72 GENERAL IEW OF MATURE. 



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organic life. The earliest physical views separate between, 

 and oppose to each other, the heavens and the earth the 

 above and the below in space. If, then, our view were 

 intended to correspond solely to the requirements of 

 sensuous contemplation, it ought to begin with the 

 description of our native earth. It should depict first 

 the terrestrial spheroid ; its magnitude and form ; its in- 

 creasing density and temperature at increasiug depths in its 

 solid or liquid strata; the relative configuration of sea and- 

 land, and in both the development of organic He in the 

 cellular tissues of plants and animals; the atmospheric 

 ocean, with its waves and currents, and forest-cUd mountain 

 chains which rise like reefs and shoals froir its bottom. 

 After thus depicting purely telluric relations, the eye would 

 be raised to the celestial spaces ; the earth, :he well-known 

 seat of organic development, would now be considered as a 

 planet taking its place in the series of cosmical bodies 

 revolving around one of the countless host of self-luminous 

 stars. This succession of ideas indicates the path pursued 

 in the earliest mode of contemplation, or that which derives 

 purely from the senses ; it almost remiids us of the ancient 

 " sea-girt disk of Earth supporting the Heavens." It begins 

 in perception, and its course is from the known and near to 

 the unknown and distant. It corresponds to the method 

 pursued in our elementary works on astronomy (and which 

 has much to recommend it ir a mathematical point of 

 view), of proceeding from the apparent to the real or true 

 movements of the celestial bodies. 



In a work which proposes not so much to shew the 

 grounds of our knowledge, as to display that which is known, 

 whether regarded in the present state of science as certain, 



