due time come forth to browse upon them; and, as the completion, man stands up to gaze with intelligent eye upon the whole. There is a unity of plan running along all this series. The plant, when it comes, is higher than the mineral-a new power, the vital, has been superinduced; but still the organic is dependent for nourishment on the inorganic, and all the forces which operate in the mineral are active in the plant. Look at the more complicated crystals—look at the frostworks on our flagstones and windows, so like the tree in their ramifications-and you at once see that powers are operating there which are to appear in a more advanced form in the plant. When the animal appears, it has something not in the plant—in particular, it has a power of sensation and voluntary motion; but still it retains all the power that is in the mineral, and is dependent for food on the vegetable; and so clearly are the plant and the brute allied, that it is difficult to draw a line which will decidedly separate the higher forms of the one from the lower forms of the other. And when man walks forth to contemplate all these objects, it is evident that there is a higher principle in him, which is not in the mineral, or in the plant, or in the brute; but it is just as clear that he has affinities with the lower creation, arising from the lower creation tending upwards towards him. Made of the dust of the ground, his bodily frame is subject to all the inorganic laws of the world, and at last returns to the dust, out of which it was formed. As an organism, he is subject to all organic laws; he needs breath and food from without, and has an allotted period of existence. As an animal, his bones and his muscles, his very nerves and brain, are after the same model as those of the brutes; like them he needs organized matter whereon to feed; and like them, he is susceptible of pleasure and pain. It may be maintained that the lower animals are in a sense anticipations of humanity, and have appetites, instincts, attachments—as for offspring and home-perceptions, and a sort of intelligence, which, though not identical with, are homologous to, certain of the lower endowments of man.

"All this does not prove, as some would argue, that man is merely an upper brute-possibly sprung from the monkey, or removed from it only as one species is from another. In his bodily frame he may be simply a new species-the highest of animated organisms-with the fore limbs turned into hands, and his frame raised into an upright attitude, and even in this, so far anticipated by the ape. But in his soul, endowed with the power of discovering necessary and immutable

truth, and of discerning the difference between good and evil; capable of cherishing voluntary affections-which alone (and not mere instinctive attachments) are deserving of the name of love,—and of 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 Bombycida 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 beauty 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 mail-covered 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 lie, 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 inuch 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.

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