BANNOCKBURN. severe one, OBERT BRUCE defeated It is the boast of Scotchmen that their country was never conquered by England, the two countries being united by the accession of James VI. of Scotland to the English throne, under the title of James I. of England. Wha for Scotland's king and law Freedom's sword will strongly draw, Freeman stand or freeman fa', Caledonian, on wi' me! By oppression's woes and pains, Forward! let us do, or die! HE ROBERT BURNS. THE DYING SAILOR. E called his friend, and prefaced with a A lover's message: "Thomas, I must die. Give me one look, before my life be gone; He had his wish-had more: I will not paint The lovers' meeting. She beheld him faint; With tender fears she took a nearer view, Her terrors doubling as her hopes withdrew. A belt of straw and ivy-buds, When in her way she meets them, they Come live with me and be my love. appear Peculiar people death has made them dear. He named his friend, but then his hand she prest, The shepherd swains shall dance and sing. For they delight each May morning: If these delights thy mind may move, And fondly whispered, "Thou must go to Come live with me and be my love. rest." CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 矛 W FOOTPRINTS OF THE CREATOR. : E learn from human history that nations are as certainly mortal as men. They enjoy a greatly longer term of existence, but they die at last Rollin's History of Ancient Nations is a history of the dead. And we are taught by geological history, in like manner, that species are as mortal as individuals and nations, and that even genera and families become extinct. There is no man upon earth at the present moment whose age greatly exceeds an hundred years; there is no nation now upon earth (if we perhaps except the long-lived Chinese) that also flourished three thousand years ago; there is no species now living upon earth that dates beyond the times of the Tertiary deposits. All bear the stamp of death-individuals, nations, species; and we may scarce less safely predicate, looking upon the past, that it is appointed for nations and species to die than that it is appointed for man once to die." Even our own species, as now constituted with instincts that conform to the original injunction, "Increase and multiply," and that, in consequence, "marry and are given in marriage "-shall one day cease to exist; a fact not less in accordance with beliefs inseparable from the faith of the Christian than with the widely-founded experience of the geologist. Now, it is scarce possible for the human mind to become acquainted with the fact that at certain periods species began to exist, and then, after the lapse of untold ages, ceased to be, without inquiring whether, "from the conditions of existence commonly termed final causes, we cannot deduce a we cannot deduce a reason for their rise or decline, or why their term of being should have been included rather in one certain period of time than another. The same faculty which finds employment in tracing to their causes the rise and fall of nations, and which it is the merit of the philosophic historian judiciously to exercise, will to a certainty seek employment in this department of history also. The progressive state of geologic science has hitherto militated against the formation of theory of the soberer character. Its facts, still merely in the forming, are necessarily imperfect in their classification and limited in their amount, and thus the essential data continue incomplete. Besides, the men best acquainted with the basis of fact which already exists have quite enough to engage them in adding to it. But there are limits to the field of paleontological discovery, in its relation to what may be termed the chronology of organized existence, which, judging from the progress of the science in the past, may be wellnigh reached in favored localities, such as the British Islands, in about a quarter of a century from the present time; and then, I doubt not, geological history, in legitimate conformity with the laws of mind, and from the existence of the pregnant principle peculiar, according to Cuvier, to that science of which geology is simply an extension, will assume a very extraordinary form. We there mingle the elements of an awful in cannot yet aspire "to the height of this great argument:" our foundations are in parts still unconsolidated and incomplete an unfitted to sustain the perfect superstructure which shall one day assuredly rise upon them; but from the little which we darkly" can now see "as in a glass enough appears from which to darkly' "assert eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to men.” 66 The history of the four great monarchies of the world was typified, in the prophetic dream of the ancient Babylonish king, by a colossal image "terrible in its form and brightness," of which the "head was pure gold," the "breast and arms of silver," the "belly and thighs of brass," and the legs and feet of iron, and of iron mingled with clay." The vision in which it formned the central object was appropriately that of a puissant monarch, and the image itself typified the merely human monarchies of the earth. It would require a widely different figure to symbolize the great monarchies of creation. And yet Revelation does furnish such a figure. It is that which was witnessed by the captive prophet beside "the river Chebar" when "the heavens were opened and he saw visions of God." In that chariot of Deity, glowing in fire and amber, with