same union as that in which they began; to us every-day, science, not the sciences, becomes the true and proper word to express our studies in nature. We more and more come back to the simplicity of early thoughts; the age of distinctions and clear, sharp divisions is the middle age in the history of science; the youth and old age are times, not of distinctions, but of unity and identity. The infancy of the sciences is a time in which the elements are thought to be few; the forces that operate on them are conceived of as few likewise. In the middle ages, every thing tends to diversity and number; the minds of inquirers are occupied with the vast variety of substances, the vast variety of forces. But in still maturer age every thing tends to bring us back to the original simplicity of conception; we find the apparently numerous elements are but forms of a very few elements; the apparently numerous forces are but utterances of one or two primary forces. Again, the infancy of the sciences knows of no distinction between things spiritual and things physical. In modern times, we are wont to regard these two classes of things as related by analogy; the ancients, at least the very earliest philosophers, thought of them as of one class and identical; and this difference in conception is often somewhat bewildering, and must ever be borne in mind, if we would enter into the meaning of their speculations. Now, without attempting here any proof of such a proposition, we think it may be fairly asserted that the course of modern discoveries tends to lead us to a more and more close connection of the spiritual and physical worlds-to make us believe that force, in whatever form, never is, nor can be, due to any thing but spirit. And does not this adult age of the world seem reproducing the speculations of the first dawn of philosophy? What are attraction and repulsion, under all their thousand forms, which play so large a part in modern science, but the pixía and veikos of Empedocles? Were not the atoms of Democritus a splendid dream, if nothing more, of Dalton's great discovery of the atomic theory? Did not Lucretius assert the existence of latent heat?* Did not Philolaus the Pythagorean maintain that the earth revolves round a central fire? and did not Heraclides and Ecphantus, whilst denying the local motion of the earth, assert it to have a rotatory movement round its own centre, like a wheel?+ And what are all the splendid speculations of Oken and Geoffroy and Goethe about the morphology of animals and plants but repetitions of Plato's theory of original forms? So truly are they such, that Owen, in summing up the subject, † Plut. de Placit, lib. iii. c. 13. *Lucret. i. 900. finds the simplest expression of the whole matter in a reference to the thoughts and the language of the old Greek. Surely these are not all mere fortuitous coincidences, but rather these old speculations have in them somewhat of intuition and insight. For it cannot be doubted that the mind of man is, in a sense, set over against nature; so that the thoughts of man have a tendency to run parallel with the creative thoughts of God, that is, with the facts of nature. If this were not so, we should have nothing but mere hap-hazard to guide us in our discoveries; we should find nothing of that intuitive insight into nature which is the only guide in all inductive experiments, the anticipatio nature of Lord Bacon; nothing of that intimate alliance between nature and genius which Schiller so well describes: "Mit dem Genius steht die Natur in ewigen Bunde; And as in the childhood of each man there are, amongst all his foolish and infantile thoughts, thoughts which in their simplicity and beauty seem more divine than the best thoughts of his graver years, so perhaps in the infancy of our race, amidst many idle and untrue dreams about science, there are some thoughts of nature that rise beyond the level of the more cautious period of exacter science, that seem more directly like shadows in the mind of man of thoughts in the Divine Mind. The first efforts, then, at exact observations in natural history, as distinguished from science at large, are not to be expected from the philosophers; they come from a different source, the poets and the travellers. Thus, in the Hebrew literature, we have in the book of Job those most poetic descriptions of the horse, of leviathan, and of behemoth, that in their force and beauty have never been excelled. In the Psalms, in the poetry of Solomon, and in the far loftier poetry of the Prophets, there are allusions of exquisite beauty to the trees, the flowers, and creatures of the Holy Land, which only want some one to do for them what Mr. Stanley has done for the geographical notices of the Bible to bring them to our minds with a greatly augmented vividness and reality. And as it is with the Jews, so it is with the Greeks; their poets give us their earliest materials in natural history: and the earlier amongst them perhaps even the most simply and most sincerely love and sing of natural things, not for association, not for metaphor, but for their own sake. Take Anacreon, for instance: how full he is of themes from nature! the rose, the pigeon, the swallow, the spring-tide, and the grasshopper, each claim a poem. And even when dealing with subjects remote from our present object, he shows the same familiarity with natural history; as, for instance, in his spiteful little verse about womankind, where he compares her beauty with the other means of defence which nature has given to other animals. By way of specimen, let us take the pretty little poem on the Grasshopper, which Cowper has neatly translated: "Happy songster, perched above, None thy pleasures can create. Harming neither herbs nor flowers. Or what can more perfectly describe the simple enjoyment of Nature than such lines as these? τί κάλλιόν ἐστι βαδίζειν It has been often said, and truly, that the great dramatic poets of Greece have but little of this feeling for nature and natural beauty in themselves; that their inspiration is drawn far more from the agora than from the fields, from the haunts of men than from the solitudes of nature. And so, when they do allude, as oftentimes they do, to the objects of natural history, it is generally in some relation or association with civil life or political history. Perhaps there are no lines in the Greek tragedy more justly celebrated for their beauty as a description of natural scenery and things than the chorus in the Edipus Coloneus of Sophocles, where the poet describes the glories of his own village home (668-719, edit. Dind.). Stranger, before thine eyes A land of noble steeds. Here the shrill nightingale Here, day by day, amid the dews, Blooms the narcissus, clustering fair, Wherewith the goddesses did use In elder times to wreathe their hair. The wandering of sleepless streams With current pure and strong His fruitful-making waves Cephissus pours along. The bands of Muses haunt the spot,- Of Aphrodite, with her reins of gold. And it was never told Of all the Asian land, Nor of the Dorian isle By Pelops ruled of old, Whereon the gods do smile,- The glorious tree of spears ;- To spring and flourish so joyously As here, the gray-leaved olive-tree, Whose fruit doth feed the little child. Sign of ruth and ruin wild, From hasty youth, or gray-haired age, By the all-seeing eye of Maurian Jove, And yet more remains to tell Of this mother-city's pride, Child of Chronos! such is she, Her to such prosperity. For was it not through thee That the mighty steed did feel First, in her streets, the taming curb of steel? And the oar, the mighty, the well-rowed oar, Hundred-footed, around its way." And yet how different is this from the verses of Anacreon, where the description of the natural object is enough in itself, is the end! Here it is only a mean towards other and dearer thoughts; so that the olive is loved, not for its light gray-green or its dark and gnarled stems, but as the mother of spears; the waves, not for their unnumbered smiles, their marvellous mysterious life, but as bearing the triumphant galleys of Poseidon's favourite city. Aristophanes would afford many a morsel to any one carefully searching into the natural history of the ancients; for whilst he made nature, like every thing else, subserve the purposes of his boundless humour, he yet looked on it with the eye of a true poet. The Birds, from the very necessity of its subject, affords many clues into the ornithology of the Greeks, and many a quaint observation on the habits of the feathered races. We cannot forbear the pleasure of quoting Mr. Frere's most Aristophanic translation of the Hoopoe's song, calling together the great council of the birds: it will at any rate serve to show how wide a range in ornithology the play extends over. |