This theory dates from the oldest philosophers, and derives perhaps
its best illustration from the newest. It is this: that nature iterates
her means perpetually on successive planes. In the old aphorism, nature
is always self-similar. In the plant, the eye or germinative point
opens to a leaf, then to another leaf, with a power of transforming
the leaf into radicle, stamen, pistil, petal, bract, sepal, or seed.
The whole art of the plant is still to repeat leaf on leaf without
end, the more or less of heat, light, moisture, and food, determining
the form it shall assume. In the animal, nature makes a vertebra, or
a spine of vertebrae, and helps herself still by a new spine, with a
limited power of modifying its form,--spine on spine, to the end of
the world. A poetic anatomist, in our own day, teaches that a snake,
being a horizontal line, and man, being an erect line, constitute a
right angle; and, between the lines of this mystical quadrant, all
animate beings find their place; and he assumes the hair-worm, the
span-worm, or the snake, as the type of prediction of the spine.
Manifestly, at the end of the spine, nature puts out smaller spines,
as arms; at the end of the arms, new spines, as hands; at the other
end, she repeats the process, as legs and feet.
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