necessary description, I shall refer to the passages by the
numbers affixed to them, for that purpose, in the margin.

In reply to No. 1, I ask whether, in the nature of the mind, illustration
and explanation must not of necessity proceed from the lower to the
higher? or whether a boy is to be taught his addition, subtraction,
multiplication, and division, by the highest branches of algebraic
analysis? Is there any better way of systematic teaching, than that of
illustrating each new step, or having each new step illustrated to him by
its identity in kind with the step the next below it? though it be the
only mode in which this objection can be answered, yet it seems affronting
to remind the objector, of rules so simple as that the complex must even
be illustrated by the more simple, or the less scrutible by that which is
more subject to our examination.

In reply to No. 2, I first refer to the author's eulogy on Mr. Hunter, p.
163, in which he is justly extolled for having "surveyed the whole
_system_ of organized beings, from plants to man:" of course, therefore,
_as_ a _system_; and therefore under some _one common law_. Now in the
very same sense, and no other, than that in which the writer himself by
implication compares himself as a man to the _dermestes typographicus_, or
the _fucus scorpioides_, do I compare the principle of Life to magnetism,
electricity, and constructive affinity,--or rather to that power to which
the two former are the thesis and antithesis, the latter the synthesis.
But if to compare involve the sense of its etymon, and involve the sense
of parity, I utterly deny that I do at all compare them; and, in truth, in
no conceivable sense of the word is it applicable, any more than a
geometrician can be affirmed to compare a polygon to a point, because he
generates the line out of the point. The writer attributes to a philosophy
essentially vital the barrenness of the mechanic system, with which alone
his imagination has been familiarised, and which, as hath been justly
observed by a contemporary writer, is contradistinguished from the former
principally in this respect; that demanding for every mode and act of
existence real or possible visibility, it knows only of distance and
nearness, composition (or rather compaction) and decomposition, in short,
the relations of unproductive particles to each other; so that in every
instance the result is the exact sum of the component qualities, as in
arithm