University of Virginia Library

OF CONSONANCES.

Consonances are repetitions of the same harmonies. They increase our pleasures by multiplying and transferring the enjoyment of them to new scenes. They farther communicate pleasure by convincing us that the same Intelligence has presided over the different plans of Nature, presenting throughout similar harmonies. Consonances accordingly confer more pleasure than simple harmonies, as they convey the sentiments of extension and divinity, so congenial to the human soul. Natural objects excite satisfaction only as they awaken intellectual feeling.

The most beautiful harmonies are those which have the most consequences. Nothing is more beautiful than the sun, nothing in nature so frequently repeated as his form and light. He is variously reflected by refractions of the air, which exhibit him above the horizon before he is actually risen, and after he has set; by the parhelia, which reflect his disk sometimes twice or thrice in the misty clouds of the north; by the rainy clouds, in which his refracted rays trace an arch shaded with a thousand various colours; and by the waters, whose reflexes exhibit him where is not, in the bosom of meadows, amidst flowers besprinkled with dew, and in the shade of green forests. The dull and inert earth, too, reflects him in the specular particles of gravels, micas, crystals, and rocks. It presents to us the form of his disk and rays in the disks and petals of the myriads of radiated flowers with which it is covered. In a word, this beautiful star has multiplied himself into infinity with unknown varieties, in the innumerable stars of the firmament, which he discovers to us when he quits our horizon; as if he had withdrawn himself from the consonances of the earth only to display to the delighted eye those of heaven.

From this law of consonance it follows that what is best and beautiful in Nature, is also common and most frequently repeated. To it we must ascribe the varieties of species in each genus, the more numerous as they genus is useful. There is no family in the vegetable kingdom so necessary as the gramineous, on which subsist not only quadrupeds but birds and insects, and there is no one whose species are so varied. The millet of Africa, the maize of Brazil, the rice of Asia, the palm-sago of the Moluccas, the trunks of which

are filled with alimentary flour, are in consonance with the corns of Europe. We shall find consonances of another kind in the same places, as if it had been the intention of Nature to multiply her benefits by varying only the form of them, without changing almost anything of their qualities. Thus in our gardens, what a delightful and beneficial consonancy there is between the orange and citron trees, the apple and the pear, the walnut and the filbert; and in our farm-yards between the horse and the ass, the goose and the duck, the cow and the she-goat.

Although each genus is in consonancy with itself from difference of sex, there are between the sexes contrasts giving energy to their loves from the very opposition of contraries, from which all harmony takes its birth; but without the general consonancy of form between them, sensible beings of the same genus never would have approached each other. Without this, one sex would have remained a stranger to the other. Before each could have observed what the other possessed that corresponded to its necessities, the time of reflection would have absorbed that of love, and perhaps extinguished desire. It is consonancy which attracts, and contrast which unites them. There is not in any one genus an animal of one sex entirely different from one of the other in exterior forms; and if such differences are actually found, as certain naturalists pretend, in several species of fishes and insects, I am persuaded Nature placed the habitation of male and female very close to each other, and planted their nuptial couch near their cradle.

There is a consonancy of forms more intimate still than every that of the two sexes, I mean the duplicity of the organs of each individual. Every animal is double. If you consider his two eyes, his two nostrils, his two ears, the number of his legs and arms disposed by pairs, you would be tempted to say, here are two animals glued the one to the other, and united under the same skin. Nay, the single parts of his body, as the head, tail, and tongue, appear to be formed of two halves, compacted together by seams. It is not so with the members properly so called: for example, one hand, one ear, one eye, cannot be divided into two similar halves; but the duplicity of form on the parts of the body distinguishes them essentially from the members; for the part of the body is double, and the member is single; the former is always single and alone,

and the latter always repeated. Thus the head and tail of an animal are parts of its body, and the legs and ears are members.

This most wonderful law of Nature destroys all the hypotheses which introduce chance into the organization of beings; for independently of its harmonies, it doubles the proofs of a Providence, who did not deem it sufficient to give one principal organ to animals adapted to each element in particular, such as the eye for the light, the ear for sound, the foot for the ground, but determined that they should have each of those organs by pairs.

