To me, this absorbing subject presents a very different aspect. I see man everywhere religious in some form. The sentiment takes the molding of his accidental circumstances. It is poetry, enthusiasm, eloquence, bravery; but in every form an aspiration after the vast, illimitable, eternal, shadowy conceptions of an unknown hereafter, that the senses have not embodied. It is rational or fanciful, it is respectable or superstitious, it is a pure abstraction or a gorgeous appeal to the senses, according to one’s country, training and temperament. But man, whether he be a dweller in the far isles of the sea, or in the crowded mart, whether christian or savage, is everywhere found, in some form, invoking a God and reposing the hopes and affections of his worn heart in another and a better world; and extending his faith to an immortal life and an eternal sphere of action. Instead of searching for this universal principle with metaphysicians, pronouncing upon it with dogmatists, or deducing it from creeds, or creeds from it, I behold in it the same unwritten revelation which we call instinct. Vague and undefined as is this law, and questioned by some as is even its existence, it announces to us one of the most impressive and beautiful homilies upon the truth and goodness of the Author of our being. It may be called the scripture of the lower orders, guiding them, with unerring certainty, to their enjoyments and their end. Beasts feel it, and graze the plain. Birds feel it, and soar in the air. Fishes feel it, and dart along their liquid domain; each feeding, moving, resting, playing and perpetuating its kind, according to its organic laws. Winter comes upon the gregarious tribes of water fowls enjoying themselves in the Canadian lakes. They listen to this call from heaven, and mount the autumnal winds; and without chart or compass, by a course to which that of circumnavigators is devious, they sail to the shores of the south, where a softer atmosphere and new supplies of food await them. It leads the young one of these animals, scarcely yet disengaged from the shell, to patter its bill in the dry sand, impatiently to search for water before it has yet seen it. It creates in the new born infant a purpose to search for its supplies in the yet untasted fountains of the maternal bosom. It guides all the lower orders of being through the whole mysterious range of their peculiar habits and modes of life. Under its influence, animals and men exercise powers which transcend the utmost efforts of our reason. Who can tell me why the duckling plunges into the water with the shell on its head? Who can inform me how the affectionate house dog, blindfolded and conveyed in utter darkness in a carriage to a distance of fifty leagues, the moment he is emancipated, returns by a more direct route than that by which he came? There would be no use in presenting the most extended details of these developments of instinct through the whole range of animated nature.