whole _actual_ life of Nature originates in the existence,
and consists in the perpetual reconciliation, and as perpetual resurgency
of the primary contradiction, of which universal polarity is the result
and the exponent. From the first moment of the differential impulse--(the
primaeval chemical epoch of the Wernerian school)--when Nature, by the
tranquil deposition of crystals, prepared, as it were, the fulcrum of her
after-efforts, from this, her first, and in part _irrevocable_,
self-contraction, we find, in each ensuing production, more and more
tendency to independent existence in the increasing multitude of strata,
and in the relics of the lowest orders, first of vegetable and then of
animal life. In the schistous formations, which we must here assume as in
great measure the residua of vegetable creations, that have sunk back into
the universal life, and in the later predominant calcareous masses, which
are the _caput mortuum_ of animalized existence, we ascend from the laws
of attraction and repulsion, as united in gravity, to magnetism,
electricity, and constructive power, till we arrive at the point
representative of a new and far higher intensity. For from this point
flow, as in opposite directions, the two streams of vegetation and
animalization, the former characterised by the predominance of magnetism
in its highest power, as reproduction, the other by electricity
intensified--as irritability, in like manner. The vegetable and animal
world are the thesis and antithesis, or the opposite poles of organic
life. We are not, therefore, to seek in either for analogies to the other,
but for counterpoints. On the same account, the nearer the common source,
the greater the likeness; the farther the remove, the greater the
opposition. At the extreme limits of inorganic Nature, we may detect a dim
and obscure prophecy of her ensuing process in the twigs and rude
semblances that occur in crystallization of some of the copper ores, and
in the well-known _arbor Dianae_, and _arbor Veneris_. These latter Ritter
has already ably explained by considering the oblique branches and their
acute angles as the result of magnetic repulsion, from the presentation of
the same poles, &c. In the CORALS and CONCHYLIA, the whole act and purpose
of their existence seems to be that of connecting the animal with the
inorganic world by the perpetual formation of calcareous earth. For the
corals are nothing but polypi, which are characterised