108 Des Moulins on the genera Unto and Anodonta. 



This saying is true ; observe its justness from kingdom to king- 

 dom ; behold the close connexion of the mineral with the vegetable 

 kingdom, in those innumerable crystals which form thelnicro- 

 scopic quasi skeleton of the stem of the Cactcea, and of so many 

 other plants ; behold it also, though in a different form, in those 

 Chara, so dehcate as to be always protected by a stony covering ; 

 observe the relation between the mineral and the animal king- 

 doms, in those curious madrepores, of which the frame- work, en- 

 tirely mineral, is secreted by a feeble living jelly; behold, finally, 

 that of the animal with the vegetable kingdom, in those corals 

 which unite the essential composition of the former with the flex- 

 ibility and the appearance of the laws of growth of the latter : 

 Natura non facit saltum. 



Let us proceed, and this maxim will shed more light. It is not 

 a simple line of junction that marks the boundary between the 

 inorganic and the two organic kingdoms ; they go even to a su- 

 perposition, or if I may invent a term to express my idea, to a 

 superaddition, so constant as to form one of the essential laws of 

 the physical world. Nothing is purely animal, nothing is purely 

 vegetable, since every organic substance is reduced, by analysis, 

 to inorganic elements. The mineral or inorganic kingdom is,' 

 then, the primary matter of the physical world— matter which 

 Its Creator has set in action and modified by superadding other 

 principles entirely foreign to it : Natura 7ion facit saltum. 



But observe, gentlemen, this wonderful concatenation : the in- 

 organic kingdom, which enters into the composition of all phys- 

 ical things, is subject to all universal laws, and is limited by 

 one only of those which govern more complicated creatures : 

 MiNERALiA CREscuNT ; behold the basis of the physical world. 

 God works, and superadds the principle of vegetable life, hidden 

 from our feeble intellect: Vegetabilia Crescunt et vivunt. 

 God works again, but in another direction, and superadds the 

 principle still more mysterious and sublime, of animal life, of 

 sensation, of volition : Animalia crescunt, vivunt et sentient. 

 Here you still perceive, Natura non facit saltum. 



The naturalist stops here ; he stops where stopt the mind of 

 the great classifier of material things, at the bound which neces- 

 sarily limited the extent of his immortal maxim. Linnsus, after 

 having borrowed, almost in very phrase from Saint Augustine, 

 the first three terms of this divinely instituted magnificent pro- 



^ 



