90 EVOLUTION AND DOGMA. 



merely more or less successful devices of scientific 

 men to arrange and correlate the facts and phe- 

 nomena of nature? Are the divisions which natural- 

 ists have introduced into their systems artificial and 

 arbitrary, or have they rather been instituted by the 

 Divine Intelligence as the categories of His mode of 

 thinking? Are they but the inventions of the hu- 

 man mind or have " the relations and proportions 

 which exist throughout the animal and vegetable 

 worlds an intellectual and ideal connection in the 

 mind of the Creator?" " Have we, perhaps," asks 

 the eloquent Agassiz, " thus far been only the un- 

 conscious interpreters of a Divine conception, in our 

 attempts to expound nature ? And when in the 

 pride of our philosophy we thought that we were in- 

 venting systems of science, and classifying creation 

 by the force of our own reason, have we followed 

 only and reproduced in our imperfect expressions, 

 the plan whose foundations were laid in the dawn of 

 creation, and the development of which we are labo- 

 riously studying, thinking, as we put together and 

 arrange our fragmentary knowledge, that we are in- 

 troducing order into chaos anew ? Is this order the 

 result of the exertions of human skill and ingenuity ; 

 or is it inherent in the objects themselves, so that 

 the intelligent student of natural history is led un- 

 consciously, by the study of the animal kingdom 

 itself, to these conclusions, the great divisions under 

 which he arranges animals being indeed but the 

 headings to the chapter of the great book which he 

 is reading." ' 



1 " Essay on Classification," pp. 8, 9. 



