and my acquaintance with men, and even with books, more extensive; and in the interchange of idea which we carried on, both were gainers: he occasionally picked up in our conversations a fact of which he had been previously ignorant; and I, mayhap, learned to look more closely than before at an argument. I introduced him to the Eathie Lias, and assisted him in forming a small collection, which, ere he ultimately dissipated it, contained some curious fossils--among the others, the second specimen of _Pterichthys_ ever found; and he, in turn, was able to give me a few geological notions, which, though quite crude enough--for natural science was not taught at the university which he attended--I found of use in the arrangement of my facts--now become considerable enough to stand in need of those threads of theory without which large accumulations of fact refuse to hang together in the memory. There was one special hypothesis which he had heard broached, and the utter improbability of which I was not yet geologist enough to detect, which for a time filled my whole imagination. It had been said, he told me, that the ancient world, in which my fossils, animal and vegetable, had flourished and decayed--a world greatly older than that before the Flood--had been tenanted by rational, responsible beings, for whom, as for the race to which we ourselves belong, a resurrection and a day of final judgment had awaited. But many thousands of years had elapsed since that day--emphatically the _last_ to the Pre-Adamite race--had come and gone. Of all the accountable creatures that had been summoned to its bar, bone had been gathered to its bone, so that not a vestige of the framework of their bodies occurred in the rocks or soils in which they had been originally inhumed; and, in consequence, only the remains of their irresponsible contemporaries, the inferior animals, and of the vegetable productions of their fields and forests, were now to be found. The dream filled for a time my whole imagination; but though poetry might find ample footing on a hypothesis so suggestive and bold, I need scarce say that it has itself no foundation in science. Man had _no_ responsible predecessor on earth. At the determined time, when his appointed habitation was completely fitted for him, he came and took possession of it; but the old geologic ages had been ages of immaturity--_days_ whose work as a work of promise was "good," but not yet "very good," nor yet ripened for the appearance of a moral agent, whose nature it is to be a fellow-worker with the Creator in relation to even the physical and the material. The planet which we inhabit seems to have been prepared for man, and for man only.