Thus geology, while it reveals a succession of animal types, pronounces each after its kind perfect in its own degree and measure of organic development. The oldest known fossil fish (the Onchus Murchisoni, and inhumed in the lowest fossiliferous beds), belongs to the highest type of the Cestraciont division of the vertebrata. What they were made at first, they all vindicate their capacity of continuing to the end. The various tribes and orders had their own limits of organization, their own sphere within which the functions of each were to be performed, and adapted to the condition in which they were placed, each reaped the full enjoyment that divine benevolence had appointed. Man was the last in the course of successive creation, endowed with the highest and most enlarged capacities, and, allied to none, was constituted the priest of nature, that he might collect the silent praises of the universe, and offer them to the Creator in intelligent devotion. But here it is, when we have reached this link of the chain, that the most vitiating element in the whole doctrine of progressive development is manifested. The anti-theism and materialism, involved inevitably and undisguisedly in the noxious dogma, are brought out in bold relief. This dogma implies, that the cosmical arrangements and all the organic transmutations of living types, are none of them directly the result of any personal, immediate creative actings on the part of Deity. These arrangements, from the beginning, are all dependent on one unchanging law, applicable alike to organic and inorganic bodies, to the mysterious principle of life, and to things inanimate,—to mind as to matter. The simple effect of this may appear to be, the removal of the Creator merely a step farther from his own works, which he can still hold in the hollow of his hand, and bend whither He will. But the statement goes a great deal farther. It strikes directly at the root of all moral distinctions as well as of all revealed truth. The creature man, upon this hypothesis, the last link in the terrestrial chain, comes not from his Maker’s hands “made in his own likeness.” He too is the product of a natural law, evolved after a long series of metamorphoses, to whose operation the moral and the physical are equally subject,—the soul and the body alike the result of its rigid inflexible agency. Front the fire-mist and electro-nebulous matter, which is assumed to have originally filled all space, Man, along with suns and stars, and all planetary bodies, derived the first germ of his being. At first gaseous, it became in process of time concrete. There was no life until the electric spark, struck in some mysterious way from the dance of atoms and wild whirl of the elements, vivified the germ with this newly-developed principle. Then the germinal vesicle became a self-moving, self-acting thing—not at first, but after a series of changes, adapted into the type of the human family, whose life