II 



OBJECTIONS. 155 



traveller, who sees the mountains soaring into the 

 sky and can hardly discern where the deep 

 shadowed crags and roseate peaks end, and where 

 the clouds of heaven begin. Surely the awe- 

 struck voyager may be excused if, at first, he re- 

 fuses to believe the geologist, who tells him that 

 these glorious masses are, after all, the hardened 

 mud of primeval seas, or the cooled slag of 

 subterranean furnaces — of one substance with 

 the dullest clay, but raised by inward forces 

 to that place of proud and seemingly inaccessible 

 glory. 



But the geologist is right; and due reflection 

 on his teachings, instead of diminishing our rever- 

 ence and our wonder, adds all the force of intel- 

 lectual sublimity to the mere aesthetic intuition of 

 the uninstructed beholder. 



And after passion and prejudice have died 

 away, the same result will attend the teachings of 

 the naturalist respecting that great Alps and Andes 

 of the living world — Man. Our reverence for the 

 nobility of manhood will not be lessened by the 

 knowledge that Man is, in substance and in struc- 

 ture, one with the brutes; for, he alone possesses 

 the marvellous endowment of intelligible and 

 rational speech, whereby, in the secular period 

 of his existence, he has slowly accumulated and 

 organised the experience which is almost wholly 

 lost with the cessation of every individual life 

 in other animals; so that, now, he stands raised 



