112 Proceedings of the Eoyal Pliysical Society. 



and of life, or to be able to catalogue and classify the 

 march and order of creation ; except in a very general way 

 indeed. There are truths, however, announced in this old 

 account which I cannot but believe, viz.: the original creation 

 of matter — the worlds — by the Almighty Maker; a pro- 

 gress of creation, after light and order had been evolved from 

 an apparent state of disorder ; the sequence or succession of 

 vegetable and animal life, each in its turn declared by its 

 Creator to be perfect, " good, very good ; " and the special cir- 

 cumstances mentioned at the creation of man sufficiently 

 mark him out, to my mind at least, however closely allied his 

 physical frame may be to the lower animals, as a creature very 

 diff'erent indeed from them. 



Then let me remind you that the Bible history of man is 

 not one of development by slow degrees in the course of un- 

 told ages, from a state of degradation allied to the brute 

 creation. On the contrary, we are told that man was created 

 at the first upright, and lord of all the lower creation. From 

 this state he soon fell, but doubtless he still retained at least 

 his lordship over the creatures, and very early took some of 

 them specially under his protecting care; one of the first 

 family being, we are told, a keeper of domesticated cattle. It 

 would almost appear, as, indeed, I have elsewhere stated, as 

 if the Creator had stamped a peculiarly plastic or mobile 

 character on the whole group of these very domestic animals 

 which man has brought under his sway, to suit them, shall 

 I say, in their varied descendants, under man's superintending 

 care, for accompanying him as he spreads abroad over almost 

 all the regions of the earth. It is this very peculiarity, indeed, 

 which has been taken by some learned writers to attempt to 

 prove the mobile characters, not of these domesticated animals 

 alone, but of the whole animal kingdom. The after-history of 

 the human race, instead of being one of regular progress and 

 advancement, seems rather to have been one of fall and degrada- 

 tion; again of rise and progress, at least in some of its 

 branches; and again of fall and degradation, followed again by 

 rise and progress; the modern barbarism thus covering in some 

 places and concealing the older civilisation. But into this wide 

 though tempting subject I cannot at present enter ; only I 



