b INTRODUCTION. 



A New Hollander is not by half so good a builder 

 as the white ant in his woods, or the little coral worm 

 in the sea that surrounds him ; and the European must 

 yield the palm to a snail or an oyster ! The tree that 

 adorns the forest, the flower that enamels the par- 

 terre, the very rankest weed that grows, the particles 

 of earth that arrange themselves into an agate or a 

 crystal ; nay, the very moisture in the air of a room on 

 a winter's night, which does not appear, till coming in 

 contact with the cold glass of the window, it shoots 

 into beautiful feathers of ice ; these, nay, any thing 

 else of nature's forming, are all much greater adepts 

 in the arts of form and construction than man is. Of 

 his painting we need not speak ; and as for his che- 

 mistry, why, in the practice of it, he is outdone by a 

 vine, a mountain berry, or even a sunbeam. 



If, therefore, we were to take the mere arrangement 

 of matter as the evidence of mind, man would be 

 placed far down in the scale, and his immortality 

 would stand upon no better foundation than that of 

 an insect, a stone, or even a drop of dew. But that 

 is not the philosophic view of the matter. The most 

 ingenious performances of the animals, those which 

 have been described as the results of an inferior sort 

 of reason, have really nothing more to do with reason, 

 viewed as an attribute of mind, than has the motion 

 of a planet, or the falling of a stone, or the congelation 

 of water by cold and the thawing of it again by heat. 

 The whole of the phenomena of matter, whether it be 

 organized or not, and whether the organization of it 

 be animated or not, are the results of the law of mat- 



