was but the life for ages of the animals that have perished, and are now fossilized in their various formations. THE PRINCIPLE OF LIFE, in short, as implied in this account of its origin, is the same essentially with the light and heat that sparkle and glow in the rolling orbs which deck the firmament! Much of the development theory is built upon the influence of the instincts as manifested in the lower tribes. Let its abettors listen to the indignant cry of THE WHOLE FAMILY OF MAN against this theory of his origin; and say, if there is not an instinct here, peculiar and distinct, to vindicate his claim to a separate and distinct position in the great system of being. “Quanta ad eam rem vis,” says Cicero, “ut in suo quoque genere permaneat.” The continental philosophy, at no time for the last century, has partaken of a religious, healthy tone. It has been profoundly subtile in its speculations and analysis, but never truly spiritual. The author of the “Vestiges,” from his own turn of mind, has been all the more enamored of it, and, unwittingly dragged into its vortex, has been carried far beyond the ken of all rightful philosophies. These are not the subjects of legitimate investigation. Man has no plummet-line, in all his armory of science, wherewith to sound them. Grant that in the manner now described, the human race originated, and became living creatures—destined, it may be, to undergo new changes and to ascend into new orders of being—the animal nature to be perfected in the progressive modifications of his type. But the divine ethereal spark, as men vulgarly dream of themselves, what account is given of this? The soul, what? and whence derived? The thinking principle of mind,—where its place, and what provision made for its efflux, in the nebulous ether? The inference unquestionably is, that if such be its source, the human UNDERSTANDING must be of the essence of matter out of which it evolved,—glorious as the sun and fair as the moon,—but not the heavenly element, animate with the immaterial, incorruptible being of Divinity. But this is not the teaching of geology. Through all the story of its undefinable epochs, and in the myriad sarcophagi of its extinct generations, there is no record, no trace of man. He stands, utterly and far apart, from every fossilized thing, while— “The most distant star’s invisible beam, Or comet on his farthest journeyings, Or all the extent which philosophic ken Has given to infinite space, the elastic soul Springs over”—— and claims kindred with the image of the heavenly, whence it came, and whither it seeks and aspires to return.