The signs that substance and its states give of intrinsic nature and use, or the connection of configuration and function, are not understood as we understand the symbols of arithmetic, and the words of artificial language; that is, the symbols of our own creation answer to the ideas they are intended for, but the signs of the universal physiognomy of nature are neither comprehended fully, nor translated even to the extent that they are understood, into the formulæ of science and the words of oral language. Many of them are telegraphed in dumb show to our instincts, to the great enlargement of our converse with nature, both sentient and inanimate; but still a vast territory of knowledge lies beyond the rendering of our intuitions, and remains yet unexplored by our understanding; a dark domain that has not been brought under any rule of science, nor yielded its due tribute to the monarch mind. We have no dictionary that shows the inherent signification of a cube, a hexagon, an octagon, circle, ellipse, or cylinder; no tables of multiplication, addition, subtraction, and division, which, dealing in forms and their equivalents, might afford the products, quotients, and remainders of their various differences and interminglings with each other. States, qualities, and attitudes of structure, contribute much of that natural language by which we converse with the animal world beneath us, and with the angel world within us, but it remains as yet instinctual, except so far only as the fine arts have brought it out of the intuitive and oracular into rule and calculation, nor have we any methodic calculus, universally available, by which these revelations of nature may be rendered into demonstrative truth ruled by scientific method. It is conceivable that the form of every natural being is a full report of its constitution and use, but as yet, tedious and dubious chemical analysis, observation, and experiment are our directory to the hidden truth. In some things it is otherwise. We know perfectly a passion or emotion, and the meaning of the attitudes, colors, and forms of limb, person and feature which denote them; and the interior qualities of texture, also, as they are intimated to the sight and touch, lead us without reasoning, to definitive judgments of human character. Of animals, in their degree, we receive similar impressions and with equal conviction, but we know so little more about these things, than that we know them, that we can make no advantage of such knowledge beyond its most immediate purpose in our commerce with the living beings which surround us. It remains, therefore, for mind to explore the philosophy of form, that all which lies implied in it, waiting but still undiscovered, may come out into use, and all that we instinctively possess of it may take a scientific method, and so render the service of a law thoroughly understood.