Labrador, and nurture its people to become the "guardians of civilization."

These comprehensive views of continental development have been especially wrought out by that Christian gentleman and unrivaled scholar, Professor J. D. Dana, of New Haven.

It is wonderful to behold one of Nature's great plots worked out with such undeviating unity of purpose. Though incalculable ages have elapsed since the nucleus of the American continent was lifted above the waves, we find the announcement then made to have been faithfully prosecuted to the end. What convincing proofs of the unity of the Creative Intelligence! The plastic rocks have always been moulded by the hands of the same allproviding Artificer. How it exalts our apprehension of his infinite attributes to behold him bringing into existence a series of secondary causes, so simple in themselves, but working out a succession of results so complex in their details, and presenting a history stamped with such uniformity of plan, such harmony of parts, and such wisdom of design! But these are only his doings in the material world. When we contemplate the manifestation of his attributes presented to us by animated nature, every one imbued with the spirit and love of truth is compelled, with the poet, to exclaim,

"An undevout philosopher is mad.”

We turn, then, to consider the method which reigns among creatures exalted with the gift of life.

Who has not been amazed at the endless variety of animal forms existing upon the earth? There seems to be no conceivable conformation, no possible situation, no circumstances of element, climate, food, or condition, that have not been made the fitting and essential conditions of some

type of conscious existence. One animal dwells on the land, another in the soil, a third in the air, a fourth in salt water, a fifth in fresh; one burrows in a log, another in a rock, a third in the mud, a fourth in the flesh, or brain, or liver, or even the eye of another animal. Ponderous quadrupeds move through the jungle, wily serpents glide among the reeds, the centipede crouches under a stone, the minnow darts beneath the sedgy bank, and the lazy oyster sleeps in the mud at the bottom of the bay. We place beneath the microscope a specimen of the mud in which the oyster spends his drowsy life, or even a sample of the water in which the familiar frog delights, and lo! another world is revealed to our vision-vegetal and animal life in forms as varied as all that the unassisted eye has seen in the greater world.

Nor is this all. Every one has read of forms long since extinct of strange and monstrous forms that sported upon the earth before the empires of the brute creation. had been subjugated by the intellect of man. A stonemason of Cromarty has introduced to the world the Asterolepis of Stromness, and the Cephalaspis and Pterichthys of the "old red sandstone"-fishes which the most learned had at one time almost decided to throw into the company of turtles. Mantell has amazed us with stories of the Iguanodon, an immense lizard, believed by him to have been sixty feet in length, which crawled over the slime of the latest part of the Jurassic period. These all were forms of the middle ages of the world's history. As we run back through the æons preceding, we tread upon the graves of myriads of beings which in their day swarmed in the depths of the sea, but whose lineage and likeness are now known only in history. We push back through the dim dawn of being, and stand upon the sandy shore of that uneasy sea in which Creative Power first essayed

to mould the plastic clay into animal forms, and plant in them ethereal fire. How reverently do we turn up the cleaving stone, and gaze upon a little coral, a Lingula, or a trilobite, and think that these were the forms which God first exerted his skill upon, and placed first in possession of our round and verdant planet! And how different those beings from all we know upon the earth to-day! What an infinite range of aptitudes between that humble Lingula and the majestic mien of man! Such is the exhaustless fertility of God's conception.

We place ourselves, then, upon the threshold of animal existence, and inquire what course creative Power will pursue. Shall we witness a series of experiments for the slow perfection of a plan-models and methods tried and abandoned-detached essays, having no intelligent connection with an ultimate or central scheme? With a finite intelligence such experiments would have been unavoidable; but Nature has served no apprenticeships; the end has been contemplated from the beginning.

There are two things which strike the attention of every one who studies the history of the ancient populations of our globe. First, their forms and features, their habits, and the details of their living, are often in wide contrast with any thing we behold at the present day. Secondly, while so peculiar in their details, their fundamental features are identical with those of existing animals, so that we call them by the same generic titles-corals, shells, crustaceans. And if we scan the long line of being from the Laurentian to the present, we shall find nothing which may not be embraced under the most general designations which we apply to existing animals.

Now which of these two features of the fossil world is most instructive? Their wild and extravagant forms astonish us, and attract the curiosity of the marvel-loving

public. Their identity of fundamental plan impresses us with awe and reverence, and breathes the thoughts of a world-embracing scope of intelligence. The first converts the animal creation into a vast menagerie for the curious to wonder at; the latter shows it to be a lesson of wisdom traced by the finger of the Omniscient himself.

Let us see what is the nature of this identity of plan which runs through all existence and all time. It is a wonderful fact in Nature. From the epoch of the St. John's molluscs and the Potsdam trilobites, through all the dreary ages of the earth's preparation for man, but four fundamental types of animal structure have ever existed. All the varied forms of extinct monsters have been constructed upon one or the other of these four fundamental plans. Throughout the wide range of existing beings-inhabiting the deep sea, populating the air, swarming over the land, and the forest, and the jungle--countless equally in the number of individuals and in the number of distinguishable species-we discern but the same four foundation plans of structure which we find exemplified in the creations of the ancient world. As the seven fundamental intervals of the gamut have in their endless combinations afforded us all the varieties of melody that have ever greeted the ears of the world, so these four fundamental plans of animalic structure have furnished the endless variations and combinations which daily greet our senses with never-ceasing novelty and delight. As Agassiz has aptly and beautifully illustrated the idea, one of these fundamental plans is like the fundamental harmony upon which an endless set of variations may be played. Vary it to what extent you will, the characteristics of the theme continually recur. What are the zoological characters of these four fundamental forms may be learned from any elementary work on the science. It is the magnificent generalization--for which

we are indebted to the genius of George Cuvier-that I wish to impress. Suffice it to say that all animals are either vertebrated-possessed of a backbone; articulated-with an external horny crust, composed of rings, like insects, lobsters, and worms; molluscous-with soft bodies like slugs, very often covered by a shell, like snails and oysters; or radiated--with bodies composed of parts somewhat symmetrically arranged on all sides with reference to the centre, like the starfish and corals. I have named the most striking character which distinguishes each of these great branches of the animal kingdom. All the other parts conform to these; indeed, the basis of each peculiar plan is laid in the nervous system, at a very early period of embryonic development; and the hard parts-the bones and external crust-are moulded to this, so that, though the real basis of these distinctions is hidden from view, the external form and proportions become always an infallible exponent of the fundamental plan.

Three of these fundamental plans are called into requisition in the constitution of the very first population of our globe, omitting any consideration of the little-known existences of the Eözoic Time. The coral was a radiate; the Lingula was a mollusc; the trilobite was an articulate. The fourth plan was drawn upon before the close of the first great period of animal history, and was realized in the form of a fish.

In the very first chapter of the book of Nature, then, we read the announcement of a programme which is still in process of execution. The type of the primeval coral has sprouted into the sea-anemone, the sea-nettle, and the starfish. The type of the Lingula has been degraded into the Bryozoan and nummulite, and expanded into the clam, the snail, and the cuttle-fish. The type of the trilobite has varied into the worm below and the insect above; while