116 PTof, Owen on Recent and Fossil Mammalia. 



changes of organic structure ; and that, in all these instances of change, 

 the organs, as far as we could comprehend their use, were exactly those 

 best suited to the functions of the being. Hence we not only show 

 intelligence evoking means adapted to the end ; but, at successive 

 times and periods, producing a change of mechanism adapted to a 

 change in external conditions. Thus the highest generalizations in the 

 science of organic bodies, like the Newtonian laws of universal matter, 

 lead to the unequivocal conviction of a great First Cause, which is 

 certainly not mechanical. 



Unfettered by narrow restrictions, — unchecked by the timid and 

 unworthy fears of mistrustful minds, clinging, in regard to mere 

 physical questions, to beliefs, for which the Author of all truth has 

 been pleased ro substitute knowledge, — our science becomes connected 

 with the loftiest of moral speculations ; and I know of no topic more 

 fitting to the sentiments with which I desire to conclude the present 

 course. 



If I believed, — to use the language of a gifted contemporary, that 

 the imagination, the feelings, the active intellectual powers, bearing on 

 the business of life, and the highest capacities of our nature, were 

 blunted and impaired by the study of physiological and palaeontological 

 phenomena, I should then regard our science as little better than a 

 moral sepulchre, in which, like the strong man, we were burying our- 

 selves and those around us in ruins of our own creating. 



But surely we must all believe too firmly in the immutable attri- 

 butes of that Being, in whom all truth, of whatever kind, finds its 

 proper resting-place, to think that the principles of physical and moral 

 truth can ever be in lasting collision.* 



[R. O.] 



* Sedgwick, Address to the Geological Society, 1831. 



