the makers of tools; the inventor of decimal notation; the geometer;
the engineer; musician,--severally make an easy way for all, through
unknown and impossible confusions. Each man is, by secret liking,
connected with some district of nature, whose agent and interpreter
he is, as Linnaeus, of plants; Huber, of bees; Fries, of lichens; Van
Mons, of pears; Dalton, of atomic forms; Euclid, of lines; Newton, of
fluxions.

A man is a center for nature, running out threads of relation through
everything, fluid and solid, material and elemental. The earth rolls;
every clod and stone comes to the meridian; so every organ, function,
acid, crystal, grain of dust, has its relation to the brain. It waits
long, but its turn comes. Each plant has its parasite, and each created
thing its lover and poet. Justice has already been done to steam, to
iron, to wood, to coal, to loadstone, to iodine, to corn, and cotton;
but how few materials are yet used by our arts! The mass of creatures
and of qualities are still hid and expectant. It would seem as if each
waited, like the enchanted princess in fairy tales, for a destined
human deliverer. Each must be disenchanted, and walk forth to the day
in human shape. In the history of discovery, the ripe and latent truth
seems to have fashioned a brain for itself. A magnet must be made man,
in some Gilbert, or Swedenborg, or Oersted, before the general mind
can come to entertain its powers.

If we limit ourselves to the first advantages;--a sober grace adheres
to the mineral and botanic kingdoms, which, in the highest moments,
comes up as the charm of nature,--the glitter of the spar, the sureness
of affinity, the veracity of angles. Light and darkness, heat and cold,
hunger and food, sweet and sour, solid, liquid, and gas, circle us
round in a wreath of pleasures, and, by their agreeable quarrel, beguile