man, whom God created in his own image, the much-loved Benjamin of the family, last-born of all creatures. It is of itself an extraordinary fact, without reference to other considerations, that the order adopted by Cuvier in his animal kingdom as that in which the four great classes of vertebrate animals, when marshalled according to their rank and standing, naturally range, should be also that in which they occur in order of time. The brain which bears an average proportion to the spinal cord of not more than two to one came first: it is the brain of the fish; that which bears to the spinal cord an average proportion of two and a half to one succeeded it: it is the brain of the reptile; then came the brain averaging as three to one: it is that of the bird; next in succession came the brain that averages as four to one: it is that of the mammal; and last of all there appeared a brain that averages as twenty-three to one: reasoning, calculating man had come upon the scene. All the facts of geological science are hostile to the Lamarckian conclusion that the lower brains were developed into the higher. As if with the express intention of preventing so gross a misreading of the record, we find in at least two classes of animals-fishes and reptiles-the higher races placed at the beginning the slope of the inclined plane is laid, if one may so speak, in the reverse way, and, instead of rising toward the level of the succeeding class, inclines downward, with at least the effect, if not the design, of making the break where they meet exceedingly well marked and conspicuous. And yet the record does seem to speak of development and progression-not, however, in the province of organized existence, but in that of insensate matter subject to the purely chemical laws. It is in the style and character of the dwelling-place that gradual improvement seems to have taken place, not in the functions or the rank of any class of its inhabitants; and it is with special reference to this gradual improvement in our common mansion-house the earth, in its bearing on the "conditions of existence," that not a few of our reasonings regarding the introduction and extinction of species and genera must proceed. That definite period at which man was introduced upon the scene seems to have been specially determined by the conditions of correspondence which the phenomena of his habitation had at length come to assume with the predestined constitution of his mind. The large reasoning brain would have been wholly out of place in the earlier ages. It is indubitably the nature of man to base the conclusions which regulate all his actions on fixed phenomena: he reasons from cause to effect or from effect to cause; and when placed in circumstances in which, from some lack of the necessary basis, he cannot so reason, he becomes a wretched, timid, superstitious creature greatly more helpless and abject than even the inferior animals. This unhappy state is strikingly exemplified by that deep and peculiar impression made on the mind by a severe earthquake which Humboldt from his own experience so powerfully describes. "This impression," he says, " is not, in my opinion, the result of a recollection of those fearful pictures of devastation presented to our imagination by the historical narratives of the past, but is rather due to the sudden revelation of the delusive nature of the inherent faith by which we had clung to a belief in the immobility of the solid parts of the earth. We are accustomed prehension of a coming convulsion, and laughs at the fears of the natives; but as soon as his wish is gratified he is terrorstricken, and is involuntarily prompted to seek safety in flight." from early childhood to draw a contrast between the mobility of water and the immobility of the soil on which we tread, and this feeling is confirmed by the evidence of our senses. When, therefore, we suddenly feel the ground move beneath us, a mysterious Now, a partially consolidated planet temforce with which we were previously unac- pested by frequent earthquakes of such terquainted is revealed to us as an active dis- rible potency that those of the historic ages turber of stability. A moment destroys the would be but mere ripples of the earth's illusion of a whole life, our deceptive faith in surface in comparison could be no proper the repose of nature vanishes, and we feel trans- home for a creature so constituted. The ported into a realm of unknown destructive fish or reptile-animals of a limited range forces. Every sound, the faintest motion of the of instinct, exceedingly tenacious of life in air, arrests our attention, and we no longer most of their varieties, oviparous, prolific, trust the ground on which we stand. There and whose young immediately on their esis an idea conveyed to the mind of some uni- cape from the egg can provide for themversal and unlimited danger. We may flee selves-might enjoy existence in such cirfrom the crater of a volcano in active erup- cumstances to the full extent of their nartion or from the dwelling whose destruction row capacities; and when sudden death is threatened by the approach of the lava- fell upon them, though their remains, scatstream, but in an earthquake, direct our flight tered over wide areas, continue to exhibit whithersoever we will, we still feel as if we that distortion of posture incident to violent upon the very focus of destruction." dissolution which seems to speak of terror Not less striking is the testimony of Dr. and suffering, we may safely conclude there Tschudi in his Travels in Peru regarding was but little real suffering in the case: this singular effect of earthquakes on the they were happy up to a certain point, and human mind. "No familiarity with the unconscious for ever after. Fishes and repphenomenon can," he remarks, "blunt the tiles were the proper inhabitants of our planfeeling. The inhabitant of Lima, who