ONLY imagine yourself, says a writer in the Journal of Commerce, in a little row-boat, passing around the northern coast of Ireland. In the distance, you seem to look upon an immense castle, flanked by double rows of cylindrical columns. It seems so fortress-like, this massive structure rising from the depths of the sea, that you expect to find guards and wardens, soldiery and arms; but as you approach

nearer it loses that castellated appearance,

and gra

luntarily to what great artist your praise is due; what year marked the foundation-stone; what force formed each cylinder, and joined in uniform contact such irregular masses? The toil of many a lifetime has been spent on far meaner designs, and proud

wealth has gloried in much less wonderful relics of man's invention.

Passing onward and still onward, for this columnar structure bounds a great extent of seacoast, you

come upon a vast gateway of stone work, like the rest, but formed into a wide arch, not Gothic, nor Norman, but unique, and perfect as peculiar. Its

entrance is kept by huge waves, that for centuries

dually lessons in magnitude until there remains only a huge stone wall, extending around the coast for miles. It is composed of gigantic pillars, cut into prisms, three-sided, five-sided, eight-sided-side fitting to side-variously jointed, joint corresponding have been rolling higher and higher, to bar the gateto joint, innumerable irregularities conformed into way that is open still, so your tiny boat rises with such beautiful regularity, that you are struck with their swelling, and you pass through, not, as you had awe at so perfect a monument of skill, and ask invo- I expected, to find the sky above you still, but into the

recesses of a mighty cavern, whose vaulted roof is | They were all born within sight of the "auld formed of stones, many cornered and many colored. Giant's" dominions, and the only history they ever You should be there at sunset, as we were, to see learned is comprised in wild legends about the stones the dashing waters sparkling with gold, and the and crannies that the giant once ruled. From mornstones radiant with crimson light. You would be ing to evening they walk before you, behind you, and awed into silence; for there is something fearful in seem to rise from the stones on every side of you. the thought of a chamber built without hands; but offering their "spacermens" of the "Giant's Punch should your feelings find vent in words, your ears Bowl," "his honor's walking-stick," and various would be stunned by the deafening sound of even other remarkable relics, "the very last" of which your sweet voice, dear Bel, so heavy is the echo has been sold and resold for twenty years back, and there. I had been always very anxious to see the will be for twenty years to come, to every visitor inside of this famous cave, with its ocean door, and who will "lend them the loan of a sixpence to break its stony wall hung with sea-weed tapestry, but I their fast with." assure you I was not less eager to see the outside of it again; I had no ambition to interfere with a solitude too desolate for aught save the cawing of rooks, and the twittering of swallows.

The average height of the basaltic columns constituting the Giant's Causeway is thirty feet; but the whole neighborhood is strewn with detached fragments of the same species of rock, that in their picturesque confusion seem the broken pillars of some ruined temple. These columns in combination, these heptagons, hexagons, octagons and triangles all joined in perfect symmetry, as if hewn for corresponding measurements, form, when you have climbed the rocky ascent to their level summit, a tesselated pavement, where one may promenade in scorn of the fierce waves that incessantly dash against their base, as if they sought to hurl the firm rocks into oblivion. It is quite amusing to listen to the wonderful harangues of the numerous barefooted urchins that follow you all the way along the shore, offering themselves for guides, and their tongues for teachers.

The little ragamuffins tell you that their father is dead, and their mother is poor; and in the grief of your heart you buy, and buy, and buy, until you have no more money to pay, and no more hands to carry their useless pebbles; and finding new faces, and hearing new tales continually, the plot thickens so unmercifully, that you cease to believe any thing. because you have believed so much, and in selfdefense are forced to turn away from the masonic pile that owns no mason-from the old arm-chair that no cabinet-maker ever planned-from the huge bowl where none but a giant could drink—and the organ-pipes to whose identity the roaring waves lend so real an illusion. But a sight of the Giant's Causeway, in spite of its nonsensical traditions and its fabulous legends, is a commentary too impressive ever to be forgotten, on the power and might of its great Creator. And long years hence it will stand, firm and enduring, as it ever has stood, in its solemn, awful grandeur, to annihilate the atheist's doubt, and to silence the sceptic's sneer.

IT has been frequently said the building at the Broussais, or in the published certificates of the effinorth-west corner of Broad and George streets looks cacy of Perkins' metallic tractors, or somebody's poverty caste, that is, its external indications lead to galvanic rings, or anybody's sarsaparilla syrup, or in a suspicion it is of a poor family, while if it were Kossuth's theory of intervention, or in the editorial rough-caste it would have such a tidy, smart look, predictions printed in the daily newspapers; but the that no mere passer-by would suspect there are any members of the Society in question battle for Truth poor relations connected with it. That edifice is a which is truth, and not for the flimsy dictum of men. small arena where a few courageous men do battle They seek to ascertain the facts of the Creation, and for TRUTH. Were they to consent to rough-caste, the yet hidden causes which bind them together in or stucco, or plaster over the unsightly surface of relations of eternal harmony and peace. They seek their street fronts, while they are in debt, they would in the atmosphere for signs to lead to the compremake a false show to the public which would be al- hension of the laws which regulate its movements; together inconsistent with the object of the Society they study the vegetable growths of forest and field to which that edifice belongs. The object of that to learn how to increase the products of the soil; Society is to ascertain the TRUTH, and to point it out they inquire into the nature and habits and structure to the human race, beginning of course with citizens of the living inhabitants of the air, the earth, and the of Philadelphia. It must not be imagined, reader, seas, to know the best and easiest modes of rendering gentle or fair or both, that the Society to which the them profitable to society; they dive beneath the rough brick walls alluded to belongs, is engaged in surface of the land, and drag to light the buried reany fanciful or visionary or transcendental occupa-mains of those animals which dwelt on earth counttion It does not spend time in listening to testimony less years before man made any mark of his presence or seeking evidence of TRUTH of the kind asserted to in the universe, indeed before he had existence: exist in the doctrines of Hanneman, of Preisnitz, of and in that building they bring together, under one