Pleistocene? If the infinity of worlds is not a desert, God moreover must have set life a-going there. Was the vera causa competent to that task too feeble to marshal the terrestrial sequence of species? Or is it consonant with the Creator's dignity to "breathe life" into a monad, but beneath His majesty to breathe life into a man?

It

36. There is nothing so regrettable in Mr. Darwin's book as his paltering with this momentous issue. Why seek to establish an insincere and flimsy truce between such schemes of the human origin and religion? reads like an unworthy mockery of faith and hope to be offered, even with the recommendation of "celebrated divines," the "ennobling" assurance of descent from a fungus in lieu of the Christian revelation of the Father and Futurity. 77 "Adam was the son of God."

Nay, in such case, in other than the olden meaning, he must

'say to Corruption, Thou art my father, and to the worm, Thou art my mother and my sister."

37. Happily, we may meet Mr. Darwin's scheme irrespective of its bearings on our hopes or our wishes, our holiest feelings or our worthiest fears. To Natural Selection, with unabated confidence, we may oppose the old belief in CREATIVE ELECTION; nay, with confidence

augmented in the ratio of that plenitude to which the proof of Divine forethought in the graduation of animals has now attained. On the earliest page of Origines Sacra, we read that the Creator brought to Adam every living creature to be named; "and whatsoever he called them, that was the name thereof." To the mind of a child this will call up the picture of a sort of animal review; a muster of quadrupeds and other creatures innumerable defiling in procession before the first father of our race, and receiving each a changeless name on the spot to go down to its offspring for ever. A worthier reading of the narrative, with due allowance for the partial veil of parable, will perhaps commend itself, however, to a more reflective age. It will be seen that Adam is here portrayed as the first holder and representative of that Adamic faculty in virtue of which Man stands forth the constituted Critic of Creation; sole earthly decipherer of the Almighty's purpose, and recorder of the wonders of His hand. Small likelihood, it may be owned, that a range of knowledge, the inheritance of patient centuries, was bestowed by miracle on our first parent to perish with him in his grave. But what a field for devout gratitude opens up on the perception that "Adam" here personifies the aggregate pre

rogative of universal human thought; the unborn genius of that illustrious succession to whom Nature has surrendered her secrets and told out her oracles, till the bewildering chaos of the starry movements above, and the threadless labyrinth of living forms below, have each resolved themselves into a splendid harmony of Creative wisdom and beneficent design. When, after long years of racking and unrewarding toil, Kepler at last unlocked the problem of the heavens, his emotion, it is said, found memorable vent-"O God, I think Thy thoughts after Thee!" Many centuries before, the geometers of ancient Greece had reasoned on the properties of the figures attained by the various cuttings of the cone. By the discovery of the modern, the stars in their courses shone out a celestial diagram of those self-same curves ; the veil was lifted from the face of space; and lo! the earth and her sisters swam in those very figures through the deep of the sky. The sun was environed by so many tracings of the Conic Sections, and Kepler saw it was so, and "thought God's thoughts after Him." In this his offspring, of a truth, thus binding into a unity planet, comet, and satellite, was Adam naming the creatures. He was naming them when Solomon studied vegetation, "from the cedar of

Lebanon to the hyssop on the wall." He was naming them when the penetrating genius of Aristotle first gave system to natural history. He was naming the creatures still in Linnæus and Cuvier. He is naming them to this hour in the labours of Richard Owen.

38. Indeed in the sense of their being accurately marshalled, compared, and ordinated, they are now almost named. The English explorer has placed the copestone on that fabric of classification of which the Stagirite traced the outlines and laid the foundations,78 and the Swede and the Frenchman built the walls.79

An undevout anatomist is mad.

r

So felt Galen when he described his work as a religious hymn in honour of the Creator." The most exact knowledge of the nineteenth century has not parted company from the sentiment. Nay, advancing illumination has but brightened the proof of Divine Forethought, not only as setting its print on special adaptations, but as stamping itself on the symmetry of the whole system of existence.

39. All Comparative Anatomy may be said to be tending towards the recognition and extrication of three supreme values, in the grouping of animals and the

graduation of life, past as well as present-the BACK

BONE, the BREAST, and the BRAIN. To appreciate these values aright is to read truly the " Vestiges of Creation;" because it is to trace the unfolding plan and to follow the measured "Footprints of the Creator." It is not in astronomy alone that the mind of man has been enabled to "think God's thoughts after Him."

And

the result of those researches which have been thus rewarded, in the study of animal life and its assigned prerogatives, may be exhibited, if I mistake not, as a Contracting Leet. The key to the significance of which is not, and cannot be, Selective Development, but must be, and is, Elective Design. (Page 89.)

40. The first leet, in the ascending order, takes note of all animals as Vertebrates or Sub-vertebrates : for every individual organism endowed with a backbone, there are countless millions without it.80 Hence this first or exterior leet leaves a master-group, palpably supreme in framework and ground - plan, over three other groups-the Articulate, the Convolute,81 and the Radiate between which and the master-group the Barrier of Backbone stands impassable; at least till it is explained how a butterfly could become a bird, or a snail a serpent, or a star-fish acquire the skeleton of the