198 



LETTERS ON TREES. 



13. Taking, then, the view we have done of man 

 and of his relations, — having regard to his rank in 

 the scale of being, and to the Hnks that bind him as 

 well to his Creator as to this earth and the organic 

 world therein, of which he forms a part, — viewing 

 him also as at least representing the highest of created 

 inteUigences, — and taking specially into account the 

 manifest uniformity in his plans observed by the 

 Creator, is it, let me ask, a vain imagination to sup- 

 pose that, in the constitution of the lower forms of 

 vegetable and animal life, which were made by Him 

 thousands, nay, millions of years before man. He, to 

 whom *^a thousand years are as one day," and who 



seeth the end from the beginning," should have 

 had an eye to the constitution of him whom He so 

 regarded, and has so highly exalted, and who, as an 

 organised being himself, was one day to occupy the 

 highest place in the organic world — and so have 

 carried into their constitution a plan or scheme of 

 organization befitting his, — befitting mind, — nay, not 

 mind merely, for the brutes have this, but reason — 

 that principle which, with its organ speech, has been 

 denied to the brutes, which is in itself divine, and 

 human only in that it has a place in man ? * 



14. The supposition seems to me both a reasonable 



* La raison est elle humaine, a parler rigour eusement, — ou 

 bien n'est elle humaine que par eela seulement qu' elle fait son 

 apparition dans Thomme ?" — Victor Cousin, Introduction a V 

 Histoire de la PMlosophie. And as to speech being a divinely 



