ping after intestinal parasites, or infusory biters, or the obscurities
of alternate generation;--the forms of the shark, the _labrus_, the jaw of
the sea-wolf paved with crushing teeth, the weapons of the grampus, and
other warriors hidden in the sea--are hints of ferocity in the interiors
of nature. Let us not deny it up and down. Providence has a wild, rough,
incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its
huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in
a clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student in divinity.

Will you say, the disasters which threaten mankind are exceptional, and
one need not lay his account for cataclysms every day? Ay, but what
happens once, may happen again, and so long as these strokes are not to be
parried by us, they must be feared.

But these shocks and ruins are less destructive to us than the stealthy
power of other laws which act on us daily. An expense of ends to means is
fate--organization tyrannizing over character. The menagerie, or forms and
powers of the spine, is a book of fate: the bill of the bird, the skull of
the snake, determines tyrannically its limits. So is the scale of races,
of temperaments; so is sex; so is climate; so is the reaction of talents
imprisoning the vital power in certain directions. Every spirit makes its
house; but afterwards the house confines the spirit.

The gross lines are legible to the dull: the cabman is phrenologist so
far: he looks in your face to see if his shilling is sure. A dome of brow
denotes one thing; a pot-belly another; a squint, a pug-nose, mats of
hair, the pigment of the epidermis, betray character. People seem sheathed
in their tough organization. Ask Spurzheim, ask the doctors, ask Quetelet,
if temperaments decide nothing? or if there be anything they do not
decide? Read the description in medical books of the four temperaments,
and you will think you are reading your own thoughts which you had not yet
told. Find the part which black eyes, and which blue eyes, play severally
in the company. How shall a man escape from his ancestors, or draw off
from his veins the black drop which he drew from his father's or his
mother's life? It often appears in a family, as if all the qualities of
the progenitors were potted in several jars--some ruling quality in each
son or daughter of the house--and sometimes the unmixed temperament, the
rank unmitigated elixir, the family vice, is drawn off