GEOLOGY. 615 



quisitive, sweep him along like an impetuous river which 

 loses itself in a boundless ocean : like the favourite heroes 

 of Goethe and Byron, all his efforts are directed towards 

 unravelling the impenetrable shadows of his destiny. 

 Hence philosophers and learned men of the highest class, 

 looking at the incessant change in created beings, have 

 asked themselves the question whether the human species 

 was really the master-piece and the last elfort of creative 

 power, or Avhether it will in its turn disappear in some new 

 shipwreck, to be succeeded by creatures of still purer 

 essence. 



Looking at the progress which each creation shows, 

 some of the German savants admit, with Bremser, the 

 latter hypothesis, and among them are some daring enough 

 to attempt to prove the point by figures.^ 



In his remarkable work on geology, M. Louis Figuier 

 has wiitten on this subject a beavitiful passage, which we 

 are happy to lay before the reader. "It is not impossible," 

 he says, "that man may be a step in the ascending and 

 progressive scale of animated beings. The divine power 

 which strewed on earth life, sensation, and thought ; which 



'Bremser thus explains himself in reference to this subject: — 

 "It may still be presumed, supposing there should be a new radical change, 

 that beings more perfect than those which resulted from preceding ones will be 

 created. In man mind bears the same proportion to matter as 50 to 50, with 

 slight differences more or less, for sometimes mind and sometimes matter pre- 

 dominates, lu a subsequent creation, supposing that in which man was formed 

 not to be the last, there would probably be organizations in which the mind 

 would act more freely, and where it would be in the proportion of 75 to 25. It 

 results from these considerations, that man was formed at the most passive epoch 

 of existence on our earth. Man is a sad middle state between the animal and the 

 angel ; he aspires to elevated knowledge and cannot reach it, albeit our modern 

 philosophers fancy such is not the case. Man wishes to fathom the first cause 

 of all that exists, and cannot attain to it ; with fewer intellectual faculties 

 he would not have the presumption to want to know these causes, which on the 

 other hand would be quite clear to him if he were endowed with a more extended 

 mind." 



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