limits in its specific range, then suddenly expanded to the widest. Man occupies the whole earth; he is not only the finishing stroke, but he excludes a successor. Consider, lastly, man's erect attitude. When the fish, the earliest representative of the type which embraces man, was introduced into the waters of the Devonian seas, the vertebral axis was hung in a horizontal position, and the animal was not endowed with even the power to raise the head by bending the neck. Many of the Carboniferous fishes acquired this power, but they remained suspended in the element of lowest vital relations. The Triassic and Jurassic Enaliosaurs, while they continued to inhabit the water, breathed the air, and held the head habitually a little elevated. The Crocodilians to these endowments added the power to crawl upon the ground. The Deinosaurs of the Cretaceous Age walked upon the land with the body elevated above the ground, but the head remaining nearly horizontal. The birds assumed an oblique position of the spinal axis; and most of the Tertiary mammals, which followed them, could carry their attitudes from the horizontal to the semi-erect. The higher monkeys lived normally in a sub-erect position, but still supporting themselves by the four extremities. Man first and alone assumed a perpendicular attitude, and turned his countenance toward heaven, and talked with the Being who formed him. "Prona cum spectent animalia cætera terram, It is evident no farther progress can be made in this direction. The elevation of the spinal axis has reached a mathematical limit; the consummation of organic exaltation is attained. These various considerations concur in justifying the as sumption that the Author of Nature regards his work as completed. The universal belief of the Christian world, therefore, that the termination of the existence of the human race will mark the consummation of the history of the present order of things, seems to be founded equally in our mental constitution and in the philosophy of the material creation. CHAPTER XXXIV. POPULAR BELIEFS IN PERIODICAL CATASTROPHES TO THE UNIVERSE. HENCE come we, and whither are we tending? WH Whence this ponderous globe which we inhabit ? What vicissitudes has it undergone? What is its final destination? And when the drama of the world is closed, what then? Whence this magnificent system of a visible universe? and of what inscrutable purposes does it form a part? What is that which is first of all-the cause of all -self-existent, uncreated, without beginning and without end? These are grand problems-the most stupendous with which the human mind can grapple. We can not presume to offer their final solution, but we may venture to inquire what light is thrown upon their solution by the converging rays of all the sciences. These are problems which have engaged the attention of thoughtful minds in every age of the world. If we look into the pages of ancient philosophy, we find it every where occupied with inquiries into the origin and destiny of the universe-the different orders or kinds of existence-the absolute existence, on which all other being depends--the nature of Deity and of man, and their relations to each other and to other grades of existence. These have been the great, ever-present, obtrusive mysteries with which the human mind has always been grappling. On the shores of classic Greece we find Thales, Pythagoras, Zeno, Epicurus, Plato, and a long and brilliant line of thinkers ponder ing over the problems of mind and matter. On the other side of the Mediterranean we hear the same interrogatories resounding from the region of civilization's dawn, in Egypt, and in far-off India and China other races have found themselves confronted by the self-same mysteries, and, with equal courage, have demanded from the depths of Nature their solution. These sublime questions have stared with equal steadiness in the face of Greek, Egyptian, Phoenician, Chaldæan, Jew, Persian, Arabian, and Hindoo. Perennial problems, omnipresent as mind itself, they have reappeared upon American shores; and we find that the sacred books of the Aztecs yield us a cosmogony and a theogony no less sublime than those of India, Persia, and Greece. Problems which, in all ages, have stood foremost in the conflict of the human mind with the vast unknown, would mock at the attempt to grapple with them in the brief compass of a chapter or two; but we can not pass them by without taking a few bearings upon their salient points. Waiving entirely the questions which arise in reference to moral and intelligent existences, let us attempt to bring together a body of considerations bearing upon the doctrine of periodical destructions and renovations in the material universe. It will thus, I think, be made to appear that the existing order of things is not eternal, and that a crisis is approaching which will demand the interposition of a power superior to Nature. Dr. Reid, the Scottish metaphysician, asserts that God has implanted in the mind of man an original principle by which he believes in and expects the continuance of the course of Nature. This, evidently, is an error, since our expectation of the continued recurrence of natural phenomena in the same order is based upon our past experience, and is, consequently, an induction instead of a necessary truth. The fact is, that in all ages of the world, and among every people who have attained to a philosophic system, the contrary belief has been prevalent. The existing order of Nature has been regarded as temporary, and the flow of terrestrial and even of cosmical events has been conceived as destined to be broken up by universal revolutions. The Chaldeans, according to Berosus, held that the world is periodically destroyed by deluges and conflagrations. The deluges they believed to result from a great conjunction of the planets in the constellation Capricorn, and the conflagrations from a similar conjunction in the constellation Cancer. Some of the Christian fathers adopted these views. The Chaldeans also calculated the end of the world from the period occupied in the retrograde movement of the stars through one complete circumference-a phenomenon due to the precession of the equinoxes, and accomplished, as modern science has shown, in a period of 21,000 to 26,000 years. The Chaldean philosophers had also their Annus Magnus, or Great Year, at the end of which the present terrestrial and cosmical order would be brought to a termination by an ordeal of fire, after which it would be again renewed. The ancient Scythians, in their dispute with the Egyptians in reference to the relative antiquity of their respective nations, reminded them that the world undergoes revolutions both by fire and water. The The Egyptians, according to Plato, fancied that the heavens and earth originated in a promiscuous pulp. From this the elements separated of their own accord; fire sprang from the upper regions; the air began to move. warmth of the sun bred living creatures innumerable in the plastic mud, and these, according to the predominance of the various elements, betook themselves to the air, the water, or the solid land. Man was generated from the slime of the river Nile. By a gradual improvement of the |