, into the perfect flower, the various colours of which seem made
for the reflection of light, as the antecedent grade to the burnished
scales, and scale-like eyes of the insect. Nevertheless, with all this
seeming prodigality of organic power, the whole tendency is _ad extra_,
and the life of insects, as electricity in the quadrate, acts chiefly on
the superficies of their bodies, to which we may add the negative proof
arising from the absence of sensibility. It is well known, that the two
halves of a divided insect have continued to perform, or attempt, each
their separate functions, the trunkless head feeding with its accustomed
voracity, while the headless trunk has exhibited its appropriate
excitability to the sexual influence.

The intropulsive force, that sends the ossification inward as to the
centre, is reserved for a yet higher step, and this we find embodied in
the class of _fishes_. Even here, however, the process still seems
imperfect, and (as it were) initiatory. The skeleton has left the surface,
indeed, but the bones approach to the nature of gristle. To feel the truth
of this, we need only compare the most perfect bone of a fish with the
thigh-bones of the mammalia, and the distinctness with which the latter
manifest the co-presence of the _magnetic_ power in its solid parietes, of
the _electrical_ in its branching arteries, and of the third greatest
power, viz., the _qualitative_ and interior, in its marrow. The senses of
fish are more distinct than those of insects. Thus, the intensity of its
sense of smell has been placed beyond doubt, and rises in the extent of
its sphere far beyond the irritable sense, or the feeling, in insects. I
say the _feeling_, not the touch; for the touch seems, as it were, a
supervention to the feeling, a perfection _given_ to it by the reaction of
the higher powers. As the feeling of the insect, in subtlety and virtual
distance, rises above the solitary sense of taste(16) in the mollusca, so
does the smell of the fish rise above the feeling of the insect. In the
fish, likewise, the eyes are single and moveable, while it is remarkable
that the only insect that possesses this latter privilege, is an
inhabitant of the waters. Finally, here first, unequivocally, and on a
_large_ scale, (for I pretend not to control the freedom, in which the
necessity of Nature is rooted, by the precise limits of a system,)--here
first, Nature exhibits, in the power of sensibility, the consummati