LECTURE SIXTH.

GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES.

PART II.

Up till the introduction of man upon our planet, the humbler creatures, his predecessors, formed but mere figures in its various landscapes, and failed to alter or affect by their works the face of nature. They were conspicuous, not from what they did, but from what they were. At a very early period reefs of coral, the work of minute zoophytes, whitened the shallows of the ocean, or encircled with pale, ever-broadening frames, solitary islands green with the shrubs and trees of extinct floras; but, though products of the animal world, they were not built up under the direction of even an instinctive intelligence, but were as entirely the results of a vegetative process of mere growth as the forests or reed-brakes of the old Carboniferous savannahs. At a later time an ant-hill might be here and there descried, rearing its squat brown pyramid amid the recesses of some Oolitic forest; or, in a period still more recent, the dam of the gigantic beaver might be seen extending its minute eye-like circlet of blue

amid the windings of some bosky ravine of the Pliocene age; or existing as a little mound-skirted pond, with the rude half-submerged cottage of the creature, its architect, rising beside it, on some rivulet of the Pleistocene. But how inconsiderable such works, compared with the wide extent of prospect in which they were included! How entirely inconspicuous rather, save when placed in the immediate foreground of the pictures into whose composition they entered! Not until the introduction of man upon earth do we find a creature whose works sensibly affect and modify the aspects of nature. But when man appears, how mighty the change which he effects! Immediately on his creation he takes under his care the vegetable productions of use and show: it becomes his business to keep and dress a garden. He next becomes a tiller of fields, then a planter of vineyards: here he cuts down great forests; there he rears extensive woods. He makes himself places of habitation; and busy cities spring up as the trophies of his diligence and skill. His labours, as they grow upon the waste, affect the appearance of vast continents; until at length, from many a hill-top and tall spire, scarce a rood of ground can be seen on which he has not built, or sown, or planted, or around which he has not erected his walls or reared his hedges. Man, in this great department of industry, is what none of his predecessors upon the earth ever were,— a fellow-worker" with the Creator. He is a mighty improver of creation. We recognise that as improvement which adapts nature more thoroughly to man's own necessities and wants, and renders it more pleasing both to his sense of the æsthetic and to his more material senses also. He adds to the beauty of the flowers which he takes under his charge,-to the delicacy and

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fertility of the fruits; the seed of the wild grasses become corn beneath his care; the green herbs grow great of root or bulb, or bulky and succulent of top and leaf; the wild produce of nature sports under his hand; the rose and lily broaden their disks and multiply their petals; the harsh green crab swells out into a delicious golden-rhinded apple, streaked with crimson; the productions of his kitchen-garden, strangely metamorphosed to serve the uses of his table, bear forms unknown to nature; an occult law of change and development inherent to these organisms meet in him with the deve loping instinct and ability, and they are re-generated under his surveillance. Nor is his influence over many of the animals less marked. The habits which he imparts to the parents become nature, in his behalf, in their offspring. The dog acquires, under his tutelage, the virtues of fidelity to a master and affection to a friend. The ox and horse learn to assist him in the labours of the fields. The udders of the cow and goat distend beneath his care far beyond the size necessary in the wild state, and supply him with rich milk, and the other various products of the dairy. The fleece of the sheep becomes finer of texture and longer of fibre in his pens and folds; and even the indocile silk-worm spins, in his sheltered conservatories, and among the mulberry trees which he has planted, a larger, and brighter, and more glistening cocoon. Man is the great creatureworker of the world,-its one created being, that, taking up the work of the adorable Creator, carries it on to higher results and nobler developments, and finds a field for his persevering ingenuity and skill in every province in which his Maker had expatiated before him. He is evidently-to adopt and modify the remark of Oken-God's image "manifest in the flesh."

Surveyed from the special point of view furnished by this peculiar nature of man, unique in creation, all the past of our planet divides into two periods;—. the period, inclusive of every age known to the geologist, during which only the Creator wrought; and the period during which man has wrought, and to which all human history belongs. In such a view we are prcsented with two sets of works,-those of the Creatorworker, and those of the creature-worker; and the vast fund of materials on which the natural theologian frames his arguments demonstrative of design or contrivance, assumes a new significancy and interest when employed as evidence that there exists a certain correspondence of nature and intellect between the two workers, human and Divine. The ability of accomplishing the same ends by the same means,-in other words, of thinking and acting in the same practical tract,-indicates a similarity, if not identity, of intellectual nature. In the Chinese centre of civilization, for instance, printing, gunpowder, the mariner's compass, with the various chemical and mechanical arts of elegant life, were originated without concert with the European centre of civilization, simply because in China, as in Europe, the same human faculties, prompted by the same tastes and necessities, had expatiated in the same tracts of invention, and had, as a consequence, educed the same results. I was much struck, when spending half an hour in a museum illustrative of the arts in China, by the identity of these with our own, especially in the purely mechanical departments; and again, when similarly employed in that apartment devoted, in the British Museum, to the domestic utensils of the ancient Egyptians. The identity of the more common contrivances which I witness

ed, with familiar contrivances in our own country, I regarded as altogether as conclusive of an identity of mind in the individuals who had originated them, as if I had actually seen human creatures at work on them all. One class of productions showed me that the potter's wheel and the turning-lathe had been known and employed as certainly in China and ancient Egypt as in Britain. Another, that their weaving processes must have been nearly the same. The Chinese know, for instance, as well as ourselves, that patterns can be delicately brought out,-as in the damasks,-without the assistance of colour, simply by exposing silken or flaxen fibre at different angles to the light; and they have fallen, as their work shows, on the right methods of producing it. And the Egyptians anticipated us in even our most homely household contrivances. They even fermented their bread and trussed their fowls after the same fashion; and thus gave evidence, in theso familiar matters, that they thought and contrived “after the manner of men." Now, in acquainting myself with the organisms of the geologic periods, I have been similarly but more deeply impressed by what I must be permitted to term the human cast and character of the contrivances which they exemplified. Not only could I understand the principles on which they were constructed, but further, not a few of them had, I found, been actually introduced into works of human invention ages ere they were discovered in the rock. What the great Creator-worker had originated in the Paleozoic and Secondary periods, had been in after times originated by the little creature-worker, wholly unaware that his contrivance had been anticipated, and was but a repctition of a previously executed design. In the later geologic ages the organization of the various extinct