body, or in presenting in effect what is spiritual in the cause?  The beasts of the earth and the birds of the air are born into all this knowledge, while man, who is far superior to them, is not; for the reason that animals are in the order of their life, and have not been able to destroy what is in them from the spiritual world, because they have no rational faculty.  Man, on the other hand, whose thought is from the spiritual world, having perverted what is in him from that world by a life contrary to order, which his rational faculty has favored, must needs be born into mere ignorance and afterwards be led back by Divine means into the order of heaven.

109.  How the things in the vegetable kingdom correspond can be seen from many instances, as that little seeds grow into trees, put forth leaves, produce flowers, and then fruit, in which again they deposit seed, these things taking place in succession and existing together in an order so wonderful as to be indescribable in a few words.  Volumes might be filled, and yet there would be still deeper arcana, relating more closely to their uses, which science would be unable to exhaust.  Since these things, too, are from the spiritual world, that is, from heaven, which is in the human form (as has been shown above in its own chapter), so all the particulars in this kingdom have a certain relation to such things as are in man, as some in the learned world know.  That all things in this kingdom also are correspondences has been made clear to me by much experience.  Often when I have been in gardens and have been looking at the trees, fruits, flowers, and plants there, I have recognized their correspondences in heaven, and have spoken with those with whom these were, and have been taught whence and what they were.

110.  But at the present day no one can know the spiritual things in heaven to which the natural things in the world correspond except from heaven, since the knowledge of correspondences is now wholly lost.  But the nature of the correspondence of spiritual things with natural I shall be glad to illustrate by some examples.  The animals of the earth correspond in general to affection, mild and useful animals to good affections, fierce and useless ones to evil affections.  In particular, cattle and their young correspond to the affections of the natural mind, sheep and lambs to the affections of the spiritual mind; while birds correspond, according to their species, to the intellectual things of the natural or the spiritual mind.{1} For this reason various animals, as cattle and their young, rams, sheep, he-goats, and she-goats, he-lambs and she-lambs, also pigeons and turtledoves, were devoted to a sacred use in the Israelitish Church, which was a representative church, and sacrifices and burnt offerings were made of them.  For they correspond in that use to spiritual things, and in heaven these were understood in accordance with the correspondences.  Moreover, animals according to their kinds and species,