t 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. Again, the study of the movements of the
universe has led us, from their complex phenomena, to the few simple
forces from which they flow. The falling apple and the rolling planet
are shown to obey the same tendency. The stick of sealing-wax which
draws a feather to it, is animated by the same impulse that convulses
the stormy heavens. These generalizations have simplified our view of
the grandest material operations, yet we do not feel that creative power
and wisdom have been shorn of any single ray, by the demonstrations of
Newton, or of Franklin. On the contrary, the larger the collection of
seemingly heterogeneous facts we can bring under the rule of a single
formula, the nearer we feel that we have reached towards the source
of knowledge, and the more perfectly we trace the little arc of
the immeasurable circle which comes within the range of our hasty
observations, at first like the broken fragments of a many-sided
polygon, but at last as a simple curve which encloses all we know, or
can know, of nature. To our own intellectual wealth, the gain is like
that of the over-burdened traveller, who should exchange hundred-weights
of iron for ounces of gold. Evanescent, formless, unstable, impalpable,
a fog of uncondensed experiences hovers over our consciousness like an
atmosphere of uncombined gases. One spark of genius