ON GEOLOGIC HISTORY. 287 



sibly have formed the design of Providence. Almost ever 

 hince God united vitality to matter, the links in this chain 

 of animated nature, as if composed of a material too brittle 

 to bear their own weight when stretched across the geologic 

 ages, have been dropping one after one from his hand, an(l 

 sinking, fractured and broken, into the rocks below. It is 

 urged by Pope, that were " we to press on superior powers," 

 and rise from our own assigned place to the place immediately 

 above it, we would, in consequence of the transposition, 



** In the full creation leave a void, 

 Where, one step broken, the great scale 's destroyed. 

 From nature's chain whatever link we strike. 

 Tenth or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike." 



The poet could scarce have anticipated that there was a 

 science then sleeping in its cradle, and dreaming the dreams 

 of Whiston, Leibnitz, and Burnet, which was one day to rise 

 and demonstrate that both the tenth and the ten thousandth 

 link in the chain had been already broken and laid by, with 

 all the thousands of links between ; and that man might 

 laudably "press on superior powers," and attain to a "new 

 nature," without in the least affecting the symmetry of crea- 

 tion by the void which his elevation would necessarily create ; 

 that, in fine, voids and blanks in the scale are exceedingly 

 common things ; and that, if men could, by rising into angels, 

 make one blank more, they might do so with perfect impunity. 

 Further, even were the graduated chain of Bolingbroke a rea- 

 lity, and not what Johnson well designates it, an "absurd 

 hypothesis," and were what I have termed the interpolation 

 of links necessary to its completion, the mere filling up of the 

 original blanks and chasms would not necessarily involve the 

 fact of degradation, seeing that each blank could be filled up, 

 if I may so express myself, from its lower end. Each could 

 be as certainly occupied to the full by an elevation of lower 

 forms, as by a humiliation of the higher. We might receive 



