Amid that strangely diversified series of organic beings which pertains to the studies of the geologist, there appears at length one, “the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals”;[19] a being capable of high moral and intellectual elevation, fertile in design, and with a capacity for transmitting experience, and working out comprehensive plans by the combined labours of many successive generations. In all this there is no analogy to any of the inferior orders of being. The works of the ant and the beaver, the coral zoophyte and the bee, display singular ingenuity and powers of combination; and each feathered songster builds its nest with wondrous forethought, in nature’s appointed season. But the instincts of the inferior orders of creation are in vain compared with the devices of man, even in his savage state. Their most ingenious works cost them no intellectual effort to acquire the craft, and experience adds no improvements in all the continuous labours of the wonderful mechanicians. The beaver constructs a dam more perfect than the best achievements of human ingenuity in the formation of breakwaters, and builds for itself a hut which the author of the _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ justly contrasts in architectural skill with the ruder dwelling of the Asiatic Tartar. The bee, in forming its cell, solves a mathematical problem which has tasked the labours of acutest analysts. But each ingenious artificer is practising a craft which no master taught, and to which it has nothing to add. The wondrous, instinctive, living machine creates for itself the highest pleasure it is capable of in working out the art with which it is endowed; and accomplishes it with infallible accuracy, as all its untaught predecessors did, and as, without teaching, each new-born successor will do. To such architects and artists history does not pertain, for their arts knew no primeval condition of imperfection, and witness no progress. Of their works, as of their organic structure, one example is a sufficient type of the whole. The palæontologist’s materials have been designated by one popular geologist, “the Medals of Creation”; and the term, though borrowed from the antiquary, has a significance which peculiarly marks the contrast now referred to between geology and archæology. Like medals struck in the same die, the multitude of examples of an extinct species, each exquisitely modelled coral, and every cast of a symmetrical sigillaria, repeat the same typical characteristics; and the poet’s fancy may be accepted as literally true, in relation to the most ingenious arts which engage the study of the naturalist:— “All the winged habitants of paradise, Whose songs once mingled with the songs of angels, Wove their first nests as curiously and well As the wood minstrel in our evil day After the labour of six thousand years.”[20]