BARON CUVIER. 83 



tainly nothing is less satisfactorily proved tlian this constant 

 simplicity of means. Beauty, richness, abundance, have 

 been the ways of the Creator, no less than simplicity. 



•• Whenever they who, in recent times, have sought to 

 give a new form to the metaphysical system of pantheism, 

 and which they have entitled ' Philosophy of Nature,' have 

 adopted the two hypotheses of which we have just spoken, 

 they have added a third, quite of the same kind. Not only 

 eacii being, according to these, represents all others, but it 

 lias a representation of itself in each of its parts. The head 

 is a complete body ; the skull, composed of vertebrae, is the 

 spine ; the nose is the thorax ; the mouth the abdomen ; the 

 upper jaw the arms, the lower the legs ; the teeth are fingers 

 or nails ; and in this thorax, in these four members, are to 

 be found the larynx, the ribs, the shoulder-blades, and the 

 basin, in a w^ord, all the bones. 



•' We comprehend, in fact, that those who admit but of 

 one single substance, of which every individual existence is 

 but a manifestation, would have pleasure in adopting the 

 idea that these manifestations succeed each other in a 

 regular and progressive order ; that they all bear the im- 

 pression, and, in some measure, become the images of one 

 common type, or essential substance, and that each part; 

 each part of a part, not only represents the special whole 

 which contains it, but even the great whole which contains 

 all others 



■• We, however, conceive nature to be simply a production 

 of the Almighty, regulated by a wisdom, the laws of which 

 can only be discovered by observation ; but we think that 

 these laws can only relate to the preservation and harmony 

 of the whole; that, consequently, all must be constituted in 

 a manner that contributes to this preservation and to this har- 

 mony, but we do not perceive any necessity for a scale of 

 beings, nor for a unity of composition, and we do not be- 

 lieve even in the possibility of a successive appearance of 

 different forms ; for it appears to us that, from the beginning, 

 diversity has been necessary to that harmony, and that pre- 

 servation, the only ends which our reason can perceive in 

 the arrangement of the world." 



Besides the " Dictionnaire des Sciences Naturelles," 

 there was yet another work of the same kind to which M. 



