ESSAY IX. Of the Production, Nourishment and Operations of Plants and Animals. SECT. I. Creatures produce their own Kind. WHEN I survey the works of nature with a more attentive eye, I am surprised to find with what marvellous exactness every creature draws its own picture, or propagates its own likeness, though in different manners of operation. The fox produces a living fox, the goose drops her egg, and hatches the young goose, and the tulip lets fall its seed into the earth, which fer- ment& and swells and labours long in the ground, till at last it brings forth a tulip. Is it the natural sagacity of foxes that ena- bles them to forni their own image so accurately ? By no means ; for the goose and the flower do the like : The sprightly and the stupid, the sensible and the senseless, work this wonder with equal regularity and perfection ; and the plant performs as well as the animal. It is not possible that any of them should effect this by any peculiar rules of art and contrivance, for neither the one nor the other are at all acquainted with the compositionor progress of their work. The bird is entirely ignorant of the wondrous vital ferment of her own egg, either in the formation of it, or the incubation ; and the mother-plant knows as much of the parts of the young plant, as the mother-animal knows of the inward springs and movements of the young little animal. There could be no contrivance here, for not any of them had any thought or design of the final production : They were all moved, both the beast, bird and flower, by the material and mechanical springs of their own nature to continue their own species, but without any such intent or purpose. Give souls to all the animal race, and make those souls as immaterial and as intelligent as you can ; attribute to them what good sense you please in other affairs of their puny life ; allow the brutes to be as rational and as cunning as you could wish or fancy, and to perform a thousand tricks by their own sagacity ; yet in this matter those intellectual powers must all stand by as useless ; the senseless vegetable has as much skill here as the animal ; the goose is completely as wise as the fox or the grey- hound ; they draw their own portraits with as exquisite art and ac- curacy, and leave as perfect images behind them to perpetuate their kind.
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