each epoch, its upper and lower tribes made their appearance predominatingly in pairs. In that far antiquity when our fuel was alive, and in the ages following, the dwarf club-moss was represented by giants of the type; and the dwindled and decayed family of firs and yews, counting their kindred not as now by tens but by hundreds, made room for themselves far and wide, and filled the land. Acrogen and lower Gymnogen were then to each other what Endogen and Arch-exogen, with the higher Gymnogen, were afterwards in the nobler flora of the Tertiary times. If we remember that the Endogen, dating in its earliest garb from the coalmeasures, has brought into these later ages, not only the palm, the lily, and the Iris, but also those grasses which feed our cattle, and, in their cereal forms, as wheat, rice, &c. yield, all the earth over, the staff of life to ourselves; and if we remember further that Exogen in its Tertiary climax means all manner of fruit as well as all shapes of beauty-means the fig, the grape, the peach, the cherry, as well as the myrtle, the geranium, or the rose-means cedars of Lebanon, and cypresses of America, and oaks and elms of Europe-means all orchard produce, all forest grandeur, all garden glory;-then perchance we may see something higher than "self

evolving powers" in the arrangement but for which ferns would have been in lieu of corn-fields, and our choicest fruit fir-cones! In the animal kingdom, as might be expected, the correlation of superiorities is equally or even more distinct. The vertebrate hemisphere is that of red blood; its avian and mammalian segments mark the limit of warm. It is also the region of the typical four limbs. Consistent with which is the occasional suppression, or, otherwise, the anticipating dawn of a characteristic endowment. Thus the serpenttribe, latest born of reptiles, are shorn of limbs; the earth-worm is exceptionally red-blooded; Amphioxus, alone of vertebrates, is not. Yet there are no reversals of fundamental order; no platform for the creations of poetic fancy, far less for the revolting burlesque of Swift; no vertebrate centipede, no suck-giving reptile; no griffins, or mermaids, or satyrs, or centaurs. There emerges therefore throughout organic nature, consistently with entire freedom from pedantic stiffness and rigidity, an all-pervading harmony of ascensive endowments. Although in nowise chained together as cause and effect, one mark of superiority tallies with the others. How is all this to be explained on Darwinian principles? Why has natural selection been so cramped

of

or so capricious that it has never produced, all those infinite ages, a mammalian cuttle-fish, or a canine plenocerebral? If all life is a medley of hap-hazard melting upwards, a pilotless drifting of type into type-whence this marvellous simulation of symmetry and system ; consistent subordination and of co-ordinated superiorities? Without the clue of Final Cause, indeed, the aggregate of living forms, though it opens a vast field for entertaining observation, ceases in strictness to yield materials for science. Not only do all laws for the study of nature vanish when the great principle of order pervading and regulating all her processes is given up, but all that imparts the deepest interest in the investigation of her wonders will have departed too." 92 For here as everywhere, science is nothing but the deciphering of system; and if there is no system to peruse there is no science to construct. The difference between the 'artificial' botanic system of Linnæus and the 'natural' system of Lindley just amounts to this-that the one classification does not correspond (as it was not meant to correspond) to the thought put into vegetable forms, while the other approximately does. So precisely in the twin kingdom of organic life. System and symmetry are everywhere the signals of Prescient and Presiding

Mind. The earth "is telling" as well as the heavens ; and it tells not of Development groping in the dark, but of God working in the light.

53. Step by step, indeed, is the great plan matured. 98 Were we speaking of a finite worker and a lower workmanship-comparing the Intuition which sees the end from the beginning with the process by which we feel our way painfully to improvement-we might, as has been already signified, conceive the first creative period as occupied in a series of experiments, resulting in the rejection of inferior life-fabrics, and in the fixing for plant and animal of the perfect Skeleton. Skeleton passed, Divine skill might be regarded as expatiating on the Reproductive System, sympathetically related in animals to the temperature and aeration of the blood. Mammalian structure reached, and its vegetable counterpart perfected, it might seem as if the assiduities of the great Architect were finally transferred to the Brain. In accordance with this view, though the language does not need to be similarly guarded and qualified, since it only expresses order, and not progressive insight or facility, the sub-vertebrate types may be contemplated as pioneers of the Backbone, the submammalian vertebrates as heralds of the Breast, and

the under-brained mammalia, in their allotted grades, as harbingers of Pleno-cerebral Man.

54. "To him that hath shall be given."

"What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals ! " 94 These are not

the common-places of an inflated rhetoric, but the revelation of highest truth to highest genius. On one favoured head have indeed been lavished the choicest benefactions of unstinting Heaven. The prerogative gift is engirt with befitting satellites. There is a strictly human as there is a simply animal correlation of superiorities. The master-brain brings its ministers and credentials in the erect posture and the boundlessly endowed hand; in the patience of maternal nurture, and the life-long character of the love it typifies; finally, in the faculty of rational language-the 'articulate-speaking' tongue.

55. The first group of auxiliary endowments belongs to the correlation of the backbone. In man alone is the skull so poised on the vertebral column as in no degree to topple forwards. The column itself, subsiding ver