and every one must be convinced that the beaver, elk, panther, buffalo, and other quadrupeds of North America are approaching extinction by perceptible steps. The fact is, we are not so far out of the dust, and chaos, and barbarism of antiquity as we had supposed. The very beginnings of our race are still almost in sight. Geological events which, from the force of habit in considering geological events, we had imagined to be located far back in the history of things, are found to have transpired at our very doors. Our own race has witnessed the dissolution of those continental glaciers which we have so long talked of as incidents of pre-Adamic history. Our own race has witnessed the submergence of Southern Europe; the detachment of the British Islands and Scandinavia from the continent; the wanderings of the great rivers of Eastern Asia; the submergence of thousands of square miles of the coast of China, so that the seats of ancient capitals are now rocky islets far at sea; the emergence of the ancient country of Lectonia; the drainage of the vast lake which once overspread the prairies of Illinois; the alternations of forests, and many other events which we once associated with high antiquity. It is the opinion of Hooker and Gray that the Falkland Islands, and others in the vicinity, have formed a part of the continent of South America during recent times, and that during this connection they acquired the continental fauna and flora. The Straits of Behring may even have been cut through since the early migrations of man and his contemporaries, the mammoth and reindeer; as in some distant future age the Isthmus of Darien, which now connects North and South America, may become a strait separating them. There is no more reason in this day than fifty years ago to claim a hundred thousand years for the past duration of our race.

I can not refrain from noting the peculiar relief which

the mind experiences in discovering the means to seize and comprehend some of the oppressively vast cycles which geology discloses. Here is a geological age—the Post-Tertiary Age-unfinished, it is true—which we almost possess the means of measuring. The life of our race reaches back beyond grand geological events. We have some notion, from the progress which our race has made during the period of written history, what must have been the duration of its infantile tutelage. Nay, the records of the Somme and the Tinière, as we now decipher them, afford us a common measure of the age of man and the duration of the Post-Tertiary. The vast changes that have transpired upon the coast of China, the shores of the Mediterranean, and other parts of the world, since man has been a beholder of geological history, seem to carry us back into the midst of the grand events which we have so solemnly and wonderingly contemplated from our seeming distance. These geological intervals, after all, are appreciably finite. The discovery affords a sensible relief to the mind so long oppressed by the contemplation of cycles which lose themselves in the haze of eternity.

One farther thought crowds itself into the company of these reflections. It is a thought of the growing perfection and exaltation of our race. How have we struggled through many ages, upward from companionship with beasts, from clothing of skins or bark, houses of caves, implements of chips of flint, a vague consciousness of a Superior Being-like the polyps' sense of light felt through all its body—through all the grades of pupilage, all the degrees of civilization, all the heights of mental and moral exaltation up to man as he now is! What a picture of progress is here! How abject once-how exalted, how spiritualized, how God-like now! Is not man approaching nearer to God? How vastly less of the brute-how infi

nitely more of the spiritual! Once he contented himself to capture prey sufficient for food, as the bear and the tiger did in whose company he lived. But-oh, how unconscious of his powers! he held even then the spark of divinity which the bear and the tiger had not, and he has risen, while they grovel on the plane from which he sprang. From age to age he has learned to commune more and more with the unseen-the ideal—the good and the true. He has made achievements which were once beyond the reach of dreams. Steam, electricity-what miracles do they not summon into mind? What does a retrospect of fifty years disclose? And is not man even yet on the march of improvement? What does a forward glance of fifty years unfold to imagination? What now irresolvable mysteries may not be explained in the school-books of our grandchildren? There is nothing which it is reverent to pronounce inscrutable among the works of God. It remains for us to penetrate the world of invisible things. We have already sundry rumors and pretences-shadows cast before, perhaps but as yet unsatisfactory and unintelligible, and, above all, unreduced to a philosophy. There must be a substratum that has not yet been sounded lying beneath the confused and apparently capricious phenomena of clairvoyance, mesmerism, dreams, and spiritual manifestations. With much imposition, there is much which can not be scientifically ignored. It remains to resolve the mystery of these sporadic phenomena―to reduce them to law, and to open under the law some regular and intelligible intercourse with the unseen world. The unseen world is destined to become like a newly discovered continent. We shall visit it-we shall hold communion with it—we shall wonder how so many thousand years could have passed without our being introduced to it. We shall learn of other modes of existence-intermediate, perhaps, between

body and spirit--having the forms and limitation in space peculiar to matter, with the penetrability and invisibility of spirit. And who can say that we may not yet obtain such knowledge of the modes of existence of other bodies as to discover the means of rendering them visible to our bodily eyes, as we now hold conversation with a friend upon the shores of the Pacific or in the heart of Europe, or fly with the superhuman velocity of the wind from the Atlantic to the Mississippi Valley. Then may we not at last gaze upon the "spiritual bodies" in which our departed friends reside, and discover the means of listening to their spirit voices, and join hands consciously with the heavenly host? Oh, who can say what these exhaustless and illimitable powers of the noble soul of man may not accomplish? Does the reader smile? I believe these are the suggestions more of philosophy than of fancy. Does he say it is only a dream of impossibilities? He assumes that he knows every thing which the infinite Intelligence can fathom. To fetter the human soul with assumed impossibilities is impiety. The bird which would soar first looks upward. The soul never attains that which it does not strive for. If we would commune consciously with the unseen world we must have both faith and works. In reference to the perfectibility and exaltation of the intellectual and moral nature of man, let no one say "impossible."

CHAPTER XXXIII.

WILL THERE BE AN ANIMAL SUPERIOR TO MAN?

HE that has glanced over the long line of organic his

tory, and observed how the ascent from the sea-weed to man has been effected, step by step, in regular succession, can not fail to start the inquiry, "Is man destined to be the last term of this series of improving types ?" I reply that, while this is peculiarly a question to be answered by Revelation, science affords some intimations which tend to assure us in the possession of the dignity which we now enjoy as the archonts of terrestrial existence.

In the first place, all geological preparations and ideas. converge in man. The world seems to have been designed with the view of stimulating to activity the powers of a thinking being. The universe is a rational product; and every department of it, and every isolated object, sustains an intelligible relation to other parts and objects. We are not left to infer, or even to know, that intelligent design is locked up in the secret plans of creation; but what is more suggestive, as well as more satisfactory, is the fact that this intelligence is patent before our eyes, so that we read, as it were, a revelation of the thought embodied in the works of the visible universe. And much of that which is not at once manifest yields to investigation, while a stimulus to investigation is found in the hints and suggestions which Nature seems intentionally to have dropped along the pathway of him who follows the beckoning of his thoughts. Not only were these germs of thought planted from time to time during the whole progress of the past