from et during the ages of the earth-tempests; childhood has frequently witnessed these and when, under the operation of the chemconvulsions of nature, is roused from his ical laws, these had become less frequent sleep by the shock, and rushes from his and terrible, the higher mammals were apartment with the cry of Misericordia!' introduced. That prolonged ages of these The foreigner from the north of Europe, tempests did exist, and that they gradwho knows nothing of earthquakes but by ually settled down until the state of things description, waits with impatience to feel became at length comparatively fixed and the movements of the earth, and longs to stable, few geologists will be disposed to hear with his own ear the subterranean deny. The evidence which supports this sounds which he has hitherto considered special theory of the development of our fabulous. With levity he treats the ap- planet in its capabilities as a scene of or trod ganized and sentient being seems palpable at every step. Look first at these Grauwacke rocks, and after marking how in one place the strata have been upturned on their edges for miles together, and how in another the Plutonic rock has risen molten from below, pass on to the Old Red Sandstone and examine its significant platforms of violent death-its faults, displacements and dislocations; see, next, in the Coal-Measures, those evidences of sinking and ever-sinking strata for thousands of feet together; mark in the Oolite those vast overlying masses of trap stretching athwart the landscape far as the eye can reach; observe carefully how the signs of convulsion and catastrophe gradually lessen as we descend to the times of the Tertiary, though even in these ages of the mammiferous quadruped the earth must have had its oft-recurring ague-fits of frightful intensity; and then, on closing the survey, consider how exceedingly partial and unfrequent these earth-tempests have become in the recent periods. Yes, we find everywhere marks of at once progression and identity of progress made and yet identity maintained; but it is in the habitation that we find them, not in the inhabitants. There is a tract of country in Hindustan that contains nearly as many square miles as all Great Britain covered to the depth of hundreds of feet by one vast overflow of trap; a tract similarly overflown which exceeds in area all England occurs in Southern Africa. The earth's surface is roughened with such, mottled as thickly by the Plutonic masses as the skin of the leopard by its spots. The trap district which surrounds our Scottish metropolis and imparts so imposing a character to its scenery is too in considerable to be marked on geological maps of the world that we yet see streaked and speckled with similar memorials, though on an immensely vaster scale, of the eruption and overflow which took place in the earthquake ages. What could man have done on the globe at a time when such outbursts were comparatively common occurrences? What could he have done where Edinburgh now stands during that overflow of trap porphyry of which the Pentland range forms but a fragment, or that outburst of greenstone of which but a portion remains in the dark ponderous coping of Salisbury Craigs, or when the thick floor of rock on which the city stands was broken up like the ice of an Arctic sea during a tempest in spring, and laid on edge from where it leans against the Castle Hill to beyond the quarries at Joppa? The reasoning brain would have been wholly at fault in a scene of things in which it could neither foresee the exterminating calamity while yet distant nor control it when it had come; and so the reasoning brain was not produced until the scene had undergone a slow but thorough process of change, during which, at each progressive stage, it had furnished a platform for higher and still higher life. When the coniferæ could flourish on the land and fishes subsist in the seas, fishes and cone-bearing plants were created; when the earth became a fit habitat for reptiles and birds, reptiles and birds were produced; with the dawn of a more stable and mature. state of things the sagacious quadruped was ushered in; and, last of all, when man's house was fully prepared for him-when the data on which it is his nature to reason and calculate had become fixed and certainthe reasoning, calculating brain was moulded by the creative finger, and man became a living soul. Such seems to be the true reading of the wondrous inscription chiselled deep in the rocks. It furnishes us with no clue by which to unravel the unapproachable mysteries of creation: these mysteries belong to the wondrous Creator, and to him only. We attempt to theorize upon them and to reduce them to law, and all nature rises up against us in our presumptuous rebellion. A stray splinter of cone-bearing wood, a fish's skull or tooth, the vertebra of a reptile, the humerus of a bird, the jaw of a quadruped,-all, any, of these things, weak and insignificant as they may seem, become in such a quarrel too strong for us and our theory: the puny fragment, in the of truth, forms as irresistible a weapon as the dry bone did in that of Samson of old, and our slaughtered sophisms lie piled up, "heaps upon heaps," before it. grasp HUGH MILLer. THE FIRST DEATH. HE first conviction that there is death THE in the house is perhaps the most awful moment of youth. When we are young, we think that not only ourselves, but that all about us, are immortal. Until the arrow has struck a victim round our own hearth, "death" is merely an unmeaning word; until then its casual mention has stamped no idea upon our brain. There are few, even among those least susceptible of thought and emotion, in whose hearts and minds the first death in the family does not act as a very powerful revelation of the mysteries of life and of their own being; there are few who after such a catastrophe do not look upon the |