TO A CONTEMPLATIVE MIND. 13 



study which is equally within the reach of all ranks and classes ; the 

 objects of which are spread around us, and at our feet, as if to invite 

 us to their contemplation. Indeed, we may be considered as under 

 the necessity of studying it. The animal, the vegetable, and the 

 mineral kingdoms, may be viewed as so many great storehouses spread 

 before us by the great Author of nature, from which we may derive 

 all that is necessary for food, clothing and medicine : at the same 

 time that they contain many things hurtful and poisonous. Man 

 comes into the world not endowed with that instinct by which other 

 animals are enabled to discriminate between what is good and what is 

 bad for them. But in its place he has the faculty of reason, — a 

 faculty which, though at first it appears inferior to instinct, is capable, 

 even here, of rising immeasurably above it. To what height it may 

 hereafter attain we cannot tell ; but it seems destined to continue for 

 ever improving. The study of natural history has a tendency to open 

 and enlarge the mind, to produce habits of reflection, to call off from 

 low and debasing pleasures. It may also serve to humble our pride 

 when we behold the wisdom and ingenuity which have been displayed 

 in what we are accustomed to consider the meanest of creatures, and 

 consider ourselves but as a link in that great chain of existence, in 

 which 



" Each shell, each crawling insect holds a rank, 



Important in the plan of Him who form'd 



His scale of beings ; holds a rank which, lost, 



Would break the chain, and leave behind a gap 



Which Nature's self would rue." 



The field which natural history embraces is so vast, and its objects 

 so numberless, that there is no fear of ever exhausting them. All 

 that could be learnt in the longest life would be but as a beginning, 

 when compared with what must remain unknown. It may serve to 

 place the endless variety of the works of nature in a stronger li°bt if 

 we consider that not only are the species of plants and animals so 

 numerous that after ages of investigation we are continually discover- 

 ing new ones j but that probably no two individuals of a species were 

 ever found exactly to agree in all their parts. Thus of all the millions 

 of men who now inhabit our globe, and of all the myriads who have 

 successively acted their parts on the great stage of life and disappeared, 

 no two have ever been found exactly alike. This rule, if applied te 

 the vegetable or the mineral kingdoms, would hold equally true. Nor 

 are the objects of natural history less varied in their duration and eco- 



