Excerpt from Lecture Delivered Before the Maryland Institute for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts, on Tuesday Evening, March 20, 1855
The Institution over which you preside must enlist in its favor the warmest sympathies of every lover of humanity. Agriculture and the mechanic arts may be regarded as twin sisters, born at the same birth, and co-workers in all that relates to the good of man, his comfort, his refinement, his civiliza tion. Without the first, the last has no active existence, - with out the last, the earth is an unreclaimed wilderness, within whose dense forests no trace of improvement exists. Working perpetually together, they have their type in the Castor and Pollux of the ancient mythology. By their joint labors they reclaim the wilderness, cause the earth to give forth its bless ings, build the populous city, construct the noble ship and freight it for distant ports, and make available in the great work of civilization, the primeval elements of fire, air and water. The. Curse pronounced upon our race, on the expulsion of our great progenitors from the garden, is almost annihilated through the substitution of manual labor by machinery, which seems often, in the complexity and yet perfect accuracy of its opera tions, to be endowed-with the principles of life and motion as inherent in itself, andindependent of the will of man. Nor does the genius which presides over the department of the mechanic arts, confine itself to the fabrication of mechanical instruments and machines devoted to the great purposes of every day life.
It springs forth into the boundless fields of the imagination wings its flight through the mists of long past ages, and revivi fies and restores through the magic touch of the brush, the pencil, and the chisel, the dust of the long since dead, and the images of things belonging to the past eternities. The Assyrian in the palaces of Nineveh - Belshazzar trembling at the hand writing on the wall-alexander in his glorious triumphs, and drunken orgies - the Ptolemies in their royal robes, and Cleopa tra who lost Mark Anthony the work To say nothing of the sublime portraitures drawn from sacred sources, it connects the past with the present by exhibiting our own noble and god like ancestors, along side of the liberty-loving men of other ages and of other climes, and crowns the whole with a halo of imperishable glory, by representing on the canvass George Washington of Virginia, surrendering his sword to the Congress at Annapolis, Maryland.
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