existence to enter upon the bright dawn of intellectual activity, which has developed into such mighty proportions as we behold to-day. Let us carry the mind back far beyond the Dark Ages, through the classic era, as far even as the very commencement of Egyptian history; and even then we find ourselves but little nearer that remote period in which the first spark of intelligence made its _debût_ upon the platform of life. In imagination we may go still further back, and view the wonders of that ancient Asian civilisation which preceded that of the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, and which was probably derived very gradually from the earliest social conceptions of the Caucasian branch of the Polynesian primitive man. Still we are ages away from the period we desire to arrive at; and even were we able to trace the human family back to that remote time when man could not be said to partake more of the character of the human than the ape species, still we should even then be unable to point to the precise moment when intellect shed its glorious rays upon the race, making bright, clear, and beautiful what before was dark, misty, and unmeaning. The ancient Prosimiæ gradually became Catarrhine apes, which, in their turn, as slowly assumed the characters of the Anthropoidæ, and afterwards of ape-like men; but the time required for this imperceptibly gradual process of evolution was probably many hundred thousands of years, during which period, or perhaps even at a prior time the first intellectual spark became manifest: how, when, or for what ultimate purpose it is apparently beyond our power to devise.