however indirectly, towards the freest and highest Christian improvement, are the Queen's Colleges lately established in Dublin, Galway, and Cork, Ireland. Most, if not all, of the collegiate and academical institutions of Great Britain heretofore existing, have been exclusive and sectarian. Even those which the Unitarians have controlled, by being sustained and patronized only by Unitarians, have contributed towards the subdivisions of Protestantism. The new colleges of Ireland are to be free of all religious tests, and are to furnish only academical and literary instructions. Professors and officers of all religious denominations, Roman Catholic and Protestant, are united in their administration, and pupils from each Christian fold are to look to their respective religious teachers for spiritual advice. There are forty free scholarships in each college, thirty of which are of the value of £30 each per annum, and ten of £50 each. The colleges were opened on October 30th, 1849. Their prospects are encouraging. No trouble is apprehended in the operation of either of them, except it may be in that at Galway, the head of which is a Roman Catholic partisan. The Rev. William Hincks, former editor of the London (Unitarian) Inquirer, whose visit to this country, two years ago, introduced him to many of our brethren as a man of learning and of high excellences of character, has been appointed Professor of Natural History in Queen's College at Cork. By a letter from him we learn that he has entered on his duties, and that, though the cares and responsibilities of the institution will by no means lie lightly on himself and his colleagues, yet they have given themselves to the work in good hope. If these Irish colleges do indeed prosper, their influence will be greatly felt over that unhappy land. 2. Song of Praise. From the German of Stolberg. 3. A Gazelle. From the German of Rückert. VII. MEMOIR AND WRITINGS OF THE LATE DAVID HALE 282 Memoir of David Hale, late Editor of the Journal of Commerce. With Selections from his Miscellaneous A History of Greece. By George Grote. IX. THE DOCTRINE OF THE RESURRECTION 1. Religious Lectures on Peculiar Phenomena in the Four Seasons. Delivered to the Students in Amherst College in 1845, 1847, 1848, and 1849. By Edward 2. The Second Advent: or, What do the Scriptures teach respecting the Second Coming of Christ, the NOTICES OF RECENT PUBLICATIONS. Taylor's Loyola, and Jesuitism in its Rudiments, 319 323 324 Report of Antislavery Society, Publications of Messrs. Phillips, Sampson, & Co., INTELLIGENCE. Religious Intelligence. -- Society for the Relief of Aged 331 331 332 333 333 333 334 334 338 THE CHRISTIAN EXAMINER AND RELIGIOUS MISCELLANY. MARCH, 1850. ART. I. GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF ANIMALS. THE greatest obstacles in the way of investigating the laws of the distribution of organized beings over the surface of our globe, are to be traced to the views generally entertained about their origin. There is a prevailing opinion, which ascribes to all living beings upon earth one common centre of origin, from which it is supposed they, in the course of time, spread over wider and wider areas, till they finally came into their present state of distribution. And what gives this view a higher recommendation in the opinion of most men is the circumstance, that such a method of distribution is considered as revealed in our sacred writings. We hope, however, to be able to show that there is no such statement in the book of Genesis; that this doctrine of a unique centre of origin and successive distribution of all animals is of very modern invention, and that it can be traced back for scarcely more than a century in the records of our science. There is another view, to which, more recently, naturalists have seemed to incline; namely, the assuming several centres of origin, from which organized beings were afterwards diffused over wider areas, in the same manner as according to the first theory, the difference being only in the assumption of several centres of dispersion instead of a single one. We have recently been led to take a very different view VOL. XLVIII. 4TH S. VOL. XIII. NO. II. 16 of the subject, and shall presently illustrate the facts upon which the view rests. But before we undertake to introduce more directly this subject, there is another point which requires preliminary investigation, which seems to have been entirely lost sight of by all those, without exception, who have studied the geographical distribution of animals, and which seems to us to be the keystone of the whole edifice, whenever we undertake to reconstruct the primitive plan of the geographical distribution of animals and plants. The distribution of organized beings over the surface of our globe in its present condition cannot be considered in itself, and without an investigation, at the same time, of the geographical distribution of those organized beings which have existed in former geological periods, and had become extinct before those of the present creation were called into being. For it is well ascertained now that there is a natural succession in the plan of creation, an intimate connection between all the types of the different periods of the creation from its beginning up to this day; so much so, that the present distribution of animals and plants is the continuation of an order of things which prevailed for a time at an earlier period, but which came to an end before the existing arrangement of things was introduced. The animal kingdom, as we know it in our days, is therefore engrafted upon its condition in earlier periods, and it is to the distribution of animals in these earlier periods that we must look, if we would trace the plan of the Creator from its commencement to its more advanced development in our own time. If there is any truth in the view that animals and plants originated from a common centre, it must be at the same time shown that such an intimate connection between the animals existed at all periods, or, at least, we should, before assuming such a view for the animals living in our days, discover a sufficient reason for ascribing to them another mode of dispersion than to the animals and plants of former periods. But there is such a wonderful harmony in all the great processes of nature, that, at the outset, we should be carefully on our guard against assuming different modes of distribution for the organized beings of former periods, and for those which at present cover the globe. Should it be plain that the ani |