114 Fairy Rings. 



being told of the rotatory motions of our globe, or the cause 

 of an eclipse : doubting what is demonstrable to a child of the 

 commonest capacity, and admitting what would stagger the 

 soundest philosopher. Like the poor woman who, receiving 

 her son from the West Indies, listened with satisfactory con- 

 viction to his marvellous narrations of rocks of sugar and 

 rivers of rum, but shuddered, and gave him the flattest con- 

 tradiction, when he averred that he had seen fishes that could 

 fly ; when a moment's reflection, even of her mind, would 

 have shown as near an affinity between fowls and fishes, as 

 between sugar and sand. But these good though simple souls, 

 " most ignorant of what they 're most assured," whose delight 

 is in the marvellous, did they but turn to Nature, would find 

 her kingdom peopled and furnished with incalculably more 

 wonders, ay, and true ones too (were that any recommend- 

 ation), and each perspicuously and indubitably indicating 

 almighty power, wisdom, and benevolence, than all the abor- 

 tions that were ever spawned from the monstrous womb of 

 Superstition ; even more incongruous and copious than " the 

 stuff which dreams are made of," — more charming, more 

 changing, and more enchanting. What are the tricks and 

 transformations of the most cunning necromancer, compared 

 to the metamorphoses of millions of insects, that actually, and 

 almost hourly, unfold before us ; from the smooth and com- 

 pact e^gg^ to the rough and frightful reptile, through the 

 curious mummy of a chrysalis, to the splendid and celestial 

 butterfly? Look at the myriads of monadal and polypodal 

 molluscous creatures that people every part of the multitudi- 

 nous ocean ! Minuteness, indeed, rather than an argument 

 against, is an augmentation of, astonishment; equal wisdom 

 being displayed, and wonder excited, in the articulations of 

 an elephant or an aphis, in the ramifications of a forest or a 

 fern, in the fructification of a melon or a moss ; indeed, the 

 last is incomparably the most intricate and interesting. Look 

 at the fantastic and often, at first, repulsive formations, and 

 apparent deformities, of these creatures of the waters, with 

 limbs and organs in every place and shape but what we ex- 

 pect, and tentacles hundreds of times longer than themselves ! 

 W^hy, heraldry itself never came up to these, with all its hip- 

 pogryphs, dragons, wiverns, hydras, chimeras, and amphis- 

 baenas dire. Some flowers that are now brought from 

 abroad are so extravagantly eccentric in composition, so 

 magnificent in structure, and so dazzlingly glaring in colours, 

 that the most imaginative painter would never have thought 

 of limning such. Some parasites so expansive and ponder- 

 ous, having blossoms many feet in diametei*, exist on trailing 



