208 SUPERPOSITION NOT PARENTAL RELATION. 



across the entire scale of life, animal and vegetable ; but it 

 contracts as it rises into the past : man, — the quadrumana, 

 — the quadrupedal mammal, — ^the bird, — and the reptile, — 

 are each in succession struck from off its breadth, till we at 

 length see it with the vertebrata, represented by only the fish, 

 narrowing, as it were, to a point ; and though the clouds of 

 the upper region may hide its extreme apex, we infer, from 

 the declination of its sides, that it cannot penetrate much 

 farther into the profound. "When Steele and Addison were 

 engaged in breaking up, piecemeal, their Spectator Club, — 

 killing off good Sir Roger de Coverly with a defluction, mar- 

 rying Will Honeycomb to his tenant's daughter, and sending 

 away Captain Sentry and Sir Andrew Freeport to their estates 

 in the country, — it was shrewdly inferred that the " Specta- 

 tor" himself was very soon to quit the field ; and the sudden 

 discontinuance of his lucubrations justified the inference. 

 And a corresponding style of reasoning, based on the corre- 

 sponding fact of the breaking up and piecemeal disappearance 

 of the group of organized being, seems equally admissible. 

 It is somewhat difficult to conceive how at least many more 

 volumes of the geologic record than the known ones could be 

 got up without the club. Further, so far as yet appears, 

 the fish must have lived in advance of the reptile during 

 the three protracted periods of the Old Ked Sandstone, the 

 still more protracted period of the Silurian, and perhaps 

 the more protracted period still of the Cambrian deposits ; — 

 in all, apparently, a greatly more extended space than that 

 in which the reptile lived in advance of the quadrupedal 

 mammal, or the quadrupedal mammal lived in advance of 

 man. On principles somewhat similar to those on which, 

 with reference to the average term of life, the genealogist 

 fixes the probable period of some birth in his chain of suc- 

 cession of which he cannot determine the exact date, it seems 

 natural to infer that the birth of the fish should have taken 



