A BOOK PROJECTED. 17 



knowledge ; his noble impatience cannot be restrained till all 

 his conceptions have arranged themselves into one harmonious 

 whole, till he stands at the central point of arts and sciences, 

 and thence overlooks the whole extent of their dominion with 

 a satisfied glance. New discoveries in the field of his activhy, 

 which depress the trader in science, enrapture the philosopher. 

 Perhaps they fill a chasm which the growth of his ideas had 

 rendered more wide and unseemly, or they place the last stone, 

 the only one wanting to the completion of the structure of his 

 ideas. But even should they shiver it into ruins — should a new 

 series of ideas, a new aspect of nature, a newly discovered law in 

 the physical world, overthrow the whole fabric of his knowledge, 

 he has akvays loved truth better than his system, and gladly will he 

 exchange her old and defective form for a new and fairer one. 

 Under such intellectual impulses as these, he had con- 

 ceived the idea, while still only in his twenty-second year, 

 of a work which should serve as an introduction to the 

 philosophical study of Natural History. The treatises of 

 the day appeared to him deficient in grasp of the underlying 

 principles of physiological science ; they were filled with 

 facts and observations which were sometimes ill understood, 

 because their true relations were only imperfectly appre- 

 hended. He boldly grappled with the difhculty, and re- 

 solved to aim at nothing less than a general view of the 

 entire realm of organic nature, so as to set forth the funda- 

 mental laws which might be discerned in the life alike of 

 plants and animals. His thoughts had been playing round 

 special questions in this wide domain as far back as his 

 voyage to the West Indies. The subject haunted him 

 during the session which he spent at University College, 

 and rose into a positive though immature design. His first 

 printed paper, published before he left London, in the West 

 of England Journal, October, 1835, dealt with "The Structure 

 and Functions of the Organs of Respiration in the Animal 

 and Vegetable Kingdoms."* Starting from the recognized 

 * It was continued in January, 1836. 



