intelligently, just as words must be learned before one can speak a language. Mastery of the means of expression is as essential to the communication of ideas an is the possession of the ideas themselves. The botanist observes an individual plant, and notes its characteristics. He observes others which possess some of these characteristics whilst others are wanting. He forms a class-type from these agreeing attributes, and gives this new collocation of characteristics a name. Nature never presents this class-type absolutely; it is found nowhere but in intellect. What has the botanist done but to retranslate the communication of Nature into Idea, and then to express this idea by less complicated and less physical symbols? Man's province in this case is simply to interpret the hieroglyphics of Nature into a more readily comprehended language--to express that simply which nature has expressed confusedly. The scientist restricts himself to the interpretation of a single class of symbols, as the Botanist to plants, the Zoologist to animals, but the end sought in each case is the same--that is, to change all these physical utterances of Nature into Idea, and to secure for this Idea a method of expression involving the least possible materiality of symbol--that is, to change individual facts and phenomena into general principles, which, because abstract, are unchangeable. When this has been done, the work of the Naturalist ceases, but the work of Man, the Thinker is not done; it is only just begun. By assuming the ultimate expressions of the various natural sciences as individual and not as typical, we can treat the truths reached by them precisely as the Botanist treated plants, and, rejecting points of of difference, may find in them all some central idea. This is the province of the metaphysician. He seeks the law of Idea, he determines the law of Thinking, just as all other laws are determined, from a study of the symbols formulating its expression in Nature. When this law has been distinctly enunciated, and freed from all intermixture with the contingent, then the work of the metaphysician ceases, the _summum genus_ has been reached. The truths communicated in the symbols of Nature, have been correlated and enunciated, and finally translated from the dialect of man the physical into the language of man the intellectual. Physical science determines the separate words of this message of God, the letters of which are scattered throughout Nature. Metaphysics combines these words into propositions which enunciate a distinct truth. There is therefore neither conflict nor variation between the method of Logic and the method of Nature. The movement of both is in the same direction; the only difference is in the point of starting. And another truth no less important, which follows from the foregoing discussion, is that the method of Nature is fundamental to the method of Logic. Physics should precede metaphysics, but not exclude it;