310 THE HUMAN FORM. 



gested into botany, in which they assume order, classes, species, and 

 families; and the order is subject to that of the kingdoms them- 

 selves, and included within it. But being a vegetative or growing 

 order, and not an animal or moving order, it does not travel to man, 

 but enters into him by his own choice. Hence the uses of the plants 

 are their chief human relations. For the plants, like factory men, 

 begin to feed and clothe us; they spin our cottons in vegetable 

 Manchesters, and are the looms of looms, in which the Arkwrights 

 of the sap and pod herald and provoke the Arkwrights of the mill. 

 In this kingdom there are all things not made with hands, in pre- 

 paration for all similars to be made with hands, and this again in 

 earnest of a new growth in heaven, where all things not made with 

 hands again appear. And the more good science we bring to bear, 

 the more humane do the plants become ; in other words, we find 

 that they are altogether useful, that is to say, grow towards us; 

 until at length we see all the trees as one tree, whose fruits are good 

 for food, and its leaves for medicine. More remotely, plants are 

 our anatomical brethren ; they have sap like blood, and leaves like 

 lungs, skin and limbs, and roots of stomachs also, each of their own 

 order. They also have seed and progency, and in their green ambi- 

 tion, they tend to people all earths, and to build airy castles like 

 our own, raising up the soil on their hods in wooden galleries to the 

 clouds. Moreover they are symbolical, or humane to our sentiments, 

 with which they easily tremble and glow ; and in the same light 

 they are biblical, or humane to the divine, leading him from para- 

 dise, the harmonious garden, to that city in the midst of whose 

 street there was still the tree of life. And as the domesticated ani- 

 mals stand at the head of the animal kingdom according to one mode 

 of classification, so the useful plants occupy the first ranks in the 

 vegetable kingdom : and constituting the beginnings of series, sum- 

 mon the rest about them, and group their whole realm around man. 

 Again, the mineral kingdom is humane, because it is included in 

 the scheme of order, or the mental humanity ; and because it sup- 

 ports the vegetable, which grows up to the animal, which travels 

 towards man. And here be it observed, that each realm has its own 

 approach to us. The animal makes its way thither by a scale of 

 likening forms and functions ; it looks and acts as if it were human, 



