166 ASSIMILATION AND ITS ORGANS. 



becomes assimilated to liis fellows; the merchant behest carries him 

 abroad, and informs him from other races ; the aroma of his bro- 

 ther's industry clings to every stuff that he brings; forbidding 

 waste as the loss of humanity and virtue. Thus the organs that 

 assimilate our food, cover themselves with sensibilities, and assimi- 

 late our fellows. And thus we note that the spade-way or plough- 

 track of the husbandman, the paths of ships over the sea, of cara- 

 vans over the desert, and the road with its refinements, are only 

 magnified images of that which goes on with intense smallness in 

 the assimilative organs. 



It is not in the lower kingdoms only that assimilation and diges- 

 tion are proceeding. The plant, it is true, assimilates the mineral, 

 and assimilates the atmosphere, the fruitful soil being the amalgam 

 of their twofold natures in the one case, and the active aroma in the 

 other. The animal again digests all beneath, and fertilizes all. 

 Above the lowest nature each thing is eater and meat, end and be- 

 ginning in succession. The external world in its extent is progress- 

 ive assimilation and refinement. Through every change, by a se- 

 cret providence, the surface of the planet is steadily fitting itself to 

 sustain a grander edifice of society. For this, the primitive forests 

 and their inhabitants have been industriously making, and shed- 

 ding, their frames, in unrcckoned generations. For this, the little 

 flowers have been working since the first were self-sown from the 

 miraculous garden. For this, the earth has rested uncropped in the 

 balmiest latitudes, and still the sun pours the tropical spirit on her 

 unexhausted islands. For this, an aboriginal savage tenantry lease 

 but as hunters the future corn-lands of a long-deferred civilization. 

 The human body, also — fallow and in great part tenantless as the 

 planet — shall it not refine its organization century after century, 

 and become the microcosm of a new mind, to be connected with it 

 entirely, and to inhabit and cultivate it entirely ? 



And what is the growth of this mind itself, but renewed diges- 

 tion and assimilation ? In this again the creation is our food, but 

 which enters through the mouths of the senses. Touch, taste, smell, 

 hearing, sight, carry inwards their several matters of information to 

 the nutrient reservoirs of the memory, where by the active imagina- 

 tion they are raised to some uniformity of life, and being cast into 



