Miscellaneous. 



445 



world an intellectual being. Nor can we conceive that a creature so 

 noble, stamped by the image of its Creator, could be destined, like 

 those animals which had become extinct, to be swept in its turn from 

 the earth by causes similar to those which had effected their extinction. 

 The creation of an intellectual being was not an occurrence coming 

 in the common order of events ; but man must have been placed upon 

 the earth by a fiat of the All-powerful Creator. The present order of 

 the globe was ordained for him, and all things proceeded to fit it for 

 his habitation. We will not deny that he who made man might like- 

 wise ordain that he should be swept from the earth ; but we do deny 

 that the exhibitions of the causes destined to produce this would be in 

 uniformity with the usual designs of Providence. It would be ill-ac- 

 cordant with a divine wisdom to suppose that it had not arrested the 

 causes which led to the extinction of whole tribes of animals, when it 

 called man into being. But it would as little harmonize with our con- 

 ceptions of the Creator's works to imagine that any divine interposi- 

 tion or miracle altered the face of nature, immediately antecedent to 

 the creation of that intellectual being. Laws were instituted, by which 

 this earth is governed, and we must look for such changes in the na- 

 tural current of their operation, not in their annihilation or alteration. 

 Now if I have carried you along with me in the description of events 

 which have proceeded on the earth from the first dawn of organic life, 

 you will find no difficulty in discovering, or admitting with me, that 

 the grand causes for the extinction of animal life were now removed. 

 We have seen all the primeval lands, which we have hastily traversed, 

 covered with a luxuriant vegetation, but containing a disproportion- 

 ably small number of forms of animal life. We have approached more 

 nearly to our own epoch, and remarked the gradual increase of these 

 forms; and at the same time, we have seen that the atmosphere which 

 covered those lands, gradually changed its character. We have re- 

 marked that the first forms of land animals were such as could live in 

 an atmosphere destitute of its present proportion of oxygen, and such 

 also as did not return any notable quantity of carbonic acid to the 

 atmosphere. But we remarked also a great change as we approached 

 our era :— the animals existing in strata antecedent to modern deposits 

 were all furnished with respiratory organs like our own ; that is, with or- 

 gans fitted for abstracting oxygen from the air, and returning carbonic 

 acid : functions quite opposed to those of vegetables, which abstract 

 carbonic acid and return oxygen. Hence, as soon as animals become 

 sufficiently multiplied to supply the amount of carbonic acid to the air, 

 equivalent to the quantity abstracted by growing plants, a balance 



