predilection for natural history, among the mountains and isles of the Highlands.

We had one morning ascended a high mountain in Knapdale. Many objects were either new to us or unobserved before, or we saw them under new views. Poor Campbell's spirits seemed to rise, and his mind to take wilder flights, in proportion as he looked to the barometer that he carried, and observed the sinking of the mercury. "This Cannach," said he, "that blooms here on the mountains of Scotland, unseen, save by the deer and the ptarmagan, is not it more delicately beautiful than the gloriosa of Siam, or the rose of Cashmere? and if, as philosophers assert, there is an analogy through all the works of nature, and the meaner animals proceed from the parent as slumbering embryos, and the more perfect are produced nearly as they afterwards exist—why do we meet here in this cold and stormy region with the Festuca vivipara, which has flowers and seeds in the warmer valleys below? Does this puny grass adapt its economy to its circumstances, and finding that the cold and the winds render its flowers abortive, does it resolve to continue its species by these buds and little plants, which it is observed to shake off when they can provide for themselves? These and similar speculations enlivened our botanical labours.

The day was calm, the sky resplendent, and a view of the sea and the islands, from the point of Cantyre, on the south to Tiree and Coll on the N. West (the most picturesque and singular portion of our native country), was pourtrayed on the expanse before us. The scene had its full effect upon the mind of my friend, fitted alike to concentrate itself upon the most minute, and expand itself to grasp the most magnificent, objects in nature; he had not been more charmed with the most diminutive plants than now, when he took a rapid review of the vast ocean, with all its mighty movements of tides and currents; of the joint and contending influence of the sun and moon; of the agency of a mass of matter, inert in itself, revolving at a distance, and with a velocity alike inconceivable, and even moving, as by a mysterious cord, the vast pivot around which it rolled; and of the progressive power of man, originally fixed below his tree, and comparatively ignorant, listless, and blind, who had formed unto himself