The whole art of the plant is still to repeat leaf on leaf without
end, the more or less of heat, light, moisture, and food, determining
the form it shall assume. In the animal, nature makes a vertebra, or
a spine of vertebrae, and helps herself still by a new spine, with a
limited power of modifying its form,--spine on spine, to the end of
the world. A poetic anatomist, in our own day, teaches that a snake,
being a horizontal line, and man, being an erect line, constitute a
right angle; and, between the lines of this mystical quadrant, all
animate beings find their place; and he assumes the hair-worm, the
span-worm, or the snake, as the type of prediction of the spine.
Manifestly, at the end of the spine, nature puts out smaller spines,
as arms; at the end of the arms, new spines, as hands; at the other
end, she repeats the process, as legs and feet. At the top of the
column, she puts out another spine, which doubles or loops itself over,
as a span-worm, into a ball, and forms the skull, with extremities
again; the hands being now the upper jaw, the feet the lower jaw, the
fingers and toes being represented this time by upper and lower teeth.
This new spine is destined to high uses. It is a new man on the
shoulders of the last. It can almost shed its trunk, and manage to
live alone, according to the Platonic idea in the Timaeus. Within it,
on a higher plane, all that was done in the trunk repeats itself.
Nature recites her lesson once more in a higher mood. The mind is a
finer body, and resumes its functions of feeding, digesting, absorbing,
excluding, and generating, in a new and ethereal element. Here, in the
brain, is all the process of alimentation repeated, in the acquiring,
comparing, digesting, and assimilating of experience. Here again is
the mystery of generation repeated. In the brain are male and female
faculties; here is marriage, here is fruit. And there is no limit to
this ascending scale, but series on series. Everything, at the end of
one use, is taken up into the next, each series punctually repeating