ON GEOLOGIC HISTORY 279 



each man were in liimself, not the microcosm of the old fan- 

 ciful philosopher, but something greatly more wonderful, a 



compendium of all animated nature, and of kin to every crea- 

 ture that lives. Hence the remark, that man is the sum 

 total of all animals, — " the animal equivalent," says Oken 

 " to the whole animal kingdom." We are perhaps too much 

 in the habit of setting aside real facts, when they have been 

 first seized upon by the infidel, and appropriated to the pur- 

 poses of unbelief, as if they had suffered contamination in 

 his hands. We forget, like the brother " weak in the faith," 

 instanced by the Apostle, that they are in themselves " crea- 

 tures of God ;" and too readily reject the lesson which they 

 teach, simply because they have been offered in sacrifice to 

 an idol. And this strange fact of the progress of the human 

 brain is assuredly a fact none the less worth looking at from 

 the circumstance that infidelity has looked at it first. On no 

 principle recognisable in right reason can it be urged in sup- 

 port of the development hypothesis ; — it is a fact of foetal 

 development, and of that only. But it would be well should 

 it lead our metaphysicians to inquire whether they have not 

 been rendering their science too insulated and exclusive ; and 

 whether the mind that works by a brain thus " fearfully and 

 wonderfully made," ought not to be viewed rather in connec- 

 tion with all animated nature, especially as we find nature 

 exemplified in the various vertebral forms, than as a thing 

 fundamentally abstract and distinct. The brain built up of 

 all the types of brain, may be the organ of a mind compound- 

 ed, if T may so express myself, of all the varieties of mind. 

 It would be perhaps over fanciful to urge that it is the crea- 

 ture who has made himself free of all the elements whose 

 brain has been thus in succession that of all their proper 

 denizens ; and that there is no animal instinct, the function 

 of which cannot be illustrated by some art mastered by man : 

 but there can be nothing over fanciful in the suggestion, 



