we 
*. 
108 Des Moulins on the genera Unio and Anodonta. 
This saying is true; observe its justness from kingdom to king- 
dom ; behold the close connexion of the mineral with the vegetable 
kingdom, in those innumerable crystals which form the micro- 
scopic quasi skeleton of the stem of the Cacteza, and of so many 
other plants ; behold it also, though in a different form, in those 
Chara, so delicate as to be always protected by a stony covering ; 
observe the relation between the mineral and the animal king- 
doms, in those curious madrepores, of which the frame-work, en- 
tirely mineral, is secreted by a feeble living jelly ; behold, finally, 
that of the animal with the vegetable kingdom, in those corals 
which unite the essential composition of the former with the flex- 
ibility and the appearance of the laws of growth of the latter: 
Natura non facit saltum. 
Let us proceed, and this maxim will shed more light. It is not 
a simple line of junction that marks the boundary between the 
inorganic and the two organic kingdoms; they go even to a su- 
perposition, or if I may invent a term to express my idea, to a 
superaddition, so constant as to form one of the essential laws of 
the physical world. Nothing is purely animal, nothing is purely 
vegetable, since every organic substance is reduced, by analysis, 
to inorganic elements. The mineral or inorganic kingdom is, 
then, the primary matter of the physical world—matter which 
its Creator has set in action and modified by superadding other 
principles entirely foreign to it: Natura non JSacit saltum. 
But observe, gentlemen, this wonderful concatenation: the in- 
organic kingdom, which enters into the composition of all phys- 
ical things, is subject to all universal laws, and is limited by 
God works again, but in another direction, and superadds the 
principle still more mysterious and sublime, of animal life, of 
sensation, of volition: ANrmaLta CRESCUNT, VIVUNT ET SENTIENT. 
Here you still perceive, Natura non. facit saltum. 
The naturalist stops here ; he stops where stopt the mind of 
the great classifier of material things, at the bound which neces- 
sarily limited the extent of his immortal maxim. Linneus, after 
having borrowed, almost in very phrase from Saint Augustine, 
the first three terms of this divinely instituted magnificent pro- 
