When steam issues from the tea-urn, and becomes condensed in minute drops upon the window-pane,--the miniature is of the _earth's heat_, evaporating the waters, and the cold air of night condensing the vapours into _dew_.
When grass and corn bend before the wind, and are beaten down by its force; when the pond forgets its calm, and rises in troubled waves, casting the flotilla of natural boats that move upon its surface, in rude disorder upon its windward shore,--the little storm is but a miniature of those great _hurricanes_ which wrecked a fleet in the Black Sea, and levelled the encampments of a mighty army.
When the snow that has gathered upon the house-top, warming beneath the smiles of the sun, slips from its bed, and drops in accumulated heaps from the roof,--it is a miniature of those terrible _avalanches_ which in the Pyrenees bury villages in their icy pall, and doom man and beast to death.
When the rivulet hurries on its course, and meeting with obstructions, leaps over them in mimic wrath, overturning some little raft upon which, perchance, a weary fly has alighted,--it is a miniature of those _rapids_ on whose banks the hippopotamus and the alligator yet live; and where, though rarely, man may be seen directing his raft over the troubled current, amid the rush of _debris_ from forests unexplored.
And when, in a basin of the rivulet, two opposing currents meet, and form a little vortex into which insect life and vegetable fragments coming within the sphere of its influence are drawn,--it is a miniature of the roaring _whirlpool_, or the wilder _maelstrom_ of the Norwegian seas.
Nature rehearses all her parts in mild whispers; and for every picture that she paints, she places a first study upon the canvas. Man need not go into the heart of her terrors to understand their laws. Many an unknown Humboldt, sitting by the river's side, may rejoice in the "aspects of nature," and share the bliss of knowledge with the great philosopher.
[Verse: "Can any understand the spreadings of the clouds, or the noise of his tabernacle?"--JOB XXXVI.]
A barometer is an instrument which _indicates the pressure of the atmosphere_, and which takes its name from two Greek words signifying _measurer of weight_.