vocabulary for all of your moral observations." He found a lesson in
composition in the fact that the diamond and lampblack are the same
substance differently arranged. Good writing, he said, is a chemical
combination, and not a mechanical mixture. That is not the noblest
chemistry that can extract sunshine from cucumbers, but that which can
extract "honor from scamps, temperance from sots, energy from beggars,
justice from thieves, benevolence from misers."

Though mindful of the birds and flowers and trees and rivers in his
walks, it was mainly through his pressing need of figures and symbols
for transcendental use. He says, "Whenever you enumerate a physical
law, I hear in it a moral law." His final interest was in the moral
law. Unless the scientific fact you brought him had some moral value,
it made little impression upon him.

He admits he is more interested to know "why the star form is so oft
repeated in botany, and why the number five is such a favorite with
Nature, than to understand the circulation of the sap and the
formation of buds." His insight into Nature, and the prophetic
character of his genius, are seen in many ways, among others in his
anticipation or poetic forecast of the Darwinian theory of the origin
of species, in 1853.

"We want a higher logic to put us in training for the laws of
creation. How does the step forward from one species to a higher
species of an existing genus take place? The ass is not the parent of
the horse; no fish begets a bird. But the concurrence of new
conditions necessitates a new object in which these conditions meet
and flower. When the hour is struck in onward nature, announcing that
all is ready for the birth of higher form and nobler function, not one
pair of parents, but the whole consenting system thrills, yearns, and
produces. It is a favorable aspect of planets and of elements."

In 1840 he wrote, "The method of advance in Nature is perpetual
transformation." In the same year he wrote:

"There is no leap--not a shock of violence throughout nature. Man
therefore must be predicted in the first chemical relation exhibited
by the first atom. If we had eyes to see it, this bit of quartz would
certify us of the necessity that man must exist as inevitably as the
cities he has actually built."

X

How fruitful in striking and original men New England was in those
days--poets, orators, picturesque characters! In Concord, Emerson,
Thoreau, Hawthorne, Alcott; in B