EVOLUTION OF LIFE. 63 



The shark has been known, at one morsel, to 

 devour a man, and the large boa snake has 

 swallowed, without any mastication, animals 

 of considerable magnitude, not only pigs and 

 deer, but even a buffalo ! 



Witk respect to the power in the organs of 

 sense, the superiority of brutes over the hu- 

 man species is equally evident. What man is 

 there, whose eye is equal, in acuteness, to pre- 

 dacious birds, or to the animals of the feline 

 race ? whose olfactory organs can bear any com- 

 parison with those in many species of dogs ? 

 whose muscles are equally strong with those of 

 the lion or the elephant? An elephant by the 

 power of its proboscis, will raise, with the great- 

 est ease, a thirty-two pounder ; and a lion, by 

 a stroke of his paw, will break the back bone 

 of a horse, seize, and carry him off between 

 his jaws, and afterwards devour him for food. 

 What individual is there whose loco-motive 

 powers are equal to those of the most sluggish 

 greyhound ? While our best pedestrians believe 

 that they have performed feats the most asto- 

 nishing, by walking for four or five successive 

 days, forty or fifty miles, assisted by intervals 

 of sleep and generous diet different kinds of 

 fish will traverse, without resting or sleeping, 

 from one continent to another. It is a well 

 known fact, that the same shark has followed 

 the track of the same ship, from the Indian 



