rising to the knowledge of God, and of communion with him; by reason of this soul-responsible and immortal-he belongs not merely to a new species or genus of nature, but to a new order in creation. In respect of this, his nobler part, he is made not after the likeness of the brute, but after the image of God. He stands on this earth, but with upright face he looks upward to heaven.

THE FIRST BEE.

"The first bee makes its appearance in the amber of the Eocene, locked up hermetically in its gem-like tomb,—an embalmed corpse in a crystal coffin,-along with fragments of flower-bearing herbs and trees. The first of the Bombycidæ, too-insects that may be seen suspended over flowers by the scarce visible vibration of their wings, and sucking the honied juices by means of their long, slender trunks, -also appear in the amber, associated with moths, butterflies, and a few caterpillars. Bees and butterflies are present in increased proportions in the latter tertiary deposits, but not until that terminal creation to which we ourselves belong, was ushered on the scene, did they receive their fullest development. There is exquisite poetry in Wordsworth's reference to 'the soft murmur of the vagrant bee'—

'A slender sound, yet hoary Time

Doth to the soul exalt it with the chime

Of all his years; a company

Of ages coming, ages gone,

Nations from before them sweeping.'

And yet, mayhap, the naked scientific facts of the history of this busy insect are scarcely less poetic than the pleasing imagination of the poet regarding it. They tell that man's world, with all its griefs and troubles, is more emphatically a world of flowers than any of the creations which have preceded it; and that, as one great familythe grasses were called into existence, in order, apparently, that he might enter in favouring circumstances upon his two earliest avocations, and be in good hope a keeper of herds, and a tiller of the ground; and as another family of plants-the Rosacea-was created in order that the gardens which it would be also one of his vocations to keep and to dress, should have their trees 'good for food and

pleasant to the taste;' so flowers in general were profusely produced just ere he appeared, to minister to that sense of beanty which distinguishes him from all the lower creatures, and to which he owes not a few of his most exquisite enjoyments. The poet accepted the bee as a sign of high significance: the geologist also accepted her as a sign. Her entombed remains testify to the gradual fitting up of our earth as a place of habitation for a creature destined to seek delight for the mind and the eye, as certainly as for the grosser senses, and in especial marks the introduction of the stately forest trees, and the arrival of the delicious flowers.

THE LIASSIC AGES.

"There are tridactyle footprints in the red sandstones of Connecticut that measure eighteen inches in length from the heel to the middle claw, nearly thirteen inches in breadth from the outer to the inner toe, and which indicate, from their distance apart in the straight line, a stride of about six feet in the creature that impressed them in these ancient sands,—measurements that might well startle zoologists who had derived their experience of the ornithic class from existing birds exclusively. I have already referred to flying dragons,—real existences of the Oolitic period,-that were quite as extraordinary of type, if not altogether so huge of bulk, as those with which the seven champions of Christendom used to do battle; and here are we introduced to birds of the Liassic ages that were scarcely less gigantic than the roc of Sinbad the sailor. They are fraught with strange meanings, these footprints of the Connecticut. They tell of a time far removed into the by-past eternity, when great birds frequented by myriads the shores of a nameless lake, to wade into its shallows in quest of mailcovered fishes of the ancient type, or long extinct molluscs; while reptiles equally gigantic, and of still stranger proportions, haunted the neighbouring swamps and savannahs; and when the same sun that shone on the tall moving forms beside the waters, and threw their long shadows across the red-sands, lighted up the glades of deep forests, all of whose fantastic productions,-tree, bush, and herb,have even in their very species long since passed away. And of this scene of things only the footprints remain, 'footprints on the sands of

time,' that tell us, among other matters, whence the graceful American poet derived his quiet, but singularly effective and unmistakeably indigenous figure.

MAN'S DESTINY.

"The appearance of man upon the scene of being constitutes a new era in creation; the operations of a new instinct come into play,—that instinct which anticipates a life after the grave, and reposes in implicit faith upon a God alike just and good, who is the pledged 'rewarder of all who diligently seek Him.' And in looking along the long line of being,-ever rising in the scale from higher to yet higher manifestations, or abroad on the lower animals, whom instinct never deceives,- -can we hold that man, immeasurably higher in his place, and infinitely higher in his hopes and aspirations than all that ever went before him, should be, notwithstanding, the one grand error in creation-the one painful worker, in the midst of present trouble, for a state into which he is never to enter the befooled expectant of a happy future which he is never to see? Assuredly no. He who keeps faith with all his humbler creatures-who gives to even the bee and the dormouse the winter for which they prepare-will to certainty not break faith with man—with man, alike the deputed lord of the present creation, and the chosen heir of all the future. We have been looking abroad on the old geologic burying grounds, and deciphering the strange inscriptions on their tombs; but there are other burying grounds and other tombs,—solitary churchyards among the hills, where the dust of the martyrs lies, and tombs that rise over the ashes of the wise and good; nor are there wanting, on even the monuments of the perished races, frequent hieroglyphics and symbols of high meaning, which darkly intimate to us, that while their burial yards contain but the debris of the past, we are to regard the others as charged with the sown seed of the future.

MEMORY-TRADITION.

"There are events so striking in themselves, or from their accompaniments, that they powerfully impress the memories of children but

little removed from infancy, and are retained by them in a sort of troubled recollection ever after, however extended their term of life. Samuel Johnson was only two and a half years old, when, in accordance with the belief of the time, he was touched by Queen Anne for the Evil;' but more than seventy years after, he could call up a dream-like recollection of the lady dressed in the black hood, and glittering with diamonds, into whose awful presence he had been ushered on that occasion, and who had done for the cure of his complaint all that legitimate royalty could do. And an ancient lady of the north country, who had been carried when a child, in her nurse's arms, to witness the last witch execution that took place in Scotland, could distinctly tell, after the lapse of nearly a century, that the fire was surrounded by an awe-struck crowd, and that the smoke of the burning, when blown about her by a cross breeze, had a foul and suffocating odour. In this respect the memory of infant tribes and nations seems to resemble that of individuals. There are characters and events which impress it so strongly, that they seem never to be forgotten, but live as traditions, sometimes mayhap very vague, and much modified by the inventions of an after time, but which, in floating downwards to late ages, always bear upon them a certain strong impress of their pristine reality. They are shadows that have become ill-defined from the vast distance of the objects which cast them-like the shadows of great birds flung, in a summer's day, from the blue depths of the sky to the landscape far below-but whose very presence, however diffuse they may have become, testifies to the existence of the remote realities from which they are thrown, and without which they could have had no being at all. The old mythologies are filled with shadowy traditions of this kind-shadows of the world's 'gray fathers,'-which, like those shadows seen reflected on clouds by travellers who ascend lofty mountains, are exaggerated into the most gigantic proportions, and bear radiant glories about their heads."

CHAPTER XIX.

DEATH.

THE labour to which Hugh Miller had been subjected in the preparation and final revision of the "Testimony of the Rocks," was the melancholy means of unhinging his intellectual powers, and leaving him the prey of those spectral illusions, those paroxysms of horror and despair, amidst whose deep and awful shadows he so gloomily perished. In such a state of mind as was his during the last months of his life, intellectual effort of any kind ought to have been strictly forbidden and rigidly foregone. Yet even long prior to these months, the mischief was done. Conjugal love had thrown a veil of the most inviolate secrecy over the earlier attacks of the insidious malady, so that not even his physicians knew how deep-seated was the calamity they at length became aware, only when too late, had smitten him, as it has smitten many of the most gifted of earth's sons.

The form which the malady latterly assumed, was precisely of the nature we might have expected