It is in the stomach of plants that development begins, and ends in the circles of the universe. ’Tis a long scale from the gorilla to the gentleman--from the gorilla to Plato, Newton, Shakspeare--to the sanctities of religion, the refinements of legislation, the summits of science, art and poetry. The beginnings are slow and infirm, but it is an always-accelerated march. The geologic world is chronicled by the growing ripeness of the strata from lower to higher, as it becomes the abode of more highly-organized plants and animals. The civil history of men might be traced by the successive meliorations as marked in higher moral generalizations;--virtue meaning physical courage, then chastity and temperance, then justice and love;--bargains of kings with peoples of certain rights to certain classes, then of rights to masses,--then at last came the day when, as the historians rightly tell, the nerves of the world were electrified by the proclamation that all men are born free and equal. Every truth leads in another. The bud extrudes the old leaf, and every truth brings that which will supplant it. In the court of law the judge sits over the culprit, but in the court of life in the same hour the judge also stands as culprit before a true tribunal. Every judge is a culprit, every law an abuse. Montaigne kills off bigots as cowhage kills worms; but there is a higher muse there sitting where he durst not soar, of eye so keen that it can report of a realm in which all the wit and learning of the Frenchman is no more than the cunning of a fox. It is the same fact existing as sentiment and as will in the mind, which works in Nature as irresistible law, exerting influence over nations, intelligent beings, or down in the kingdoms of brute or of chemical atoms. Nature is a tropical swamp in sunshine, on whose purlieus we hear the song of summer birds, and see prismatic dew-drops--but her interiors are terrific, full of hydras and crocodiles. In the pre-adamite she bred valor only; by-and-by she gets on to man, and adds tenderness, and thus raises virtue piecemeal.