" We must be satisfied with this, I suppose, but it is a very
faulty declaration, for I have seen one dog change a bone with another,
in which instance a big dog traded with a little dog, and impressed the
little dog with the desirability, under the circumstances, of the
smaller of two bones! And I am not sure but that
ALL BARGAINS, WHETHER HUMAN OR CANINE,
are of that stripe, wherein the superior of two bone or money getters
acquaints the inferior with the good points of a bad bargain. Buffon, at
the beginning of his Natural History, is unable, even, to give any line
of demarcation between vegetable and animal substances, and perplexes
the mind with an infinitude of faulty attempts, in turn showing the weak
spot in each. "For man is a plant,"
SAYS PLUTARCH,
"not fixed in the earth nor immovable, but heavenly, whose head, rising,
as it were, from a root upwards, is turned towards heaven." "A man ought
to carry himself in the world," says Henry Ward Beecher, continuing and
building on Plutarch's thought, "as an orange-tree would, if it could
walk up and down in the garden,--swinging perfume from every little
censer it holds up to the air.
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