SOURCE OF ERROR. 



of scanning the magnificent, and scrutinizing the mi- 

 nute, they were as perfect in the range of the eye as 

 we are ; and the fragments of records of what they 

 did, that have come down to us, show that their single 

 observations were accurate ; but they had not the 

 proper, method of so combining facts as that the one 

 might throw light upon the other, and for that reason 

 they formed those imperfect and contradictory theories, 

 of the origin of things and the succession of events, 

 which give an unphilosophic air even to the most 

 acute of their conjectures. 



There is no way of avoiding fancies of that kind 

 but by looking at the whole. No part of nature is 

 detached ; and though, when we find the ultimate fact 

 displayed by or in one of nature's productions, as 

 when we find an acorn passing through stem, bud, 

 and flower to an acorn again, a bee building a cell, 

 or a bird changing its clime or its colour with the season, 

 we hunt for an instinct in the individual to explain 

 the whole, we do not take into consideration that in 

 the production of any of these, or any other pheno- 

 mena more simple than these, there may be a count- 

 less number of the energies of nature at work. Change 

 of heat, change of light, change of humidity, change 

 in the place of matter by the mere mechanical action 

 of the wind and the rain, change of the composition 

 according to those chemical laws which we know, or 

 to many others of which we are ignorant, with many 

 other circumstances, may enter into an ultimate fact 

 so simple as the germination of a seed, or the appear- 

 ance of the larva of an insect in a particular time ; 



