hunting in a false direction; and sought for analogy where they should have looked for antithesis. He saw, or thought he saw, that the harmony between the vegetable and animal world, was not a harmony of resemblance, but of contrast; and their relation to each other that of corresponding opposites. They seemed to him (whose mind had been formed by observation, unaided, but at the same time unenthralled, by partial experiment) as two streams from the same fountain indeed, but flowing the one due west, and the other direct east; and that consequently, the resemblance would be as the proximity, greatest in the first and rudimental products of vegetable and animal organization. Whereas, according to the received notion, the highest and most perfect vegetable, and the lowest and rudest animal forms, ought to have seemed the links of the two systems, which is contrary to fact. Since that time, the same idea has dawned in the minds of philosophers capable of demonstrating its objective truth by induction of facts in an unbroken series of correspondences in nature. From these men, or from minds en kindled by their labours, we hope hereafter to receive it, or rather the yet higher idea to which it refers us, matured into laws of organic nature; and thence to have one other splendid proof, that with the knowledge of LAW alone dwell Power and Prophecy, decisive Experiment, and, lastly, a scientific method, that dissipating with its earliest rays the gnomes of hypothesis and the mists of theory may, within a single generation, open out on the philosophic Seer discoveries that had baffled the gigantic, but blind and guideless industry of ages. Such, too, is the case with the assumed indecomponible substances of the LABORATORY. They are the symbols of elementary powers, and the exponents of a law, which, as the root of all these powers, the chemical philosopher, whatever his theory may be, is instinctively labouring to extract. This instinct, again, is itself but the form, in which the idea, the mental Correlative of the law, first announces its incipient germination in his own mind: and hence proceeds the striving after unity of principle through all the diversity of forms, with a feel ing resembling that which accompanies our endeavors to recollect a forgotten name; when we seem at once to have and not to have it; which the memory feels but cannot find. Thus, as "the lunatic, the lover, and the poet," suggest each other to Shakspeare's Theseus, as soon as his thoughts present him the One FORM, of which they are but varieties; so water and flame, the diamond, the charcoal, and the mantling champagne, with its ebullient sparkles, are convoked and fraternized by the theory of the chemist. This is, in truth, the first charm of chemistry, and the secret of the almost universal interest excited by its discoveries. The serious complacency which is afforded by the sense of truth, utility, permanence, and progression, blends with and ennobles the exhilirating surprize and the pleasurable sting of curiosity, which accompany the propounding and the solving of an Enigma. It is the sense of a principle of connection given by the mind, and sanctioned by the correspondency of nature. Hence the strong hold which in all ages chemistry has had on the imagination. If in SHAKSPEARE we find nature idealized into poetry, through the creative power of a profound yet observant meditation, so through the meditative observation of a DAVY, a WOOLLASTON, or a HATCHETT; "By some connatural force, Powerful at greatest distance to unite we find poetry, as it were, substantiated and realized in nature: yea, nature itself disclosed to us, GEMINAM istam naturam, quæ fit et facit, et creal et creatur, as at once the poet and the poem! ESSAY VI. Ταυτῇ τοινῦν διαίρω χῶρις μὲν, οἷς νῦν δὴ ἔλεγες φιλοθεάμονάς τε, καὶ φιλοτέχνους καὶ πρακτίκους, καὶ χῶρις αὖ πέρι ὧν ὁ λόγος, οἷς μόνους ἀν τὶς ἔρθως προσείποι φιλοσόφους, ὡς μὲν γιγνωσκάντας, τίνος ἔτιν ἐπιτήμη ἐκάση τούτων τῶν ἐπισήμων, ὁ τυγχάνει ἄν ἄλλο αὐτῆς τῆς επισήμης. ΠΛΑΤΩΝ. (Translation.)-In the following then I distinguish, first, those whom you indeed you may call Philotheorists, or Philotechnists, or Practicians, and secondly those whom alone you may rightly denominate PHILOSOPHERS, as knowing what the science of all these branches of science is, which may prove to be something more than the mere aggregate of the knowledges in any particular science.-PLATO. FROM Shakspeare to Plato, from the philosophic poet to the poetic philosopher, the transition is easy, and the road is crowded with illustrations of our present subject. For of Plato's works, the larger and more valuable portion have all one common end, which com |