"Old House, hush up! Why do you talk stuff? 'Golden memories' indeed! To hear you, one might suppose you were an ivied castle on the Rhine, and I a fair-haired princess, cradled in the depths of regal luxury, feeding on the blossoms of a thousand generations, and heroic from inborn royalty. 'Tender care'! Did you not wake me in the middle of the night, last summer, by trickling down water on my face from a passing shower? and did I not have to get up at that unearthly hour to move the bed, and step splash into a puddle, and come very near being floated away? Did not the water drip, drip, drip upon my writing-desk, and soak the leather and swell the wood, and stain the ribbon and spoil the paper inside, and all because you were treacherous at the roof and let it? Have you not made a perfect rattery of yourself, yawning at every possible chink and crumbling at the underpinning, and keeping me awake night after night by the tramp of a whole brigade of the Grand Army that slaughtered Bishop Hatto? Whenever a breeze comes along stout enough to make an aspen-leaf tremble, don't you immediately go into hysterics, and rock, and creak, and groan, as if you were the shell of an earthquake? Don't you shrivel at every window to let in the northeasters and all the snow-storms that walk abroad? Whenever a needle, or a pencil, or a penny drops, don't you open somewhere and take it in? 'Golden memories'! Leaden memories! Wooden memories! Madden memories!"
My savage gave a war-whoop. I turned scornfully. I swept down the staircase. I banged the front-door. I locked it with an accent, and marched up the hill. A soft sighing breathed past me. I knew it was the old house mourning for her departing child. The sun had disappeared, but the western sky was jubilant in purple and gold. The cool evening calmed me. The echoes of the war-whoop vibrated almost tenderly along the hushed hillside. I paused on the summit of the hill and looked back. Down in the valley stood the sorrowful house, tasting the first bitterness of perpetual desolation. The maples and the oaks and the beech-trees hung out their flaming banners. The pond lay dark in the shadow of the circling hills. The years called to me,—the happy, sun-ripe years that I had left tangled in the apple-blossoms, and moaning among the pines, and tinkling in the brook, and floating in the cups of the water-lilies. They looked up at me from the orchard, dark and cool. They thrilled across from the hill-tops, glowing still with the glowing sky. I heard their voice by the lilac-bush. They smiled at me under the peach-trees, and where the blackberries had ripened against the southern wall. I felt them once more in the clover-smells and the new-mown hay. They swayed again in the silken tassels of the crisp, rustling corn. They hummed with the bees in the garden-borders. They sang with the robins in the cherry-trees, and their tone was tender and passing sweet. They besought me not to cast away their memory for despite of the black-browed troop whose vile and sombre robes had mingled in with their silver garments. They prayed me to forget, but not all. They minded me of the sweet counsel we had taken together, when summer came over the hills and walked by the watercourses. They bade me remember the good tidings of great joy which they had brought me when my eyes were dim with unavailing tears. My lips trembled to their call. The war-whoop chanted itself into a vesper. A happy calm lifted from my heart and quivered out over the valley, and a comfort settled on the sad old house as I stretched forth my hands and from my inmost soul breathed down a Benedicite!
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METHODS OF STUDY IN NATURAL HISTORY.
It may seem to some of my readers that I have wandered from my subject and forgotten the title of these articles, which purport to be a series of papers on "Methods of Study in Natural History." But some idea of the progress of Natural History, of its growth as a science, of the gradual evolving of general principles out of a chaotic mass of facts, is a better aid to the student than direct instruction upon special modes of investigation; and it is with the intention of presenting the study of Natural History from this point of view that I have chosen my title.
I have endeavored thus far to show how scientific facts have been systematized so as to form a classification that daily grows more true to Nature, in proportion as its errors are corrected by a more intimate acquaintance with the facts; but I will now attempt a more difficult task, and try to give some idea of the mental process by which facts are transformed into scientific truth. I fear that the subject may seem very dry to my readers, and I would again ask their indulgence for details absolutely essential to my purpose, but which would indeed be very wearisome, did they not lead us up to an intelligent and most significant interpretation of their meaning.
I should be glad to remove the idea that science is the mere amassing of facts. It is true that scientific results grow out of facts, but not till they have been fertilized by thought The facts must be collected, but their mere accumulation will never advance the sum of human knowledge by one step;—it is the comparison of facts and their transformation into ideas that lead to a deeper insight into the significance of Nature. Stringing words together in incoherent succession does not make an intelligible sentence; facts are the words of God, and we may heap them together endlessly, but they will teach us little or nothing till we place them in their true relations and recognize the thought that binds them together as a consistent whole.
I have spoken of the plans that lie at the foundation of all the variety of the Animal Kingdom as so many structural ideas which must have had an intellectual existence in the Creative Conception independently of any special material expression of them. Difficult though it be to present these plans as pure abstract formulae, distinct from the animals that represent them, I would nevertheless attempt to do it, in order to show how the countless forms of animal life have been generalized into the few grand, but simple intellectual conceptions on which all the past populations of the earth as well as the present creation are founded. In such attempts to divest the thought of its material expression, especially when that expression is multiplied in such thousand-fold variety of form and color, our familiarity with living animals is almost an obstacle to our success. For I shall hardly be able to allude to the formula of the Radiates, for instance,—the abstract idea that includes all the structural possibilities of that division of the Animal Kingdom,—without recalling to my readers a Polyp or a Jelly-Fish, a Sea-Urchin or a Star-Fish. Neither can I present the structural elements of the Mollusk plan, without reminding them of an Oyster or a Clam, a Snail or a Cuttle-Fish,—or of the Articulate plan, without calling up at once the form of a Worm, a Lobster, or an Insect,—or of the Vertebrate plan, without giving it the special character of Fish, Reptile, Bird, or Mammal. Yet I insist that all living beings are but the different modes of expressing these formulae, and that all animals have, within the limits of their own branch of the Animal Kingdom, the same structural elements, though each branch is entirely distinct. If this be true, and if these organic formulae have the precision of mathematical formulae, with which I have compared them, they should be susceptible of the same tests.
The mathematician proves the identity of propositions that have the same mathematical value and significance by their convertibility. If they have the same mathematical quantities, it must be possible to transform them, one into another, without changing anything that is essential in either. The problem before us is of the same character. If, for instance, all Radiates, be they Sea-Anemones, Jelly-Fishes, Star-Fishes, or Sea-Urchins, are only various modes of expressing the same organic formula, each having the sum of all its structural elements, it should be possible to demonstrate that they are reciprocally convertible. This is actually the case, and I hope to be able to convince my readers that it is no fanciful theory, but may be demonstrated as clearly as the problems of the geometer. The naturalist has his mathematics, as well as the geometer and the astronomer; and if the mathematics of the Animal Kingdom have a greater flexibility than those of the positive sciences, and are therefore not so easily resolved into their invariable elements, it is because they have the freedom and pliability of life, and evade our efforts to bring all their external variety within the limits of the same structural law which nevertheless controls and includes them all.
I wish that I could take as the illustration of this statement animals with whose structure the least scientific of my readers might be presumed to be familiar; but such a comparison of the Vertebrates, showing the identity and relation of structural elements throughout the Branch, or even in any one of its Classes, would be too extensive and complicated, and I must resort to the Radiates,—that branch of the Animal Kingdom which, though less generally known, has the simplest structural elements.