The moving creature that hath life Endued with self-motion and animal life. How much soever we may be astonished at the stupendous vastness and magnificence of inanimate matter, the least piece that is animated and has life, is still more admirable. But who can conceive the nature of life? We see it daily around us, but cannot comprehend it!
We observe that it enables millions and millions of creatures to act, as it were, of themselves, and to seek and obtain such enjoyments as give them a sensible pleasure; but how it does this surpasses all understanding: and we can reach no more of its nature, than that it is such an amazing property, as, if we think at all, must carry up our thoughts to that Almighty Being, who alone could bestow such a wonderful blessing, and who, in his exuberant goodness, has conferred it, not on one or a few merely, but on innumerable millions, and has inclined and enabled them to communicate it to millions and millions more of the same species with themselves, that shall succeed one another till time shall be no more! Thus in the work of creation, after the formation of light, air, water, and earth, the originals of all things, he proceeds from creatures less excellent to those that are more so: from vegetables to animals; and then from animals less perfect in their form to the more perfect. Such was the Creator's progress in his work; and, in imitation of him, we should be continually advancing to greater excellence and perfection in our dispositions and actions. Fish and fowl were both formed out of the water: there being a nearer alliance and greater resemblance between the form of the bodies in general, and the motions of creatures that swim and of those that fly, than there is between either of these and such as creep or walk on the earth: and their bodies being intended to be lighter, and their motions swifter, the wise Creator saw fit to form them from a lighter and fluid element.
The waters are said to produce them abundantly; to signify the prodigious and rapid multiplication, especially of all the various species of fishes. The word in Hebrew, which generally stands for fish, also means multiplication; no creatures, it seems, multiplying so fast as they do.