410 RELATION OF QUANTITY TO AESTHETIC SENTIMENT. 



Such a discovery enhances our admiration, and leads us forward in 

 the study of the wondrous works of God : 



" With growing strength and ever new dehght." 



The number two is the most apparent cipher in the whole range of 

 figures. All things go in pairs, and those two are ever one. The one 

 is nothing without the other. You cannot separate them without 

 destroying both. Thus we have day and night. But suppose that 

 the earth did not turn upon its own axis, so that one hemisphere 

 basked in the continual light of the sun, and the other lay in the 

 gloom of an unbroken darkness. To the inhabitants of the first, no 

 conception of day would be possible ; neither would that of night be 

 possible to the dwellers on the shadowed side. So every where we 

 have male and female, cold and heat, negative and positive, and num- 

 berless instances of this duality. In the structure of plants we find 

 each. to be a dual, composed of two essential and distinct parts — the 

 stem and the leaf. Whatever apparently diversified forms may be 

 found in the plant, they may be all reduced to these two. The sepal 

 is a rudimentary leaf. The petal is a leaf reduced in size, thinned, 

 and coloured. The stamen is a leaf whose peteole is represented by 

 the filament ; while the two sides of its laminse are represented by the 

 two lobes of the anther. In like manner each flower itself is a rudi- 

 mentary branch, with its penduncle and bracteolse. The plant, there- 

 fore, is a dual, with unity of plan running through the whole. 



"We have said that these two are ever one . It would have been 

 more correct to have said that that these two are ever three ; for, 

 after all, the universal quantity is a triad rather than either a unit or 

 a dual. To the senses, the constitution of things is twofold ; but to 

 the reason it is threefold. Between the two points already stated 

 there is ever a third or middle point, without which we do not con- 

 ceive accurately of either. Thus we have male and female, and that 

 middle or third term, man, in which the two are one. So also we 

 have the negative and the positive, and the relation between these op- 

 posites. We have the outside and the inside, and that one thing of 

 which we use these relative terms. We have, also, stem and leaf, and 

 the plant of which these are the essential parts. 



Following three we have^we as the next great typical number ; and 

 next to this, and the last of the great and universal numbers, is seven. 

 Carry our investigation where we will, these numbers follow each 

 other in numerical progression. But our observations must for the 

 present be confined to the vegetable kingdom. ' 



