five eye, I i\m surprised to find with what marvellous 

 exactness every creature draws its own picture, or 

 propagates its own likeness, though in different man. 

 ners of operation. The fox produces a living fox ? 

 the goose drops her egg, and hatches the young goose, 

 arid the tulip lets fall its seed into the earth, which 

 ferments and swells, and labours long in the ground, 

 till at last it brings forth a tulip. 



Is it the natural sagacity of foxes hat enables them 

 to form their own image so accurately? By no 

 means: for the goose and the flower do the like: the 

 sprightly and the stupid, the sensible and the senseless^ 

 work this wonder with equal regularity and perfec- 

 tion, and the plant performs it as well as the animah 



It is not possible that any of them should effect 

 this by any peculiar rules of art and contrivance : for 

 neither the one nor the other are at all acquainted 

 with the composition or progress of their work. The 

 bird is entirely ignorant of the wondrous vital ferment 

 of her own egg, either in the formation of it, or the 

 incubation, and the mother plant knows as much 

 of the parts of the-yoiing plant, as the mother animal 

 knows of the inward springs and movements of the 

 young little animaL There could be no contrivance 

 here ; for not any of them had any thought or design 

 of the final production : they were all moved, both 

 the beast, bird, and flower, by the material and me- 

 chanical springs of their own nature to continue 

 their own species, but ^without any such intent or 

 purpose. 



Give souls to all the animal race, and make those 

 souls as intelligent as you can ; attribute to them 

 what good sense you please in other affairs of their 

 puny life ; allow the brutes to be as rational and as. 

 cunning as you could wish or fancy, and to perform 

 a thousand tricks by their own sagacity, yet in this 

 matter, those intellectual powers must all stand by as 

 useless: the senseless vegetable has as much skill 

 here as the animal ; the goose is as wise as the fox 

 or the greyhound ; they draw their own portraits. 



