MODERN ERA. 579 



for a life of work, and boundless aspirations to lead to endless im- 

 provement. He was the first being capable of an intelligent survey 

 of nature, and comprehension of her laws ; the first capable of aug- 

 menting his strength by bending nature to his service, rendering 

 thereby a weak body stronger than all possible animal force ; the first 

 capable of deriving happiness from truth and goodness ; of appre- 

 hending eternal right ; of reaching toward a knowledge of self and 

 of God ; the first, therefore, capable of conscious obedience or dis- 

 obedience of a moral law, and the first subject to debasement through 

 his appetites and a moral nature. 



There is, hence, in Man, a spiritual element, in which the brute has 

 no share. His power of indefinite progress, his thoughts and desires 

 that look onward even beyond time, his recognition of spiritual exist- 

 ence and of a Divinity above, all evince a nature that partakes of the 

 infinite and divine. Man is linked to the past through the system of 

 life, of which he is the last, the completing, creation. But, unlike 

 other species of that closing system of the past (significantly the Zoic 

 era of geological history), he, through his spiritual nature, is far more 

 intimately connected with the opening future. 



5. Modern Era. 



1. Modern relics of Man. — "While the animal system is not now 

 working onward to a loftier limit, except so far as there is improve- 

 ment in the culminant species, Man, all other geological work goes 

 on as in past times. Seas, rivers, winds, and the other agencies of 

 change are at their old labors. 



The following figures exemplify to the eye some of the relics of the 

 times, by way of contrast with those of the beginning of geological 

 progress. Fig. 955 represents a human skeleton, from a shell lime- 

 stone of modern origin and now in progress, on the island of Guada- 

 loupe. The specimen is in the Museum at Paris. The British 

 Museum contains another from the same region, but wanting the head, 

 which is in the collection of the Medical College at Charleston in 

 South Carolina. They are the remains of Caribs, who were killed in 

 a fight with a neighboring tribe, about two centuries since. Fig. 956 

 represents another fossil specimen, of the age of Man, — a ferruginous 

 conglomerate, containing silver coins of the reign of Edward I. and 

 some others, found at Tutbury, England. It was obtained at a depth 

 of ten feet below the bed of the river Dove. 



2. Extinction of species in Modern times. — Species are becoming 

 extinct, as heretofore, but partly through the new agency, the pressure 

 of civilization. 



Among the species recently exterminated, there are the Moa (Di- 