Certain sages have considered this admirable duplication as a predisposition of Providence, that the animal might always be able to supply the loss of one of the double organs, exposed as they are to so many accidents; but the interior parts of the body, which at first sight appear to be single, present on closer examination a similar duplicity of forms, even in the human body, where they are more confounded than in other animals. Thus the five lobes of the lungs, one of which has a kind of division; the fissure of the liver; the supernal separation of the brain by the duplication of the dura-mater; the septum lucidum, similar to a leaf of talc, which separates the two anterior ventricles of it; the two ventricles of the heart; and the divisions of the other viscera announce this double union, and seem to indicate, that the very principle of life is the consonance of two similar harmonies.

From this duplicity of organs there results more utility than if they had been single. Man with two eyes can take in at once more than half the horizon, with one only he could scarcely have embraced a third part. Provided with two arms he can perform many actions he never could have accomplished with but one, such as raising upon his head a load of considerable size and weight, and clambering up a tree. Had he been placed upon one leg, not only would his position be much more unsteady than on two, but he would be unable to walk; his progressive motion would be reduced to crawling or hopping, producing discord to the other parts of his body, and the variety of soils over which he is destined to move.

If Nature has given a single exterior organ to animals, as the tail, it is because its use extends but to a single action, to which it is fully equivalent. Besides, the tail from its situation

is secured against danger, and hardly any but very powerful animals have a long tail, as bulls, horses, and lions. Rabbits and hares have it very short. In feeble animals which have one of considerable length, as the thornback, it is armed with prickles, or else it grows again, if it happens to be torn off by an accident, as in the case of a lizard. Finally, whatever may be the simplicity of its use, it is formed of two similar halves, as the other parts of the body.

There are other interior consonances, which collect diagonally the different organs of the body, to form but one only and single animal of its two halves. I leave to anatomists the investigation of this incomprehensible connexion; but the cruel experiments every day made on brutes, to discover these secret correspondencies of Nature, serve only to spread a thick veil over them; and the barbarous means employed by our modern physics, have an influence still more fatal on the morals of those who practise them; for, together with false information, they inspire them with the most atrocious of all vices, cruelty.

If man may presume to put questions to Nature respecting the operations she is pleased to conceal, I should prefer the road of pleasure to that of pain. Of the propriety of this sentiment I witnessed an instance at a country-seat in Normandy. Walking in an adjoining field with a young gentleman, we perceived bulls fighting. He ran to them with his staff brandished, and the poor animals instantly gave up their contention. He went up to the most ferocious, and began to tickle him at the root of the tail. The animal, whose eyes were still inflamed with rage, became motionless, with outstretched neck, expanded nostrils, transpiring the air with a satisfaction which most amusingly demonstrated the intimate correspondence between this extremity of his body and his head.

The duplicity of organs is farther observable in the essential parts of vegetables, as the anther' of the flowers, which are double bodies: in their petals, one half corresponding exactly to the other; in the lobes of their seed, &c. A single one of these parts, however, appears sufficient for the expansion and generation of the plant. This observation applies to the very leaves, the halves of which are mostly correspondent; and if any one recedes from this order, undoubtedly the reason is worthy of investigation.

These facts confirm the distinction between the parts and

members of a body; for in leaves where this duplicity occurs the vegetative faculty is usually to be found, which is diffused over the body of the vegetable itself; so that if you carefully replant those leaves at the proper season, the complete vegetable will thence be reproduced. Perhaps it is because the interior organs of the tree are double that the principle of vegetative life is diffused even over its slips, which sprout again from one branch. Nay, some have the power of perpetuating themselves by cuttings simply. Of this we have a noted instance in the Memoirs of the Academy of Sciences. Two sisters became heiresses of an orange-tree; each insisted on having it thrown into her allotment. At length, after much wrangling, and neither being disposed to resign her claim, it was settled that the tree should be cleft in two, and each take her half. The orange-tree underwent the judgment pronounced by Solomon on the child—it was cleft asunder: each sister replanted her own half, and, wonderful to be told! the tree which had been separated by unsisterly animosity, received a new clothing of bark from the benignant hand of Nature.

This universal consonance of forms suggested to man the idea of symmetry. He has introduced it into most of the works of art, particularly architecture, as an essential part of order. To such a degree is it the work of intelligence and combination, that I consider it as the principal character by which we distinguish organized bodies from such as are not so, however regular their assemblage may appear.

