bustle or strife, he spent several years, beloved by the people of his charge. So secluded did he keep himself, as seldom to be present even at a meeting of Presbytery. It was then a practice for ministers to inquire of each other "if they preached to the times." On the question having been put to Leighton, he replied, "If all the brethren have preached to the times, may not one poor brother be suffered to preach on eternity?" In the year 1638, the General Assembly at Glasgow abolished episcopacy, and continued to sit and transact business after the king's commissioner had dissolved them. This was properly the commencement of the civil war in Scotland. The ill-advised and treacherous monarch, with the view of gaining over the Scotch to assist him against the English Parliamentary army, made a proposal to them which is known in the history of the period as the engagement. At this critical period, Leighton declared for the engagement. This offended many of his best friends. The Presbyterians began to denounce him as an apostate, and the Episcopalians welcomed him as a convert. This step is almost the only one in a long and useful life, which we have any difficulty in defending. Having resigned his parochial charge, he was appointed to the office of Principal of the University of Edinburgh, and for ten years delivered lectures on theology to the students attending this seat of learning. Charles II. had sworn to maintain the Presbyterian form of government in Scotland, but very soon threw off the mask. Dr. Leighton, who was then residing at Bath for his health, was importuned to accept of a bishopric. He was won over, and in 1662 he came to Dunblane. He had not been three months in his diocese when two thousand of the most learned and holy ministers that England ever saw, were cast out of their churches for non-conformity. Before the close of the same year, four hundred ministers were silenced in Scotland for the same cause. Leigh

ton's heart smote him for being of the church of the persecutors. He spoke, wrote, and remonstrated against the measures which Sharp and Lauderdale were prosecuting. He even went so far as to threaten to resign his diocese, and was induced to retain it only by the hope that if the state of matters were properly represented to the king, Scotland would be free. With the view of bringing about a more desirable state of matters in Scotland, Leighton proceeded to London, and had several interviews with Charles, seemed to impress the monarch, and received from him assurances that the severities hitherto practised should terminate. Leighton and Scotland were deceived. In the year 1670, he was solicited to accept of the archbishopric of Glasgow, in the hope of his being instrumental in allaying the discontents in Scotland. He had formed a scheme of accommodation between Episcopacy and Presbyterianism, and, in the hope of effecting it, agreed to accept of the archbishopric. The scheme was abortive. Neither party would yield in a single point. It has been asserted that the king sent secret instructions to subvert Leighton's schemes. After wearing his dignities for a year, Leighton was tired of them, and having laid them aside, returned to Dunblane. Early in the year 1684, he was invited to London. Here he fell sick, was confined to his room for a week, and to bed only three days. On THE FIRST DAY OF FEBRUARY 1684, he breathed out his soul into the hands of his Saviour. He had often expressed a wish to die from home, and at an inn. He considered such a place suitable for the departure of a Christian pilgrim. His desires were granted, and he expired at the Bell Inn, Warwick Lane, London. He left £150 for a bursary in philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, £300 for three bursaries in Glasgow, and £300 to maintain four old men in St. Nicholas' hospital in that city. He bequeathed

his valuable library and manuscripts to the see of Dunblane, and they are still preserved in a building adjoining the cathedral.

CAPTAIN COOK THE NAVIGATOR, AND THE ISLAND
OF HAWAII.

JAMES COOK was born at Marton, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, on the 27th October 1728. His father was a day-labourer. All the education which he received was English reading, writing, and the elements of arithmetic. When eleven years of age he was apprenticed to a small shopkeeper in the neighhouring town of Suaith, on the sea-coast. He was here smitten with a love for sea life, and his master was obliged to part with him, and allow him to engage on board of a Newcastle coal-trader. In this employment he continued till the war broke out in 1755. He then entered the navy as a common seaman, but the superiority of his character soon arrested attention in his new sphere, and in four years he was appointed master of a vessel on an expedition sent against Quebec. He was now on the high road to preferment, and in 1768, when the English government had resolved to send out scientific persons to the South Sea, to take observations on the transit of Venus, Cook was appointed to command the ship. In this expedition he conducted himself with so much honour and ability, that in 1771 he was appointed to proceed on a voyage to settle the long-disputed question of a southern polar continent. This voyage occupied him three years. The principal object of his third and last voyage, was to ascertain the practicability of a passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, along the northern coast of America. After having been out on this voyage for more than three years, and having explored a vast extent of sea and coast, the great navigator put in at Hawaii, one of the Sandwich islands, on his return home, and was there barbarously murdered in a sudden and unexpected attack by the

natives, on THE FOURTEENTH DAY OF FEBRUARY 1799. The news of his death was received in this country, and it may be said by the world, with the feeling that one of the great men of the age was lost; and both in Britain and in foreign nations, public honours were paid to his memory.

