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[page 155, column 1, continued:]
A LECTURE ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF VEGETATION. Read at the Organization of the American Agricultural Association, at the University in the City of New York, on Monday, the 10th February, 1845. By W. A. Seeley, Esq. Wiley & Putnam.
Mr. Seeley's lecture is too purely technical for popular reading, and we were not surprised to see, in a morning paper that gives a good portion of its columns to agricultural knowledge, some exceedingly disparaging remarks in regard to it. Probably the critic had in his mind Milton's lines in Comus,
“How charming is divine philosophy!
Not harsh and trabbed as vain suppose,
But musical as is Apollo's lute.
And a perpetual feast of ncazared sweets,”
and was disappointed in not finding the “philosophy of vegetation” as amooth and flashy as a review by Macaulay. A purely scientific essay [column 2:] should not read too smoothly, lest it slip over the tongue without making any impression upon the mind. A few jagged points may help to make a principle stick to the memory. Mr. Seeley's lecture is not written in the pleasing style of Dumas it is true, nor with the copiousness of detail and illustration which we find in the lectures of Davy, but he has crowded as many facts into his lecture as we remember to have seen in the same space. We extract one sentence, merely to show how unacceptable truth itself may be made by conveying it in an unseemly shape; and as a caution to those who would have their thoughts disseminated to put them into a vehicle that is not too clumsy to carry them.
“While one special energy of electro-chemical force exhibits healthy life maintaining literally a succe,sful conflict between its own vital, and its coexistent chemical forces, ruling, nolens miens, its materials to an Angiserrie condition, yet, by reason of that conflict, (looming it ultimately to assured divorce in death; we find another, the independent chemistry of the broad and illimitable field of inorganic nature, often, even during the decline of its forces by disease, or the infirmities of age, but ever in death, seizing upon those elements, and subjecting them, through septic agencies, to disembodiment, for the purpose of another, and a future, again antiseptic existence.”
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Notes:
This review was attributed as being by Poe by W. D. Hull.
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[S:0 - BJ, 1845] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Works - Criticism - Literary (Poe?, 1845)