means, through which man's relationship to his Maker should be more completely demonstrated to all intelligences.

If, in all departments of creation, and especially in every living thing, we find an adaptation in its nature, a fitness for its place, must we not believe that man, by common understanding acknowledged to be the highest type of being living on the earth, came from his Maker's hand as perfect for his purpose and his place as lower beings are for theirs? Each type of the 100,000 species of animals perfectly fulfils the idea of its nature in bodily form and corresponding disposition. Shall we imagine that man was created as an exception to the rule? As there is an idea or model in the constitution of each creature, that idea must have been completely expressed in the first, the directlycreated, specimen of each creature. And it is only in so far as we perceive that idea in the formation of any creature examined by us, that we find a sufficient reason for believing it to be the work of Omniscient and Almighty intelligence, a thing made with definite and wise design. In short, we believe in God as the Maker of all, because we discover something of God's thought expressed in everything we know, and we feel that the perfection and beauty of anything consist in its fulfilment of the idea which is one with its design and its 'make.' We therefore conclude that man was complete when first made; complete in all that constitutes his individual essence and excellence; complete as any creature can be. The idea, thought, design, in

tended to be expressed in the perfect constitution of man, will be precisely the likeness of the first man. But we are not capable of a full conception of that man, and our nearest approach to the formation of the necessary idea is produced in our minds by an effort to bring together in one man whatever we find most admirable in the mental character and bodily presence of the best men we know, or have ever heard of. The perfection of the first man essentially included whatever is nearest to perfection in any man; or if not, we have to account for the idea of a perfect man so far existing in our own minds either from reason or intuition.

This mode of conducting the argument before us is unavoidable. In conceiving the direct creation of man, we necessarily put aside the consideration of any hypothesis that would explain man's present state of existence by supposing his development from the germ of some lower animal, or his incidental production as the result (foreseen or unforeseen by the Maker of life and mind) of natural effort to do the best amongst an imaginary brutal ancestry. We believe in the great gulf fixed, at least psychologically, between ourselves and any brutes, a gulf not bridged over by any theory yet propounded, and therefore we might quite philosophically avoid all enquiries into our original ancestry and how we stood with the primates;' but nevertheless, not to ignore the disquisitions of those who shrewdly suspect themselves and us of a very low origin, occasion will perhaps be found by and by still

more fully to consider what they say. In the meantime, a few indisputable facts and circumstances, in respect of mankind in general, demand attention. The examination of those circumstances and facts will prepare us the better to think of man's place and nature. We shall see that while an awful mystery hangs over our existence,

And out of darkness come the hands

That reach through nature, moulding men,

(TENNYSON)

yet the Power that fashioned man fixed a divine impress on his body and also imparted a mind to read its meaning.

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CHAPTER XIII.

PARENTAGE, INDIVIDUALITY, PERSONALITY, GOD.

1. FIRST, there is the grand fact, every living being on earth has sprung from a parentage, from other beings more or less like itself.

Reasoning on this fact as the demonstration of a law imposed on all vitalised nature, to what conclusion are we conducted but that, at the very creation of that nature, parentage was included as a condition of the perpetuation of life? And if so, every kind of living being was created at the beginning, as distinct and perfect according to its kind as any of its offspring can be. Parentage is a law of living existence as we now see it, and therefore if living existence, as we see it, is created existence, parentage of kinds must have been a law essentially in the creation at first. There is no other mode of life now but that derived from parentage, like begetting like with limited variation. This is a fact asserting itself, and any hypothesis asserting the contrary has to account for the existence of parentage as a universal law, and at the same time to prove that it is not wanted, by showing some other mode of derivation sufficient for the purpose of producing

all known kinds of life. But this has not yet been done.

Certain plants may be perpetuated by buds, cuttings, and offshoots. The common freshwater polype, too, being divided into several parts, each part becomes a perfect polype. Aphides, and some other creatures, are produced from each other through several successive lives without sexes. These facts prove the wonderful diversity of operation in nature. What is a bud, a cutting, an offshoot? A new plant derived in each case from a parent as much as a seed itself. And what does the division of the polype, spontaneous or otherwise, indicate? Only that the definite form of life existing in the whole polype is also existing in every part of it, so that, as in the case of buds and cuttings from the parent plant, a new being similar to the parent is germinally formed in every enlargement or increase of its own organisation, each organised part or limb being in fact a repetition in embryo of the original or parent individual. The polype thus propagates itself by throwing off germs, at first rooted like a bud or a branch in its own stem. It is a parent in the entire sense, producing its own likeness in every additional growth of its own body, without the intervention or influence of another life. Cut off its head, and that head produces body and tail; cut off its tail and that produces body and head. There is something, some specific life-force, in each part capable of evolving the perfect animal in exact and undeviating resemblance to the parent organism from which it was detached. There is, so to say,