Let us commence, if you please, with the dust, which is not to be despised, my dears, because you are made out of it, the sand, the drops of water, or any other of the very lowest forms of creation. We pass up from these elements, and find them crystalized into minerals, and wrought into flowers, and obtain our first ideas of beauty. Looking up through the grades of flowers, we happen upon the sensitive plants, which shrink from you, and shiver when you point your finger at them like guilty souls, and the winged orchids, which you must touch to convince yourself they are not butterflies; and in these you begin to get foreshadowings of life. From this point you find organisms which may be vegetable, or may be animal. Our skill is insufficient to decide which they are. Presently you reach the sponges and the corals, in which animal life is very apparent; and if you will do yourself the pleasure to look into that glass of water with a microscope, my dear Celeste, you will be thoroughly convinced of life, and also that you are daily drinking millions of very unpleasant looking animals. A step higher up, you reach the insects and the ephemera, who live their little day of breezy life in the sunshine, and in their buzzing you find music commences. All these little fellows, with wings and feelers, play very pretty tunes, if your ear is only good enough to catch them, when they praise God by beating their gauzy wings together. As you pass from the insects to the birds, life is more pronounced, and the music of which I have spoken develops in construction and increases in beauty. Now, we are reaching the grade of animals, where intelligence commences; and as we come up to the dog, ox, horse or elephant, affection is added to intelligence. The animals begin to assume the qualities of man, and before we are aware of it, some of the animals are walking on two legs instead of four, and assuming the form and features of men, as, for instance, the monkeys, the apes, and the orang-utans. You pass from the monkey to the Digger Indian or Hottentot, and with the single unimportant exception of length of tail, it is well nigh impossible to tell them apart. Man is a short-tailed monkey, or, _vice versa_, monkey is a long-tailed man. Even in the highest order of man, it is sometimes difficult to tell a man from a monkey. Turn a child out into the woods, and let it grow up for thirty or forty years, subsisting upon roots, herbs and nuts, like an animal, and what does it become at last but a hairy, chattering ape, climbing trees, burrowing in the ground, and living like an animal? Thus we rise through various grades of men, each new type more perfect than the other, but still possessing some characteristic of the animal, until we reach woman, who is a step higher; then up through the various types of women, until we reach the angels; through the various types of angels until we reach the archangels, and then