248 
WILD SCENES AND SONG-BIRDS. 
and fly in embodied shapes. He sees that these are not to 
be studied amidst the dwarfed forms and abject vices of the 
human distortion thronging in cities — but here, amidst the 
freshness of green solitudes, he can readily read the simple 
passions separately in the Lion, Eagle, Wolf, Vulture, Hart 
and Dove — while their laws would be studied through infi- 
nite complexities were they sought for when the same pas- 
sions are combined in the diseased social man. 
It is his mission to reform his race by exalting it ; and to 
do this, he must create for it the noblest models. The old 
mother leads him thus apart, to teach him that he cannot 
paint these passions without a knowledge of their original 
laws — until he has traced them through their simple forms 
up to their complex and blended expression in man. 
Thus in crystallization, she shows him the primitive sym- 
metries — the first natural arrangement of particles into har* 
monious forms — in stratification the natural arrangement of 
these primitive forms in the structure of Earth, metals and 
the universe, as determined by the law of forces or gravita- 
tion — in vegetation the ancient story of man, the passive 
embryo, in the Arboreal form which the plastic energy as- 
sumes first, and holds forever as the order of life — in the 
reptile, man slowly warming into vital activity, blind amidst 
the huge vegetation of a semifluid chaos — in the fish, man 
advanced to a purer, but still gross element, obeying the 
electric impulse of the vital fluid in straight lines — in the 
insect, the state and struggle of transitions — in the animal, 
perfection of physical organization with the circulating fluid 
reddened by the intensity of vital or generative heat — man, 
the earth-crawler, and the brute ! — in the bird, this earth- 
crawling animal on wings — a spurner of limits, a dweller of 
the pure ether, soaring towards the stars, and propelled in 
curved lines, to typify the ascent on the Eternal Circle, to- 
wards the Life of God, which the man has now made in his 
new birth of wings ! 
Thus she teaches him that it is not as organization resem- 
