262 SUMMER. 



as to cripple it by the blow. It would be easy to con- 

 tinue this enumeration through many volumes, for 

 there is not a situation or a purpose that the most 

 fertile or the most fantastic imagination can picture, 

 that has not an adaptation or an instrument in nature ; 

 and all art is merely imitation, and very clumsy imi- 

 tation, of that which nature effects as an effortless and 

 natural consequence of the previous states of those 

 substances upon or among which the phenomena take 

 place. 



We go to museums and bazaars, and we wonder at 

 their contents ; and that man should be so formed as 

 to understand and construct those things, is the grand 

 marvel, the glory of natural history ; but the blade of 

 grass on which we tread, the worm on which we tram- 

 ple, or the little fly that annoys us with its buzzing 

 sound and its tickling proboscis, is infinitely more cu- 

 rious, far more fraught with information, than all the 

 museums of art that ever were collected. Creation is 

 a self-operating, a self-constructing, and, in so far as 

 man is concerned, a self-contemplating museum. Other 

 museums, however numerous, and ingenious, and rare 

 may be the subjects collected, have no mutual rela- 

 tion, the one contributes in no degree to the 

 other ; but in the museum of nature, though the parts 

 be innumerable, the machine is but one, and, contain- 

 ing or contained, there is such a mutual relation and 

 dependence that, if one is destroyed, others must pe- 

 rish along with it ; and, if a new one appears, it comes 

 not alone. Depress but a mountain for a few yards, 

 and you lose some Alpine plant, possibly too small for 

 the microscope; turn but the course of a river, and 