In conformity to these reflections, on considering the globe of the earth, I observed that it too presented a duplicity of form. From the beginning it had been my idea that this globe, being the production of an Intelligence, order must pervade it. I had discerned the utility of islands, and even of banks, and of rocks, to protect the parts of continents most exposed to the currents of the ocean, at the extremities of which they are always situated. I had also seen the utility of bays, removed from the currents of the ocean, and hollowed into deep retreats to shelter the discharge of rivers, and serve, by the tranquillity of their waters, as an asylum to the fishes, which retire thither to collect the spoils of vegetation there disgorged by the rivers. I had admired them in detail, but had formed no conception of their combination. My mind was bewildered, and I should without hesitation have ascribed

the whole to chance, had not the order I perceived in each of the parts suggested to me the possibility that it might exist also in the totality of the work.

I shall now display the globe under a new aspect. The reader will pardon a digression which exhibits to him one little fragment of the materials I had laid up for a geographical structure, but which tends to prove the universality of the laws I am endeavouring to establish.

I first endeavoured to find out consonances between the northern and southern halves of the globe, but perceived only oppositions; the northern being, if I may so express myself, a terrestrial hemisphere, and the southern a maritime, and so different from each other, that the winter of one is the summer of the other; and the seas of the first hemisphere seem to be opposed to the lands and islands scattered over the second. This contrast presented another analogy with an organized body, for every organized body has two halves in contrast, as there are two in consonance.

I found in it then something like analogy with an animal, whose head should have been to the north, from the attraction of the magnet peculiar to our pole, which seems there to fix a sensorium, as in the head of an animal: the heart under the line, from the constant heat of the torrid zone, which seems to determine this as the region of the heart: finally, the excretory organs in the southern part, in which the greatest seas, the vast receptacles of the alluvions of continents, are situated; and where we likewise find the greatest number of volcanoes, which may be considered as the excretory organs of the seas, whose bitumens and sulphurs they consume. Besides, the sun, who sojourns five or six days longer in the northern hemisphere, seemed to present to me a more marked resemblance to the body of an animal, in which the heart, the centre of heat, is somewhat nearer to the head than to the lower extremities.

Though these contrasts appeared sufficiently determinate to manifest order on the globe, and though I perceived something similar in vegetables distinguished into two parts, opposite in functions and forms, as the leaves and roots; I was afraid of giving scope to my imagination, and attempting to generalize the laws of Nature peculiar to each existence, by extending them to kingdoms not susceptible of the application. But I ceased to doubt of the general order of the

globe, when with two halves in contrast I found two others in consonance. I was astonished, I confess, when I observed in its duplicity of forms members exactly repeated on that side and on this.

The globe, considered from east to west, is divided, as all organized bodies are, into two similar halves, the Old and New World. Each part mutually corresponds in the eastern and western hemispheres. The lakes of Finland and the gulf of Archangel correspond to the lakes of Canada and Baffin's Bay; Nova Zembla to Greenland; the Baltic to Hudson's Bay; the islands of Great Britain and Ireland, which cover the first of these mediterraneans, to the islands of Good Fortune and Welcome, which protect the second; the Mediterranean, properly so called, to the Gulf of Mexico, which is a kind of mediterranean formed in part by islands. At the extremity of the Mediterranean we find the isthmus of Suez in consonance with the isthmus of Panama, placed at the bottom of the gulf of Mexico. Conjoined by those isthmuses the peninsula of Africa presents itself in the Old World, and the peninsula of South America in the New. The principal rivers of these divisions of the globe front each other in like manner; for the Senegal discharges itself into the Atlantic directly opposite to the rive of the Amazons. Finally, each of these peninsulas, advancing toward the south pole, terminates in a cape equally noted for violent tempests, the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn.

There are between these two hemispheres many other points of consonance on which I shall no longer insist. These different particulars, it is admitted, do not correspond exactly in the same latitudes; but they are disposed in the direction of a spiral line winding from east to west, and extending from north to south, so that these corresponding points proceed in a regular progression. They are nearly of the same height, setting out from the north, as the Baltic and Hudson's Bay; and they lengthen in America, in proportion as it advances toward the south. This progression is perceptible along the Old Continent, as may be seen from the form of its capes, which, taking the point of departure east, lengthen so much more south as they advance toward the west; such as the Cape of Kamtschatka in Asia, Cape Comorin in Arabia, the Cape of Good Hope in Africa, and finally, Cape Horn in America.

