DISCOVERY OF THE PROGRAMME. 99 



type of conscious existence. One animal dwells on the 

 land, another in the soil, a third in the air, a fourth. in salt 

 water, a fifth in fresh ; one burrows in a log, another in a 

 rock, a third in the mud, a fourth in the flesh, or brain, or 

 liver, or even the eye of another animal. Ponderous quad- 

 rupeds move through the jungle, wily serpents glide among 

 the reeds, the centipede crouches under a stone, the minnow 

 darts beneath the sedgy bank, and the lazy oyster sleeps in 

 the mud at the bottom of the bay. We place beneath the 

 microscope a specimen of the mud in which the oyster 

 spends his drowsy life, or even a sample of the water in 

 which the familiar frog delights, and lo ! another world is 

 revealed to our vision — vegetal and animal life in forms as 

 varied as all that the unassisted eye has seen in the great- 

 er world. 



Nor is this all. Every one has read of forms long since 

 extinct — of strange and monstrous forms that sported 

 upon the earth before the empires of the brute creation 

 had been subjugated by the intellect of man. A stone- 

 mason of Cromarty has introduced to the world the Aste- 

 rolepis of Stromness, and the Cephalaspis and Pterichthys 

 of the " old red sandstone" — fishes which the most learned 

 had at one time almost decided to throw into the company 

 of turtles. Mantell has amazed us with stories of the Igua- 

 nodon, an immense lizard, believed by him to have been 

 sixty feet in length, which crawled over the slime of the 

 latest part of the Jurassic period. These all were forms 

 of the middle ages of the world's history. As we run 

 back through the aeons preceding, we tread upon the 

 graves of myriads of beings which in their day swarmed 

 in the depths of the sea, but whose lineage and likeness 

 are now known only in history. We push back through 

 the dim dawn of being, and stand upon the sandy shore 

 of that uneasy sea in which Creative Power first essayed 



