James Smith, Knight, Ellis, and others,—what is botany at this present hour? Little more than an enormous nomenclature; a huge catalogue, well arranged, and yearly and monthly augmented, in various editions, each with its own scheme of technical memory and its own conveniences of reference. A dictionary in which (to carry on the me taphor) an Ainsworth arranges the contents by the initials; a Walker by the endings; a Scapula by the radicals; and a Cominius by the fimilarity of the uses and purposes. The terms system, method, science, are mere improprieties of courtesy, when applied to a mass enlarging by endless appofitions, but without a nerve that ofcillates, or a pulse that throbs, in fign of growth or inward fympathy. The innocent amusement, the healthful occupation, the ornamental accomplishment of amateurs (moft honourable indeed and deferving of all praise as a preventive substitute for the stall, the kennel, and the subscription-room), it has yet to expect the devotion and energies of the philofopher.

So long back as the first appearance of Dr. Darwin's Phytologia, I, then * in earliest manhood, prefumed to hazard the opinion, that the phyfiological botanists were hunting in a false direction, and fought for analogy where they should have looked for antithefis. I faw, or thought I faw, that the harmony between the vegetable and

fation végétale. 1805. Elémens de phyfiologie végétale et de botanique. 1815.—Ed.

* 1801. The Zoonomia was published in 1793.-Ed.

animal world, was not a harmony of resemblance, but of contraft; and that their relation to each other was that of correfponding oppofites. They seemed to me, whose mind had been formed by observation, unaided, but at the same time unenthralled, by partial experiment, as two ftreams from the fame fountain indeed, but flowing the one due weft, and the other direct east, and that confequently, 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 moft perfect vegetable, and the lowest and rudest animal forms, ought to have feemed the links of the two systems, which is contrary to fact. Since that time, the fame idea has dawned in the minds. of philofophers capable of demonftrating its objective truth by induction of facts in an unbroken feries of correfpondences in nature. From these men, or from minds enkindled by their labours, we may 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 fplendid proof, that with the knowledge of law alone dwell power and prophecy, decifive experiment, and, laftly, a scientific method, that dif fipating with its earliest rays the gnomes of hypothefis and the mists of theory may, within a fingle generation, open out on the philofophic feer difcoveries that had baffled the gigantic, but blind and guideless, industry of ages.

Such, too, is the cafe with the affumed 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 philofopher, whatever his theory may be, is inftinctively 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 diverfity of forms, with a feeling resembling that which accompanies our endeavours 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,"* fuggeft each the other to Shakespeare's Thefeus, as soon as his thoughts present to him the one form, of which they are but varieties; fo water and flame, the diamond, the charcoal, and the mantling champagne, with its ebullient sparkles, are convoked and fraternized by the theory of the chemift. This is, in truth, the first charm of chemistry, and the secret of the almost universal intereft excited by its difcoveries. The serious complacency which is afforded by the sense of truth, utility, permanence, and progreffion, blends with and ennobles the exhilarating surprise and the pleasurable sting of curiosity, which accompany the propounding and the folving of an

* Midf. Night's Dream, act v. fc. 1.-Ed.

enigma. It is the fenfe of a principle of connection given by the mind, and fanctioned by the correfpondency of nature. Hence the ftrong hold which in all ages chemistry has had on the imagination If in Shakespeare we find nature idealized into poetry, through the creative power of a profound yet obfervant meditation, so through the meditative obfervation of a Davy, a Wollafton, or a Hatchett;

By fome connatural force,

Powerful at greatest distance to unite
With fecret amity things of like kind,

we find poetry, as it were, fubftantiated and realized in nature,-yea, nature itself disclosed to us, geminam iftam naturam, quæ fit et facit, et creat et creatur, as at once the poet and the poem.

ESSAY VII.

Ταυτῇ τοινῦν διαίρω χῶρις μὲν, οἷς νῦν δὴ ἔλεγες Φιλοθεάμονάς τε, καὶ φιλοτέχνους, καὶ πρακτίκους, καὶ χῶρις αὖ περὶ ὧν ὁ λόγος, οἷς μόνους ἀν τὶς ὄρθως προσείποι φιλοσόφους, ὡς μὲν γιγνώσκοντας, τίνος ἔςιν ἐπισήμη ἑκάςη πούτων τῶν ἐπισήμων, ὁ τυγχάνει ὄν ἄλλο αὐτῆς τῆς ἐπιςήμης· PLATO.

In the following then I diftinguish, first, those whom you indeed may call philotheorifts, or philotechnifts, or practi-. cians, and fecondly thofe whom alone you may rightly denominate philofophers, as knowing what the fcience of all these branches of science is, which may prove to be fomething more than the mere aggregate of the knowledges in any particular science.

ROM Shakespeare to Plato, from the philofophic poet to the poetic philosopher, the transition is eafy, and the

road is crowded with illuftrations of our present subject. For of Plato's works, the: larger and more valuable portion have all one common end, which comprehends and shines through the particular purpose of each several dialogue; and this is to establish the sources, to evolve the principles, and exemplify the art of method. This is the clue, without which it would be difficult to exculpate the nobleft productions of the divine. philofopher from the charge of being tortuous and labyrinthine in their progress, and unfatisfactory in