Abominable, inutterable, and worse Than fables yet have feign'd, or fear conceived, Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimæras dire. Such verily they would be, if they were in magnitude equal to the common animals by which we are surrounded. But Nature has left all these seemingly misformed creatures in the lowest stage of existence,—the circle of inchoation; neither are any of the hideous forms of insects repeated in the higher grades of animal life; the sea indeed contains creatures marvellously uncouth and ugly, _beaucoup plus de monstres, sans comparaison, que la terre,_ and the Sieur de Brocourt, who was as curious in collecting the opinions of men as our philosopher, though no man could make more dissimilar uses of their knowledge, explains it _à cause de la facilité de la generation qui est en elle, dont se procreent si diverses figures, à raison de la grande chaleur qui se trouve en la mer, l'humeur y estant gras, et l'aliment abondant; toute generation se faisant par chaleur et humidité, qui produisent toutes choses._ With such reasoning our Doctor was little satisfied; it was enough to know that as the sea produces monsters, so the sea covers them, and that fish are evidently lower in the scale of being than the creatures of earth and air. It is the system of Nature then that whatever is unseemly should be left in the earliest and lowest stages; that life as it ascends should cast off all deformity, as the butterfly leaves its _exuviæ_ when its perfect form is developed; and finally that whatever is imperfect should be thrown off, and nothing survive in immortality but what is beautiful as well as good. [Footnote 2: The Reader may not be displeased to read the following beautiful passage from Jeremy Taylor. “If God is glorified in the sun and moon, in the rare fabric of the honeycombs, in the discipline of bees, in the economy of pismires, in the little houses of birds, in the curiosity of an eye, God being pleased to delight in those little images and reflexes of himself from those pretty mirrors, which, _like a crevice in the wall, through a narrow perspective, transmit the species of a vast excellency_: much rather shall God be pleased to behold himself in the glasses of our obedience, in the emissions of our will and understanding; these being rational and apt instruments to express him, far better than the natural, as being near communications of himself.”—_Invalidity of a late or Death-bed Repentance_, _Vol. v. p. 464_.]