Ani] AND SYMBOLS. ri 



opportunity of stealing a march upon you. He loses ground, 

 and gives you vantage by his manifestation of it. It was an 

 old maxim with Statius, that "Anger manages everything badly." 

 In the transactions of mankind undoubtedly he was right in 

 this. It would seem from the conduct of the lion that the 

 maxim may have some application even to animals. M. 



The Common Bond of Animated Nature. 



When after a lengthened voyage and far from home, says 

 Humboldt, we for the first time set foot in a tropical land, we 

 are pleased to recognise in the rocks and mountain masses the 

 same mineral species we have left behind clay, slate, basaltic 

 amygdaloid and the like, the universal distribution of which 

 seems to assure us that the old crust of the earth has been 

 formed independently of the external influences of existing 

 climes. But this well-known crust is covered with the forms 

 of a foreign flora. Yet here, surrounded by unwonted vegetable 

 forms, impressed with a sense of the overwhelming amount of 

 the tropical organising force, in presence of an exotic nature in 

 all things, the native of the northern hemisphere has revealed 

 to him the wonderful power of adaptation inherent in the human 

 mind. We feel ourselves, in fact, akin to all that is organised ; 

 and though at first we may fancy that one of our native land- 

 scapes, with its appropriate features, like a native dialect, would 

 present itself to us in more attractive colours, and rejoice us 

 more than the foreign scene with its profusion of vegetable life, 

 we nevertheless soon begin to find that we are burghers even 

 under the shade of the palms of the torrid zone. In virtue of 

 the mysterious connection of all organic forms (and occasionally 

 the feeling of the necessity of this connection lies within us), 

 these new exotic forms present themselves to our fancy as 

 exalted and ennobled out of those which surrounded our child- 

 hood. Blind feeling, therefore, says the same great traveller, 

 and the enchainment of the phenomena perceived by sense, in 

 the same measure as reason and the combining faculty, lead us 

 to the recognition which now penetrates every grade of humanity, 

 that a common bond, according to determinate laws, and there- 

 fore eternal, embraces the whole of animated nature. K. 