its complex wheels "so high that they were dreadful," set round about with eyes, there were living creatures of whose four faces three were brute and one human, and high over all sat the Son of man. It would almost seem as if in this sublime vision-in which, with features distinct enough to impress the imagination, comprehensibility, and which even the genius of Raffaelle has failed adequately to portray-the history of all the past and of all the future had been symbolized. In the order of Providence intimated in the geologic record the brute faces, as in the vision, outnumber the human: the human dynasty is one and the dynasties of the inferior animals are three; and yet who can doubt that they all equally compose parts of a well-ordered and perfect whole, as the four faces formed but one cherubim; that they have been moving onward to a definite goal in the unity of one grand harmonious design, now "lifted up high" over the comprehension of earth, now let down to its humble level; and that the Creator of all has been ever seated over them on the throne of his providence, a "likeness in the appearance of a man," embodying the perfection of his nature in his workings and determining the end from the beginning? There is geologic evidence, as has been shown, that in the course of creation the higher orders succeeded the lower. We have no good reason to believe that the mollusc and crustacean preceded the fish, seeing that discovery, in its slow course, has already traced the vertebrata in the ichthyic form down to deposits which only a few years ago were regarded as representative of the first beginnings of organized existence on our planet, and that it has at the same time failed to add a lower system to that in which their remains occur. But the fish seems most certainly to have preceded the reptile and the bird, and the reptile and the bird to have preceded the mammiferous quadruped, and the mammiferous quadruped to have preceded man--rational, accountable man, whom God created in his own image, the much-loved Benjamin of the family, last-born of all creatures. It is of itself an extraordinary fact, without reference to other considerations, that the order adopted by Cuvier in his animal kingdom as that in which the four great classes of vertebrate animals, when marshalled according to their rank and standing, naturally range, should be also that in which they occur in order of time. The brain which bears an average proportion to the spinal cord of not more than two to one came first: it is the brain of the fish; that which bears to the spinal cord an average proportion of two and a half to one succeeded it: it is the brain of the reptile; then came the brain averaging as three to one: it is that of the bird; next in succession came the brain that averages as four to one: it is that of the mammal; and last of all there appeared a brain that averages as twenty-three to one : reasoning, calculating man had come upon the scene. All the facts of geological science are hostile to the Lamarckian conclusion that the lower brains were developed into the higher. As if with the express intention of preventing so gross a misreading of the record, we find in at least two classes of animals-fishes and reptiles-the higher races placed at the beginning the slope of the inclined plane is laid, if one may so speak, in the reverse way, and, instead of rising toward the level of the succeeding class, inclines downward, with at least the effect, if not the design, of making the break where they meet exceedingly well marked and conspicuous. And yet the record does seem to speak of development and progression-not, however, in the province of organized existence, but in that of insensate matter subject to the purely chemical laws. It is in the style and character of the dwelling-place that gradual improvement seems to have taken place, not in the functions or the rank of any class of its inhabitants; and it is with special reference to this gradual improvement in our common mansion-house the earth, in its bearing on the "conditions of existence," that not a few of our reasonings regarding the introduction and extinction of species and genera must proceed. That definite period at which man was introduced upon the scene seems to have been specially determined by the conditions of correspondence which the phenomena of his habitation had at length come to assume with the predestined constitution of his mind. The large reasoning brain would have been wholly out of place in the earlier ages. It is indubitably the nature of man to base the conclusions which regulate all his actions on fixed phenomena: he reasons from cause to effect or from effect to cause; and when placed in circumstances in which, from some lack of the necessary basis, he cannot so reason, he becomes a wretched, timid, superstitious creature greatly more helpless and abject than even the inferior animals. This unhappy state is strikingly exemplified by that deep and peculiar impression made on the mind by a severe earthquake which Humboldt from his own. experience so powerfully describes. "This impression," he says, "is not, in my opinion, the result of a recollection of those fearful pictures of devastation presented to our imagination by the historical narratives of the past, but is rather due to the sudden revelation of the delusive nature of the inherent faith by which we had clung to a belief in the immobility of the solid parts of the earth. We are accustomed |