on the Dearborn balance, as they
passed the hay scales, you could predict with certainty which party would
carry it. On the whole, it would be rather the speediest way of deciding
the vote, to put the selectmen or the mayor and aldermen at the hayscales.

In science, we have to consider two things: power and circumstance. All we
know of the egg, from each successive discovery, is, _another vesicle_;
and if, after five hundred years, you get a better observer, or a better
glass, he finds within the last observed another. In vegetable and animal
tissue, it is just alike, and all that the primary power or spasm
operates, is, still, vesicles, vesicles. Yes--but the tyrannical
Circumstance! A vesicle in new circumstances, a vesicle lodged in
darkness, Oken thought, became animal; in light, a plant. Lodged in the
parent animal, it suffers changes, which end in unsheathing miraculous
capability in the unaltered vesicle, and it unlocks itself to fish, bird,
or quadruped, head and foot, eye and claw. The Circumstance is Nature.
Nature is, what you may do. There is much you may not. We have two
things--the circumstance, and the life. Once we thought, positive power
was all. Now we learn, that negative power, or circumstance, is half.
Nature is the tyrannous circumstance, the thick skull, the sheathed snake,
the ponderous, rock-like jaw; necessitated activity; violent direction;
the conditions of a tool, like the locomotive, strong enough on its track,
but which can do nothing but mischief off it; or skates, which are wings
on the ice, but fetters on the ground.

The book of Nature is the book of Fate. She turns the gigantic pages--leaf
after leaf--never re-turning one. One leaf she lays down, a floor of
granite; then a thousand ages, and a bed of slate; a thousand ages, and a
measure of coal; a thousand ages, and a layer of marl and mud; vegetable
forms appear; her first misshapen animals, zoophyte, trilobium, fish,
then, saurians--rude forms, in which she has only blocked her future
statue, concealing under these unwieldy monsters the fine type of her
coming king. The face of the planet cools and dries, the races meliorate,
and man is born. But when a race has lived its term, it comes no more
again.

The population of the world is a conditional population; not the best, but
the best that could live now; and the scale of tribes, and the steadiness
with which victory adheres to one tribe, and defeat to another, is as
uniform as