174 THE RECENT. 



nature continue unimpaired, the balance of vital activity 

 must be maintained. Even man's extirpations and modifi- 

 cations, extensive as they appear, are in a great measure 

 counterbalanced by his introduction and wider distribution 

 of the cultivated plants and domesticated animals in all 

 their endless varieties. The scheme of Life is as progres- 

 sive now as it ever was, and man himself is as subject to 

 its laws as the meanest form he modifies. The pre-historic 

 nomades of Asia, the stone-implement makers of Europe, 

 and the mound-builders of America, have passed away, and 

 are less known to us in their aspects, thoughts, and doings 

 than their contemporary mammoths, great deer, and wild 

 oxen. The temple-reariDg, idol-worshipping races of Baby- 

 lonia, Egypt, and Central America, have perished, and their 

 characters are merely beginning to be revealed to us ; while 

 our more immediate predecessors, the Greeks, Romans, Celts, 

 and early Saxons, have partaken of the same doom, and 

 much of their history remains in doubt and obscurity. Thus, 

 physical features, habits of life, modes of thought, social 

 systems, and religious beliefs all that renders humanity dis- 

 tinctive, and confers on it its highest attributes have ever 

 been as mutable and progressive as the phases of nature by 

 which they are surrounded ; nor do the realities of the pre- 

 sent exhibit the slightest symptom of persistence and 

 finality. As the pala3ozoic passed into the mesozoic, and 

 the mesozoic into the recent ; so the recent is pressing on 

 to a future, that will be stamped by features physical and 

 vital, social and moral peculiarly its own. 



Supposing, then, that science could determine all the 

 physical and vital conditions of the earth in other words, 

 could read her history up to the present moment the 

 question naturally arises, How far we are entitled, in the 

 spirit of philosophy, to presume on what is yet to follow ? 



