OF THE EARLIER GANOIDS. 331 



descent connecting them. The fishes of the Palceozoic age 

 are in no respect the ancestors of the reptiles of the Second- 

 ary age, nor does man descend from the mammals which pre- 

 ceded him in the Tertiary age. The link by which they are 

 connected is of a higher and immaterial nature, and their 

 connection is to be sought in the view of the Creator him- 

 self, whose aim in forming the earth, in allowing it to under- 

 go the successive changes which Geology has pointed out, 

 and in creating successively all the different types of animals 

 which have passed away, was to introduce man upon the sur- 

 face of our globe. Man is the end towards which all the ani- 

 mal creation has tended, from the first appearance of the first 

 Palaeozoic fishes. " Thus far Agassiz. I see not why it should 

 be denied him to hold, in addition, that the same great Being 

 who in an after period darkly revealed his will in a dispen- 

 sation of types and symbols, may have spoken in creation, in 

 the early geologic ages, after a similar style of embodied figure 

 and allegory. The " Archetypal Idea" of Owen, — " the im- 

 material link of connection" of all the past with the present^ 

 which Agassiz resolves into the fore-ordained design of the 

 Creator, — may yet be found to resolve themselves into one 

 great general truth, viz., that the Palaeozoic and Secondary 

 dispensations of creation were charged, like the Patriarchal 

 and Mosaic dispensations of grace, with the " shadows of bet- 

 ter things to come." Enough of the embryonic may have 

 mingled in the structure of the earlier ichthyic vertebrata, to 

 indicate, as if by figure, that the time was as yet foetal and 

 immature ; and with these, enough of traits higher than the 

 merely ichthyic, to foreshow in these uterine ages that higher 

 existences, — among the rest, man himself, — were one day to 

 come to the birth. But for the purposes of the Lamarckian, 

 the so-called foetal peculiarities of the first vertebrates are, as 

 I have shown, too largely mingled with other peculiarities of 

 a decided anti-foetal character, to be of much avail. Further, 



