32 ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. 



affected by external agencies, become, from that very cause, more circum- 

 scribed in their range of distribution ; simply because a greater difference in 

 the circumstances under which they would be placed, brought with it an 

 amount of change in their structure which exceeded the limits prescribed to 

 it by Nature. In short, without pretending to do more than to divine the 

 character of those impediments, which appear ever to prevent the changes 

 of which a plant is susceptible from proceeding beyond a certain limit, we 

 seem to catch a glimpse of a general law of Nature, not limited to one of her 

 kingdoms, but extending everywhere throughout her jurisdiction, a law, 

 the aim of which may be inferred to be that of maintaining the existing order 

 of the universe, without any material or permanent alteration, throughout all 

 time, until the fiat of Omnipotence has gone forth for its destruction. The 

 wih 1 which confines the variations in the vegetable structure within a certain 

 range, lest the order of creation should be disturbed by the introduction of an 

 indefinite number of intermediate forms, is apparently the same in its motive 

 as that which brings back the celestial luminaries to their original orbits, 

 after the completion of a cycle of changes induced by then- mutual perturba- 

 tions. The whole, indeed, resolves itself into, or at least is intimately con- 

 nected with, that law of symmetry to which Nature seems ever striving to 

 conform, and which possesses the same significance in the organic world, 

 which the law of definite proportions does in the inorganic. It is the prin- 

 ciple which the prophetic genius of Goethe had divined, long before it had 

 been proved by the labors of physiologists to be a reality, and to which the 

 poet attached such importance, that the celebrated discussion as to its merits 

 which took place in 1830 between Cuvier and Geoffrey St. Hilaire so engrossed 

 his mind, as to deprive him, as his biographer informs us, of all interest in one 

 of the most portentous political events of modern days which was enacting at 

 the very same epoch, I mean the subversion of the Bourbon dynasty. It 

 is, indeed, not less calculated to subserve the gratification of our sense of 

 the Beautiful, than to provide against too wide a departure from that order of 

 creation which its great Author has from the beginning instituted ; and which 

 manifests itself, not less in the geometrical adjustment of the branches of a 

 plant, and of the scales of a fir-apple nay, even as they have wished to 

 prove, in the correspondence between the form of the fruit and that of the 

 tree on which it grows than in the frequent juxtaposition of the com- 

 plementary rays of the spectrum, by which that harmony of color is produced 

 in Nature which we are always striving, however unsuccessfully, to imitate 

 in Art. The law, indeed, seems to be nothing else than a direct consequence 

 of that unity of design pervading the universe, which so bespeaks a common 

 Creator of the existence in the mind of the Deity of a sort of archetype, to 

 which His various works have all, to a certain extent, been accommodated; 

 so that the earlier forms of life may be regarded as types of those of later 

 creation, and the more complex ones but as developments of rudimentary 

 parts existing in the more simple. 



GEOLOGICAL PROGRESS. 

 I will only further detain y<>u l>v noticing one other field of inquiry, in which 



