Organic Kingdom. 233 



bursts into a wealth of forms with sensitive life ; 

 ending in man, endowed with thought and reason, 

 with power to understand this chain of beings, as 

 he is their appointed lord and their connecting link 

 with the Maker of them all. 



Among these we know the polyp, that with radi- 

 ate masonry builds its walls and mounds strong 

 enough to shut back the ocean, and broad enough 

 for nations to dwell upon. 



The waters teem with fishes and shells, the air 

 with birds and insects, the fields and forests with 

 the higher tribes, and the rocks with the casts and 

 figures of those that lived in geologic time. We 

 reckon our species of plants and animals by hun- 

 dreds of thousands, besides the vast numbers 

 of the fossil series. A single species, among the 

 cultivated plants, may come to be represented by 

 more than a thousand distinct variet: 



It is in this field, among these countless hosts of 

 the kingdom of life, that the human mind has 

 achieved some of its greatest triumphs, in tracing 

 the grand design by which the vast multitude of or- 

 ganic beings are so related in their plan of struc- 

 ture, that the whole series can be comprehended by 

 a single mind. And when we add to the living 

 forms the countless host that the rocks contain, we 

 do not confuse the picture, but only make its shad- 

 ings more perfect. All the labors of the army of 

 naturalists have tended to this one result: to bring 

 out order and system, not by creating them, but by 

 reading the plan and discovering the grouping which 



