Researches about atmospheric phaenomena / By Thomas Forster.

  • Thomas Ignatius Maria Forster
Date:
1823
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Researches about atmospheric phaenomena / By Thomas Forster. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    to Alexandria, it took a westerly course to Athens, to Rome, and to the many illustrious states which afterwards distinguished modern Kurope. But in tracing her progress we find nothing left in her course, but the skeleton of former greatness. The ruins of stupendous | cities once the ornament of the East; the nu- merous fortifications, walls, temples, aqueducts, and other works of art, now nothing but the desolated habitations of wild animals, and the traces left of sciences which, like fruitless flowers, bloomed in the spring of time only to decay, are monuments of human fatality which must im- press reflecting persons with gloomy notions of the instability of society, and incline us to fear that, in spite of all the efforts of genius and of art of modern times, the light of knowledge which rose in the East, and civilized the oriental nations, will set on the Western parts of the world, and leave us, ere long, a monument to future ages of the fluctuating nature of human perfection, unless by a strict attention to the improvement of the physical organization of our species, conjoined with the adoption of meorne general plan- of education superior to any “ hitherto enforced, we should permanently im- prove the moral and intellectual character of