BARON CUVIER. 83 



tainly nothing is less satisfactorily proved than this constant 

 simplicity of means. Beauty, richness, abundance, have 

 been the ways of the Creator, no less than simplicity. 



" Whenever they who, in recent times, have sought to 

 give a new form to the metaphysical system of pantheism, 

 and which they have entitled ' Philosophy of Nature/ have 

 adopted the two hypotheses of which we have just spoken, 

 they have added a third, quite of the same kind. Not only 

 each being, according to these, represents all others, but it 

 has a representation of itself in each of its parts. The head 

 is a complete body ; the skull, composed of vertebrae, is the 

 spine ; the nose is the thorax ; the mouth the abdomen ; the 

 upper jaw the arms, the lower the legs ; the teeth are fingers 

 or nails ; and in this thorax, in these four members, are to 

 be found the larynx, the ribs, the shoulder-blades, and the 

 basin, in a word, all the bones. 



" We comprehend, in fact, that those who admit but of 

 one single substance, of which every individual existence is 

 but a manifestation, would have pleasure in adopting the 

 idea that these manifestations succeed each other in a 

 regular and progressive order ; that they all bear the im- 

 pression, and, in some measure, become the images of one 

 common type, or essential substance, and that each part, 

 each part of a part, not only represents the special whole 

 which contains it, but even the great whole which contains 

 all others 



" We, however, conceive nature to be simply a production 

 of the Almighty, regulated by a wisdom, the laws of which 

 can only be discovered by observation ; but we think that 

 these laws can only relate to the preservation and harmony 

 of the whole ; that, consequently, all must be constituted in 

 a manner that contributes to this preservation and to this har- 

 mony, but we do not perceive any necessity for a scale of 

 beings, nor for a unity of composition, and we do not be- 

 lieve even in the possibility of a successive appearance of 

 different forms ; for it appears to us that, from the beginning, 

 diversity has been necessary to that harmony, and that pre- 

 servation, the only ends which our reason can perceive in 

 the arrangement of the world." 



Besides the " Dictionnaire des Sciences Naturelles," 

 there was yet another work of the same kind to which M. 



