PURPOSE OF SIMILITUDES. 291 



afforded, and would, if more generally given, go so very far to 

 subvert nature's own provision for the support of birds and 

 carnivorous insects, that the opinion would seem scarcely tena- 

 ble. Besides, there are not wanting, in the vegetable world, re- 

 semblances of objects in the animal almost as close as when 

 the latter furnishes the copy. Yet no one, on the same pre- 

 servative principle, has pretended to assume that the vegetable 

 snail, star-fish, bee, fly, or spider, were endowed with sem- 

 blances of living forms in order to protect them from their 

 natural consumers, nor, we believe, in these latter instances 

 has any "final cause " been ingeniously assigned. With these, 

 in truth, as with various other of nature's proceedings, whether 

 common or unwonted, it might doubtless be as well if philoso- 

 phers would look longer before they " leap " to her supposed 

 ends ; thus adding to the treasures of their knowledge that 

 acquirement (so difficult to human self-sufficiency) which a 

 French naturalist terms, with French felicity of phrase, " Vart 

 cFignorer."* Thus much, however, we may perhaps be per- 

 mitted to suggest on the subjects of the above and other 

 singular deviations from the usual type of natural forms, may 

 they not, at least in part, have been designated by the Great 

 Creator to awaken by the uncommon a greater measure of at- 

 tention to the common wonders of his hand ? May not these 

 eccentric resemblances, in which, shooting beyond its regular 

 orbit, one kingdom of nature seems to touch the exterior of 



* Bonnet. 



