DELINEATION OF NATURE. 65 



and the Azores. These illusive images were owing not to any 

 extraordinary refraction of the rays of light, but produced by 

 an eager longing for the distant and the unattained. The 

 philosophy of the Greeks, the physical views of the middle 

 ages, and even those of a more recent period have been 

 eminently imbued with the charm springing from similar 

 illusive phantoms of the imagination. At the limits of circum- 

 scribed knowledge, as from some lofty island shore, the eye 

 delights to penetrate to distant regions. The belief in the 

 uncommon and the wonderful lends a definite outline to every 

 manifestation of ideal creation ; and the realm of fancy a 

 fairy-land of cosmological, geognostical and magnetic visions 

 becomes thus involuntarily blended with the domain of 

 reality. 



Nature, in the manifold signification of the word whether 

 considered as the universality of all that is, and ever will be 

 as the inner moving force of all phenomena, or as their mys- 

 terious prototype reveals itself to the simple mind and 

 feelings of man as something earthly, and closely allied to 

 himself. It is only within the animated circles of organic 

 structure that we feel ourselves peculiarly at home. Thus 

 wherever the earth unfolds her fruits and flowers, and gives 

 food to countless tribes of animals, there the image of nature 

 impresses itself most vividly upon our senses. The impression 

 thus produced upon our minds limits itself almost exclusively 

 to the reflection of the earthly. The starry vault and the 

 wide expanse of the heavens, belong to a picture of the uni- 

 verse, in which the magnitude of masses, the number of 

 congregated suns and faintly glimmering nebulas, although 

 they excite our wonder and astonishment, manifest themselves 

 to us in apparent isolation, and as utterly devoid of all evi- 

 dence of their being the scenes of organic life. Thus even in 

 the earliest physical views of mankind, heaven and earth have 

 been separated and opposed to one another as an upper and 

 lower portion of space. If then a picture of nature were to cor- 

 respond to the requirements of contemplation by the senses, it 

 ought to begin with a delineation of our native Earth. It should 

 depict first the terrestrial planet as to its size and form ; its 

 increasing density and heat at increasing depths in its super- 

 imposed solid and liquid strata ; the separation of sea and 

 land, and the vital forms animating both, developed in the 



