“It consoles me to find, as I contemplate the whole of organized nature, that it is not in the power of any one personage, whether statesman or hero, to produce by his ill employed activity, so much misery as might have been supposed. Thus, if a Russian army, in these insane times, after having endured a laborious march of many hundred miles, is destroyed by a French army, in defence of their republic, what has happened? Forty thousand human creatures, dragged from their homes and connexions, cease to exist, and have manured the earth; but the quantity of organized matter, of which they were composed, presently revives in the forms of millions of microscopic animals, vegetables, and insects, and afterwards of quadrupeds and men; the sum of whose happiness is, perhaps, greater than that of the harrassed soldier, by whose destruction they have gained their existence! Is not this a consoling idea to a mind of universal sympathy? I fear you will think me a misanthrope, but I assure you a contrary sensation dwells in my bosom; and though I commiserate the evils of all organized beings, “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.”” Phytologia, p. 558.
Are swept by pestilence and dearth.
Last words of Dr Darwin. I take no small credit to myself, for being one of the first to bring into notice the latest and the most sublime of this sublime philosopher’s sublime speculations. The fountain from which this radiant stream of illumination flows is denominated, among booksellers, The Temple of Nature.
To paint all the writer’s conceptions of the mansion of that old lady, and her own most singular qualifications, would be a task even beyond the abilities of a Caustic. Mr Fuseli, however, has painted, his conceptions on the occasion, which in one of his designs, appear, so far as I can comprehend him, to be simply these:—In his frontispiece to the work, he represents one beautiful lady pointing at, or rather fumbling about, (somewhat indecently, I must confess) a middle or third breast of another beautiful lady, whom I suppose to be Dame Nature;
Than which there’s nothing can be apter
To fill philosophers with rapture.
This third breast I take to be the painter’s emblem of the discoveries of Dr Darwin—implying that their existence is as evident as that a woman has three breasts. But, not to digress; the doctor ascertains that
“Human progenies, if unrestrain’d,
By climate friended, and by food sustained