248 WILD SCENES AND SONG-BIRDS. 



and fly in embodied shapes. He sees that these are not to 

 be studied amidst the dwarfed forms and abject vices of the 

 human distortion thronging in cities but here, amidst the 

 freshness of green solitudes, he can readily read the simple 

 passions separately in the Lion, Eagle, "Wolf, Vulture, Hart 

 and Dove while their laws would be studied through infi- 

 nite complexities were they sought for when the same pas- 

 sions are combined in the diseased social man. 



It is his mission to reform his race by exalting it ; and to 

 do this, he must create for it the noblest models. The old 

 mother leads him thus apart, to teach him that he cannot 

 paint these passions without a knowledge of their original 

 laws until he has traced them through their simple forms 

 up to their complex and blended expression in man. 



Thus in crystallization, she shows him the primitive sym- 

 metries the first natural arrangement of particles into har- 

 monious forms in stratification the natural arrangement of 

 these primitive forms in the structure of Earth, metals and 

 the universe, as determined by the law of forces or gravita- 

 tion in vegetation the ancient story of man, the passive 

 embryo, in the Arboreal form which the plastic energy as- 

 sumes first, and holds forever as the order of life in the 

 reptile, man slowly warming into vital activity, blind amidst 

 the huge vegetation of a semifluid chaos in the fish, man 

 advanced to a purer, but still gross element, obeying the 

 electric impulse of the vital fluid in straight lines in the 

 insect, the state and struggle of transitions in the animal, 

 perfection of physical organization with the circulating fluid 

 reddened by the intensity of vital or generative heat man, 

 the earth-crawler, and the brute ! in the bird, this earth- 

 crawling animal on wings a spurner of limits, a dweller of 

 the pure ether, soaring towards the stars, and propelled in 

 curved lines, to typify the ascent on the Eternal Circle, to- 

 wards the Life of God, which the man has now made in his 

 new birth of wings 1 



Thus she teaches him that it is not as organization resem- 



