LIFE AND OBGANISATION. 69 



and fairly. This great volume, while ever multiplying the 

 proofs of power and design, inculcates a more humble inter- 

 pretation of them ; instructing us that we can approach the 

 question through negatives only, which leave us far short of 

 the solution sought for. 



The most important of these negatives, undoubtedly, is 

 that just alluded to, forbidding the notion that all other life 

 on the earth was created for the uses of man. We should 

 scarcely stop to argue this matter, were it not that one or 

 two particular points of proof have an interest beyond the 

 simple terms of the question. The first of these is the 

 certain evidence in the long series of fossil remains, of suc- 

 cessive periods of animal life so far anterior to man, that no 

 calculation of ours can measure or approach them. Their 

 various forms (from the minute Infusoria, the shells of which 

 compose the mass of many of our existing rocks, to the 

 huge and strange aspects of the Oolitic and Weald reptiles, 

 and the endless other varieties which now fill our catalogues) 

 were doubtless adapted to the several successive conditions 

 of land, sea, and air in which they had their existence. But 

 no reason or plausible hypothesis can bring into connec- 

 tion with the human race these tenants of an elder world. 

 We may recognise the fact that the forests of those remote 

 ages gave origin to the beds of coal, which for the last two 

 hundred years have ministered so largely to the uses and 

 powers of man. But we cannot equally apply this argument 

 to the animal creations which have preceded us. No more 

 direct relations than those of type and structure connect, as 

 far as we can see, this ancient animal life with that of our 

 own day. No purposes or final causes can be assumed as a 

 necessary link between them. Any notion of tentative acts of 

 creation must at once be put aside. To say nothing of the 

 change it makes in our conception of the Creator of all, such 

 notion is wholly contradicted by the actual gradation and 



