62 



PHYSIOLOGY OF LIFE. 



In reply to No. 1, I ask whether, in the nature of the 

 mind, illustration and explanation must not of necessity 

 proceed from the lower to the higher ? or whether a boy 

 is to be taught his addition, subtraction, multiplication, 

 and division, by the highest branches of algebraic analysis? 

 Is there any better way of systematic teaching, than that 

 of illustrating each new step, or having each new step illus- 

 trated to him by its identity in kind with the step the 

 next below it ? though it be the only mode in which this 

 objection can be answered, yet it seems affronting to re- 

 mind the objector, of rules so simple as that the complex 

 must even be illustrated by the more simple, or the less 

 scrutible by that which is more subject to our examination. 

 In reply to No. 2, I first refer to the author' s eulogy 

 on Mr. Hunter, p. 163, in which he is justly extolled for 

 having "surveyed the whole system of organized beings, 

 from plants to man :" of course, therefore, as a system; 

 and therefore under some one common law. Now in the 

 very same sense, and no other, than that in which the 

 writer himself by implication compares himself as a man 

 to the dermestes typographies, or the fucus scorpioides } 

 do I compare the principle of Life to magnetism, elec- 

 tricity, and constructive affinity, or rather to that power 

 to which the two former are the thesis and antithesis, the 

 latter the synthesis. But if to compare involve the sense 

 of its etymon, and involve the sense of parity, I utterly 

 deny that I do at all compare them ; and, in truth, in 

 no conceivable sense of the word is it applicable, any 

 more than a geometrician can be affirmed to compare a 

 polygon to a point, because he generates the line out of 

 the point. The writer attributes to a philosophy essen- 