The island of Hawaii, the most south-eastern of the Sandwich group, and which has given name to the newly organized state, is the largest, and by far the most important of the group. It is 280 miles in circumference. For some time after Cook's death, he was regarded as its discoverer, but La Perouse has made it appear more than probable that it was discovered by a Spanish navigator, as early as 1542. The most important event in the history of the island, was the arrival in it of American missionaries in the year 1820. Several of the chiefs were averse to their commencing a mission among them, but the prime minister agreed to let them remain a year, and it should then be determined what ought to be done. The missionaries gained favour, and have ever since prosecuted their labours with great encouragement. The king and queen of the islands visited England in 1824, but died under an attack of measles, and our government sent the bodies to Hawaii, under charge of Lord Byron. The present king, and the great body of the chiefs, have encouraged the missionaries. Latterly, the missionaries have experienced great vexation from the introduction of Roman Catholicism by French arms.

The French autho

rities demanded 20,000 dollars, to insure the good behaviour of the Hawaiians, and it was only in 1848 this money was refunded. In 1843 the missionaries had succeeded in organising no fewer than twenty-eight churches, in which were 23,804 members. Education has become so generally diffused, that it is difficult to find

a Sandwich Islander who cannot read.

In 1850, there were in the islands 441 Protestant schools, with 12,949

children, and 102 Roman Catholic schools with 15,308 scholars.

GALILEO THE ASTRONOMER.

GALILEO GALILEI was born at Pisa, on the 15th day of February, 1564. His boyhood, like that of Newton, and like many other distinguished cultivators of mathematical and physical science, evinced the natural bent of his genius. He was educated for the medical profession. When prosecuting his studies at the university of his native city, he made his first great discovery of the vibrations of a pendulum, by observing the motions of a lamp swinging from the roof of the cathedral. He at once discovered that he had found out the means of ascertaining the rate of the pulse. He now began the study of mathematics, and became such an enthusiast in the science, as to obtain in 1589 an appointment to the mathematical chair in the university of Pisa. In 1592, the republic of Venice appointed him to the mathematical chair in the university of Padua. But the year 1609 was the most momentous in his history. It was in this year he made his grand discovery of the telescope. He first turned the instrument towards the moon, and discovered therein what he considered to be mountains and valleys. He then directed it towards the sun, and discovered several dark spots on the great orb, and that the sun was a revolving body. He next directed it to the planet Jupiter, and on the 7th January, 1618, discovered three small stars close to the line in which Jupiter was moving. Night after night he watched them; and observing that they changed their position, and sometimes disappeared, he concluded they were moons which attended this planet. These, and other discoveries on other planetary bodies, tended entirely to change the opinion of the learned regarding the movements of the heavenly orbs, and set aside the popular theories entertained regarding them. It had long been held and

taught, that the earth was a stationary body-the centre of a grand system, and that the sun, and planets, and stars, moved round it as a centre. The discoveries of Galileo, however, subverted these theories. His discoveries had a melancholy termination. He was summoned to Rome, and commanded to abstain in future from teaching the Copernican doctrine. In 1632 he published his volume on the Copernican and Ptolemaic theories. The rage of his enemies burst upon him with fury. His book was consigned to the Inquisition, and he was summoned before its tribunal. He reached Rome on the 14th day of February, 1633. It is uncertain whether he was actually put to the torture, but on the 21st June he was found guilty of heresy, and was condemned to perpetual imprisonment. His imprisonment lasted only a few days. He was now an old man, and, in the Inquisition, had the mental and moral weakness to abjure his opinions, and swear on his knees that it was absurd to talk of the earth moving on its axis, and that his other doctrines regarding the heavenly bodies "were philosophically false, and theologically considered, were erroneous in faith." An old man of seventy on his knees, with his right hand resting on the gospels, solemnly renouncing the scientific opinions which he had as matter of discovery published to Europe, was a spectacle which we cannot think of but with shame and regret. It was a transaction degrading to all parties concerned in it; yet all the while, whatever the old man may have said with his lips, and been constrained to say through fear of the horrid tortures of the Inquisition, the truth of the doctrine which he was abjuring, had as strong a hold of him as ever. Rising from his knees, he felt the im pulse of truth so powerfully as to be unable to stifle it; and, giving a stamp with his foot on the ground, he whispered his faith into the ear of a friend, saying, "It moves yet."