It may have been observed by the attentive reader—(and all my readers will be attentive, except those who are in love) that although the Doctor traced many of his acquaintance to their prior allotments in the vegetable creation, he did not discover such symptoms in any of them as led him to infer that the object of his speculations had existed in the form of a tree;—crabbed tempers, sour plums, cherry-cheeks, and hearts of oak being nothing more than metaphorical expressions of similitude. But it would be a rash and untenable deduction were we to conclude from the apparent omission that the arboreal world was excluded from his system. On the contrary, the analogies between animal and vegetable life led him to believe that the Archeus of the human frame, received no unimportant part of his preparatory education in the woods. Steele in a playful allegory has observed “that there is a sort of vegetable principle in the mind of every man when he comes into the world. In infants, the seeds lie buried and undiscovered, till after a while they sprout forth in a kind of rational leaves, which are words; and in due season the flowers begin to appear in variety of beautiful colours, and all the gay pictures of youthful fancy and imagination; at last the fruit knits and is formed, which is green perhaps at first, sour and unpleasant to the taste, and not fit to be gathered; till ripened by due care and application, it discovers itself in all the noble productions of philosophy, mathematics, close reasoning and handsome argumentation. I reflected further on the intellectual leaves before mentioned, and found almost as great a variety among them as in the vegetable world.” In this passage, though written only as a sport of fancy, there was more our speculator thought, than was dreamt of in Steele's philosophy. Empedocles, if the fragment which is ascribed to him be genuine, pretended to remember that he had pre-existed not only in the forms of maiden and youth, fowl and fish, but of a shrub also; _Ἤδη γάρ ποτ᾽ ἐγὼ γενόμην κούρη τε κόρος τε, Θάμνος τ᾽, οἰωνός τε, καὶ εἰν ἅλι ἔλλοπος ἰχθῦς._