54 Peveril Castle. 



dant as the regularities. Such things show that the 

 popular notion of Law, founded, as it is, upon the obser- 

 vation simply of a few uniformities, and upon the exact 

 recurrence of a few everyday phenomena, is blind and 

 childish ; and that the true idea of a law of nature is of 

 an energy that institutes and enforces both the regular 

 and the so-called irregular, a government which ex- 

 presses itself not only in sweet and constant repetitions, 

 year by year, and day by day, true to the finest line ; but 

 which can at the same time cover and include occur- 

 rences the most dissonant in outward seeming. In laws, 

 as in all that laws refer to, he who has seen only one, 

 has seen not any.* 



Scurvy - grass, so called from its medicinal efficacy, 

 occurs, under one form or another, upon the coasts 

 of nearly every part of the world, thus within reach of 

 the sailor. It grows also by the mossy tricklings upon 

 mountain-sides, as in Patterdale ; here, at Peveril, it 

 creeps out of dry limestone crevices, the veriest mblem 

 of ubiquity and content. The plant may easily be dis- 

 tinguished, having broad leaves, about the size of a shil- 

 ling, and clusters of little white flowers, formed of four 

 petals, with stamens as in fig. 7, the blossoms succeeded 

 by pods that are divided into two compartments by a 

 silvery membrane. These are characters that mark the 

 great family of plants called Crucifers; plants devoid, 



* Vide "Life; its Nature, Varieties, and Phenomena," chap. 

 xxi., (Ed. 2.) 



