386 STUDIES OF NATURE. 



with anxious thoughts about the manner in which 

 your members were to be combined, and your 

 nerves and your bones to expand ? When, in pro- 

 cefs of time, you emerged into light, did you fludy 

 optics, in order to know how you were to per- 

 ceive objects ; and anatomy, in order to learn how 

 to move about your body, and how to promote 

 it's growth ? Thefe operations of Nature, far fu- 

 perior to thofe of men, have taken place in you, 

 without your knowledge, and without any inter- 

 ference of your own. If you difqnieted not your- 

 felf about being born. Wherefore fliould you, 

 about living, and Wherefore, about dying ? Are 

 you not always in the fame hand ? 



Other fentiments, however, natural to the mind 

 of Man, have filled me with dejedlion. For ex- 

 ample, Not to have acquired, after fo many pere- 

 grinations and exertions, one little rural fpot, in 

 which I could, in the bofom of repofe, have ar- 

 ranged my obfervations on Nature, to me of all 

 others the moft amiable and interefting under the 

 Sun. I have another fource of regret, ftill more 

 depreffmg, namely, the misfortune of not having 

 attached to my lot a female mare, fimple, gentle, 

 fenfible, and pious, who, much better than Philo- 

 fophy, would havefoothed my folicitudes,and who, 

 by bringing me children like herfelf, would have 

 provided me with a pofterity, incomparably more 



dear 



