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ANNUAL DISCOURSE.

MR. PRESIDENt and Gentlemen:

I have been induced to accept the invitation to deliver the Annual Discourse before your learned body, chiefly from the consideration, that howmuchsoever I may fall short of what the place and the occasion require, I shall at least have an opportunity of evincing my high appreciation of the honor of being your organ, and my ardent desire to contribute something, little though it be, towards promoting the exalted objects of your association.

These objects are comprehensively summed up in the two potent words, HISTORY and PHILOSOPHY. HOW vast the separate import of each, and how mighty their combined effect! Contemplate history alone, and what terms can adequately express its importance? If, with all the lights now reflected from experience, human existence be still in many respects a profound enigma, what would it not have been, with all these lights extinguished? Imagine, for a moment, all record of past events obliterated. Retain all other books and monuments, but let those of history be erased, expunged, annihilated-and then look around you. You see the fleeting present; you dimly guess, perhaps, at the doubtful future; but the PAST-the fixed, the mighty, the instructive past-what is it? All blank oblivion. Behind you stretches a dark, unknown, interminable gulf, which utterly severs you from the elder world. Across its still and sullen waters there comes no welcome voice, to greet you as brethren of the great human family which has passed away. All is dead silence, deep as of the grave. You know not who have lived before your time, nor what has been their fate. The chords of universal sympathy are shortened to a point. Your puny race commences with your own generation; and the precious memories of sixty centuries are lost to you forever. This great abstract idea has been clothed with a form which speaks forcibly to the eye. TIME has been represented as a gigantic, inexorable being, furnished with wings, and armed with a scythe: the one denoting his ceaseless flight, the other that he cuts down all before him. And such,

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