s; from which we have reason to imagine that they have not the faculty
of abstracting or making general ideas, since they have no use of _words_
or any other general signs."

If, therefore, the science of language gives us an insight into that
which, by common consent, distinguishes man from all other living beings;
if it establishes a frontier between man and the brute, which can never be
removed, it would seem to possess at the present moment peculiar claims on
the attention of all who, while watching with sincere admiration the
progress of comparative physiology, yet consider it their duty to enter
their manly protest against a revival of the shallow theories of Lord
Monboddo.

But to return to our survey of the history of the physical sciences. We
had examined the empirical stage through which every science has to pass.
We saw that, for instance, in botany, a man who has travelled through
distant countries, who has collected a vast number of plants, who knows
their names, their peculiarities, and their medicinal qualities, is not
yet a botanist, but only a herbalist, a lover of plants, or what the
Italians call a _dilettante_, from _dilettare_, to delight. The real
science of plants, like every other science, begins with the work of
classification. An empirical acquaintance with facts rises to a scientific
knowledge of facts as soon as the mind discovers beneath the multiplicity
of single productions the unity of an organic system. This discovery is
made by means of comparison and classification. We cease to study each
flower for its own sake; and by continually enlarging the sphere of our
observation, we try to discover what is common to many and offers those
essential points on which groups or natural classes may be established.
These classes again, in their more general features, are mutually
compared; new points of difference, or of similarity of a more general and
higher character, spring to view, and enable us to discover classes of
classes, or families. And when the whole kingdom of plants has thus been
surveyed, and a simple tissue of names been thrown over the garden of
nature; when we can lift it up, as it were, and view it in our mind as a
whole, as a system well defined and complete, we then speak of the science
of plants, or botany. We have entered into altogether a new sphere of
knowledge where the individual is subject to the general, fact to law; we
discover thought, order, and purpose pervading the