Animal and vegetable physiology - v. 1 Author:Peter Mark Roget Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ANIMAL, AND VEGET PHYSIOLOGY. INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER I. FINAL CAUSES. [To investigate the relations which connect Creator is the noblest exercis... more »e of human rcasi iog who bestowed on him this faculty canno| tended that he should so exercise it, and that quire, through its means, some insight, how into the order and arrangements of creation; ledge, however imperfect, of the divine attr distinct, though faint, perception of die transi with which those attributes are cncompasse have been revealed the Power, the Wisdom, i Xess of God, through the medium of the Hoc in the varied pages of which they are inscribe characters. Oo Man has been conferred the 1 of interpreting these characters, and of derivi contemplation those ideas of grandeur and s those emotions of admiration and of gratitui rate and refine the soul, and transport it intc purer and more exalted being. Vol. I. "3 A study which embraces so extensive a range of objects, and which involves questions of such momentous interest to mankind, must necessarily be arduous, and requires for its successful prosecution the strenuous exertions of the human intellect, and the combined labours of different classes of philosophers, during many ages. The magnitude of the task is increased by the very success of those previous efforts: for the difficulties augment as the objects multiply, and the eminence on which the accumulated knowledge of centuries has placed us only discloses a wider horizon, and the prospect of more fertile regions of inquiry; till at length the mind, conscious of the inadequacy of its own powers to the comprehension of even a small part of the system of the universe, is appalled by the overwhelming consideration of the infinity that surrounds us. The...« less