from every breath of heaven, unless previously tempered with luxurious warmth, and impregnated with the perfumes of the east? Have we weakened our intellectual faculties, and brutalized our moral feelings, by habitual inebriation; abusing that gift of Heaven, which was intended as a restoration of exhausted nature? Instead of simply satisfying the calls of hunger by plain and moderate diet, have we provoked and pampered the appetite by all the luxuries which the animal and vegetable kingdoms can supply, till at length all appetite has been destroyed; pain and disease have been induced; the human form and feature have been lost under a mass of loathsomeness and corruption; and death, long wished for, yet dreaded, has arrived at last ? we shall awake hereafter in another world, but in unaltered misery; without the hope of any second offer of release from the impurity and everlasting punishment of sin.

Or, to refer to the intellectual part of our nature, in contemplating for instance the starry firmament, and in calculating the unerring motions of the heavenly bodies, have we been content to characterise the certainty and regularity of those motions as the result of necessity, or of the laws of an undefined agent called nature? And in thus failing to acknowledge explicitly the Author of those laws, though not indeed formally denying his existence, have we, like

the nations of old, worshipped the creature, rather than the Creator; and bowed down our knee, as it were, to the host of heaven?-we may in that case hereafter suffer the penalty of our intellectual pride, in a mode severely just. The mind, which in this life failed to exercise its highest functions by adoring the Deity in the contemplation of his works, may be forbidden to extend the exercise of those functions in the next; and, while it looks back with unutterable torment to the forfeited pleasures of its former state, may be condemned, with torment infinitely increased, to expatiate eternally through new fields of knowledge, without the capability of even putting the sickle to the boundless harvest which they present.

But if, happily, we have pursued a wiser course; if, with Newton, we have delighted to deduce from the contemplation of the mechanism of the heavenly bodies the power of Him who made them, and who alone sustains and directs their motions; we may, and with faculties infinitely expanded, cultivate with him the same pure pleasures, which even on earth abstracted his desires from earthly wants; and, enraptured with the harmonious movements of those endless systems, which neither our present organs can see, nor our present faculties apprehend, we may continue to be constantly acquiring new knowledge, constantly absorbed

in new wonder and adoration of that Power, from whom, both in this world, and in that which is to come, all knowledge, and every other good and perfect gift are alone derived.

APPENDIX.

HAVING considered in the preceding pages the general opinions of Aristotle respecting the physiology and classification of animals, I propose in this Appendix to make a selection from his descriptions of some natural groups and individual species of animals, for the purpose of comparing them with the corresponding descriptions of Cuvier; confining myself, however, exclusively to the mammalia, which constitute the first class of vertebrated animals. And, as an introduction to that selection, I shall prefix a comparative view of the observations of the same two authors on some points connected with the general physiology of animals; presenting the whole in the form of two parallel columns, as the most convenient mode of exhibiting the comparison. In each column I shall endeavour to give a free but faithful translation of the original passages, followed by the original passages themselves a.

However extensive may have been the information of the ancients in that department of natural science which is now under consideration; and however capable a mind like that of Aristotle must have been of deducing general conclusions from a systematic examination of facts, sufficiently numerous and various, for the purpose of effecting a natural classification of animals, it could not reasonably be expected that, antecedently to the knowledge of the circulation of the blood, and of the true character of respiration, and also of

a In order to abridge as much as possible the number and length of the extracts, I have occasionally merely stated a conclusion drawn from several separate paragraphs. In such instances I must claim credit for having rightly understood, and fairly represented, the context.