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We begin then by examining the general rules which the Creator seems
to have prescribed to His own operations. We ask, in the first place,
whether He is wont, so far as we know, to employ a great multitude
of materials, patterns, and forces, or whether He has seen fit to
accomplish many different ends by the employment of a few of these only.
In all our studies of external nature, the tendency of increasing
knowledge has uniformly been to show that the rules of creation are
simplicity of material, economy of inventive effort, and thrift in the
expenditure of force. All the endless forms in which matter presents
itself to us, are resolved by chemistry into some three-score supposed
simple substances, some of these perhaps being only modifications of the
same element. The shapes of beasts and birds, of reptiles and fishes,
vary in every conceivable degree; yet a single vertebra is the pattern
and representation of the framework of them all, from eels to elephants.
The identity reaches still further,--across a mighty gulf of being,--but
bridges it over with a line of logic as straight as a sunbeam, and as
indestructible as the scymitar-edge that spanned the chasm, in the fable
of the Indian Hades. Strange as it may sound, the tail which the serpent
trails after him in the dust, and the head of Plato, were struck in the
die of the same primitive conception, and differ only in their special
adaptation to particular ends.
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