present condition of our intellectual strength, than the unmitigated blaze of a meridian sun is fitted to the structure of our visual organs. I began to perceive the absurdity of expressions which had passed for sound sense upon my understanding. How often had I talked flippantly (at least thought within my own breast) of the _course of nature_, never recollecting that the poor Indian’s concatenation of supporters for the world, in his list of elephants and tortoises, is not more easily resolved into ignorance, than the arguments by which infidelity delays the confession that it is in utter darkness? Will the most sagacious reasoning on the formation of a bone, by the gradual accretion of calcareous matter; or the most ingenious display of physiological lore in tracing the growth of a plant from the cotyledon up to the forest’s king, apply to the _first_ created animal, or the _first_ formed oak? There the course of nature deserts us. The anatomist, and the naturalist, alike lay down their arms; here they are baffled and arrested. The former has no need of his animal laboratory in which the chyle is separated in the process of digestion from the daily food, and phosphate of lime is added to the soft cartilages that are intended to become the bony skeleton. The latter neither requires the acorn nor the “_nursing leaves_” to advance the oak from the seedling to the sapling, and thence to the full-grown monarch of the wood. He wants no gradual process of deposition by water; no metamorphosis produced by fire, neither calx, nor crystalization is demanded for the _primary_ minerals of the earth--the great “back bone” of creation. In _some_ period of time there was a _beginning_ of these things. Remove that period indefinitely, and you may lose sight of the difficulty in its distance from your eye, but you cannot reduce its real dimensions; it exists in its full size and bulk, though placed without the range of your vision. Arrived at this point (and driven to it you _must_ be sooner or later) you are involved in the absolute necessity of a revelation of some sort or other, unless you can believe that matter is self created, and carries within itself all the power, energy, and intelligence which we _know_ that it does not possess, or that man is a being governed entirely by instinct, like the inferior animals, and capable, at his first entrance into life of performing all the functions requisite to sustain his existence, and perpetuate its succession, as a crow is to build its nest. _Neither_ of these opinions being tenable without a surrender of that very experience derived through our senses, which we consider as the highest possible source of demonstration; the question which _next_ occurs is what account is there of any instruction to the first pair who were placed in the vast expanse of an unknown world, in which they were to become the founders of an unborn race of creatures? _Some_ record of a matter so vitally important to the new