These differences of proportion are to be accounted for from this, that the two terrestrial hemispheres are not projected in the same manner; for the Old Continent has its greatest breadth from east to west, and the New its greater extent from north to south; and it is manifest this difference of projection has been regulated by the AUTHOR of Nature for the same reasons which induced him to bestow double parts on animals, in order that, if necessity required, the one might supply what was deficient in the other, but principally that they might be of mutual assistance.

If, for example, there existed only the ancient continent with the South Sea alone, the motion of that sea being much accelerated under the line by the regular winds from the east, would, after having surrounded the torrid zone, advance with incredible fury, and attack tremendously the land of Japan: for the size of the billows of the sea is always in proportion to its extent. But from the disposition of the two continents the billows of the great eastern current of the Indian Ocean are partly retarded by the archipelagoes of the Moluccas and Philippine Islands; they are still farther broken by other islands, such as the Maldivia, by the capes of Arabia, and by that of Good Hope, which throws them back toward the south. Before they reach Cape Horn they have to encounter new obstacles from the current of the south pole, which then crosses their course, and the change of the monsoon, which totally destroys the cause of the commotion at the end of six months. Thus there is not a single current, easterly or northerly, which pervades so much as a quarter of the globe in the same direction. Besides, the division of the parts of the globe into two, is so necessary to its general harmony, that if the channel of the Atlantic Ocean, which separates them, had no existence, all the oriental rivers of America and the occidental of Europe would be dried up; for those rivers owe their supplies only to the clouds which emanate from the sea. Besides, the sun enlightening on our side only one terrestrial hemisphere, the mediterraneans of which would disappear, must burn it up with his rays; and at the same time, as he warmed on the other side a hemisphere of water only, most of the islands of which would sink of course, because the quantity of that sea must be increased by the subtraction of ours, an immensity of vapour would arise and go merely to waste.

It would appear that, from these considerations, Nature has not placed in the torrid zone the greatest length of the continents, but only the mean breadth of America and Africa, because the action of the sun would there have been too vehement. She has placed there, on the contrary, the longest diameter of the South Sea, and the greatest breadth of the Atlantic Ocean, and there she has collected the greatest quantity of islands in existence. Farther, she has placed in the breadth of the continents, there lengthened out, the greatest bodies of running water in the world, all issuing from mountains of ice. Again, for this reason, she has multiplied in the torrid zone and its vicinity, lofty chains of mountains covered with snow, and she directs thither the winds of the north and south pole, of which the trade-winds always partake. Several of the great rivers which flow there are not situated precisely under the line, but in regions of the torrid zone, hotter than the line itself.

From all this we have a glimpse of the necessity of two continents, mutually to check the movements of the ocean. Nature could not have disposed them otherwise, than by extending one lengthwise and the other in breadth, that the opposed currents of their ocean might balance each other, and that there might thence result a harmony adapted to their shores, and to the islands contained in their basons.

Were we to suppose these two continents projected circularly, from east to west, under the two temperate zones, the circulation of the sea contained between them would be too violently accelerated by the east wind. There could be no longer any communication by sea from the line toward the poles; consequently no icy effusions in that ocean, no tides, no cooling, and no renovation of its waters. If we suppose, on the contrary, both continents extended from north to south, as America is, there would be no longer any oriental current in the ocean; the two halves of each sea would meet in the midst of their channel, and their polar effusions would there encounter each other with an impetuosity of commotion, of which the icy effusions precipitated from the Alps convey but a faint idea. But by the alternate and opposite currents of the seas the icy effusions of our pole proceed, in summer, to cool Africa, Brazil, and the southern parts of Asia, forcing its way beyond the Cape of Good Hope, by the monsoon, which then carries the current of the ocean towards the east;

and during our winter the effusions of the south pole proceed towards the west, to moderate on the same shores the action of the sun, which is there unremitting. By means of these two spiral motions of the seas, similar to those of the sun in the heavens, there is not a single drop of water but what may make the tour of the globe by evaporation under the line, dissolution into rain in the continent, and congelation under the pole. These universal correspondences are so much the more worthy of being remarked, that they enter into all the plans of Nature, and present themselves in the rest of her works.

From any other imaginable order would result other inconveniences, which I leave the reader to find out. Hypotheses ex absurdo are at once amusing and useful; they change, it is true, natural proportions into caricatures; but they have this advantage, that by convincing us of the weakness of our understanding, they impress us with a deep sense of the wisdom of Nature.