Perhaps that which astonishes us most, when we fairly open our eyes upon the world, is the diversity in everything. Out in the forest, under the spreading tree, looking up at the luxuriant foliage, you may not think of the difference between the leaves; but pull down a limb, and spend an hour comparing them; you find, much as they resemble, that no two are precisely alike. Examine the plumage of the owl that you cruelly brought down with your rifle; every feather of his beautiful dress differs from every other; and, what is more remarkable, every fibre of every feather is another feather, still more delicate, differing from every other, all of which together yield to the pressure of your hand like floss silk. No wonder he fell upon the mischievous mole or mouse as noiselessly as the shadow of a cloud. Go down to the sea-shore; the tide is out; there is an apparent waste of white sand, a dull extent of uniformity; but stretch yourself on the beach, which the innumerable differing waves have beaten to incomparable smoothness, and examine leisurely, with a good glass, a few hundred of the infinite grains which you thought to be the same, and you discover that they differ, that each is differently shaped, each holds the light differently, and, what is more wonderful than all, each appears to be a shell, or part of a shell, which was once the abode of a creature, and a different creature from every other inhabiting or that ever inhabited any other shell of the ocean. Look into the crowded street; the men are all men; they all walk upright; they might wear each other's clothes without serious inconvenience; but could they exchange souls? "Clothe me as you will," said Sancho, "I shall still be Sancho Panza." "The soul is not twin-born, but the only begotten." "And there never was in the world," said Montaigne, "two opinions alike, no more than two hairs or two grains. The most universal quality is diversity."