208 Literary and Philosophical Society. 



origin of things numbers. This seems another mode of 

 making atoms, the original power having a different name 

 but explaining nothing. The five elements made in 

 this way, by adding points, are perhaps fundamentally the 

 five fingers, the image of the creative power of God, the 

 great hand of the Phoenicians, a symbol of all this thought. 

 On this subject we can point out the method in which a 

 modern writer has reasoned, 'God has given man five 

 senses for a fivefold sphere of action. He has given him 

 five fingers for a fivefold instrument of industrial and artistic 

 action, and five toes for a fivefold instrument of progressive 

 action. He has given him a head and four extremities as 

 the primary action of the corporeal system. Not without 

 reason, and man being the noblest representative of the 

 Divine creative agent, we should naturally give the prece- 

 dence to the number five in the sphere of collective, social, 

 and political progress, were it even superseded by some 

 other number in the construction of irrational vertebrated 

 animals. But when we find that all the superior orders of 

 rational and irrational creatures are constructed on this 

 fivefold principle, we are compelled to admit that, in the 

 sphere of action, the number five must take the precedence 

 as the fittest representation of providential movement/ 



' The Gentile poets sang of the fifth age, the " Regna 

 Saturnia," and the Jewish prophets took up the refrain 

 and detailed the glories of the Redeemer's kingdom 

 that succeeds the fourth. The fifth is the dominant in 

 music, and is neither a local nor a sectarian idea in history 

 or mythology. It is a poetic inspiration, a dramatic divi- 

 sion of the course of time, universally known, familiar to 

 all ages of the world, &c.' 1 This is probably the funda- 



1 See the Divine Drama of History and Civilisation, by the Rev. James 

 Smith, M.A., 1854, pp. 6 and 8. 



