176 THE PROGRESS OF DEGRADATION. 



There was a time in wliich the ichthyic form constituted the 

 highest example of life ; but the seas during that period did 

 not swarm with fish of the degraded type. There was, in 

 like manner, a time when all the carnivora and all the her- 

 bivorous quadrupeds were represented by reptiles ; but there 

 are no such magnificent reptiles on the earth now as reigned 

 over it then. There was an after time, when birds seem to 

 have been the sole representatives of the warm-blooded ani- 

 mals ; but we find, from the prints of their feet left in sand- 

 stone, that the tallest men might have 



*' Walked under their huge legs, and peeped about." 



Further, there was an age when the quadrupedal mammals 

 were the magnates of creation ; but it was an age in which 

 the sagacious elephant, now extinct save in the compara- 

 tively small Asiatic and African circles, and restricted to two 

 species, was the inhabitant of every country of the Old World, 

 from its southern extremity to the frozen shores of the north- 

 ern ocean ; and when vast herds of a closely allied and equally 

 colossal genus occupied its place in the new. And now, in 

 the times of the high-placed human dynasty, — of those for- 

 mally delegated monarchs of creation whose nature it is to 

 look behind them upon the past, and before them, with min- 

 gled fear and hope, upon the future, — do we not as certainly 

 see the elements of a state of ever-sinking degradation, which 

 is to exist for ever, as of a state of ever-increasing perfecti- 

 bility, to which there is to be no end ? Nay, of a higher 

 race, of which we know but little, this much we at least 

 know, that they long since separated into two great classes, — 

 that of the " elect angels," and of " angels that kept not their 

 first estate." 



