Taking higher ground in this argument, we are the more strongly of opinion that the analogical mode of reasoning is a wrong one. We do not perceive how the analogies can be made good in the business. It seems fallacious to conclude, with Professor Agassiz, that, because plants and animals—as is generally believed—have not originated in a common centre, our race could not have so originated. To argue from the fact that such “inconsistencies” do not occur in the laws of nature is bad philosophy, after all. He does not clearly or fully know what Nature, or the power we are agreed to call Nature, intends for laws. He takes a department of the material world—a section embracing the Marsupiata, the Edentata, fishes of cartilagenous type, certain plants, flowers, and so forth; and, circumscribing it, he seems to look upon it as the proper sphere for the laws of nature to work in. But it is possible—indeed we believe it to be the truth—that Nature has laws ten millions of miles beyond and above that little circle, and that we do not know or even suspect one half of them. By what law of nature was the ball we cling upon launched into space, and man, “of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting,” put upon it? Certainly by one of those laws which we, not comprehending them, call miracles. Coming down a little from the summit of such high positions, we find that man is not the analogue of reptiles, fishes, animals, plants, and so forth—that he differs from them in something out of the rule—something miraculous—the “reasonable soul” which St. Athanasius speaks of. The philosophy of analogy is at fault here, and must be. Man enters none of the categories; he is neither an animal, a reptile, nor a fish. The laws of these are not the laws of Nature—the whole book—nor the laws of man. It is nonsense, therefore, to talk, with such an air, of “inconsistencies.” Even supposing that man may, on the Lamarckian principle, at any time of his development, have been a sponge and lived on salt water, he is, as he stands now—the laughing, the exchanging, the believing animal—not the less an exception and a miracle, and as such philosophers must deal with him.