4. The law of type or pattern in nature is distinctly indicated in the Bible. This is a principle only recently understood by naturalists, but it has more or less dimly dawned on the minds of many great thinkers in all ages. Nor is this wonderful, for the idea of type is scarcely ever absent from our own conceptions of any work that we may undertake. In any such work we anticipate recurring daily toil, like the returning cycles of nature. We look for progress, like that of the growth of the universe. We study adaptation both of the several parts to subordinate uses, and of the whole to some general design. But we also keep in view some pattern, style, or order, according to which the whole is arranged, and the mutual relations of the parts are adjusted. The architect must adhere to some order of architecture, and to some style within that order. The potter, the calico-printer, and the silversmith must equally study uniformity of pattern in their several manufactures. The Almighty Worker has exhibited the same idea in his works. In the animal kingdom, for instance, we have four or more leading types of structure. Taking any one of these--the vertebrate, for example--we have a uniform general plan, embracing the vertebral column constructed of the same elements; the members, whether the arm of man, the limb of the quadruped, or the wing of the bat or the bird, or the swimming-paddle of the whale, built of the same bones. In like manner all the parts of the vertebral column itself in the same animal, whether in the skull, the neck, or the trunk, are composed of the same elementary structures. These types are farther found to be sketched out--first in their more general, and then in their special features--in proceeding from the lower species of the same type to the higher, in proceeding from the earlier to the later stages of embryonic development, and in proceeding from the more ancient to the more recent creatures that have succeeded each other in geological time. Man, the highest of the vertebrates, is thus the archetype, representing and including all the lower and earlier members of the vertebrate type. The above are but trite and familiar examples of a doctrine which may furbish and has furnished the material of volumes. There can be no question that the Hebrew Bible is the oldest book in which this principle is stated. In the first chapter of Genesis we have specific type in the creation of plants and animals after their kinds or species, and in the formation of man in the image and likeness of the Creator; and, as we shall find in the sequel, there are some curious ideas of higher and more general types in the grouping of the creatures referred to. The same idea is indicated in the closing chapters of Job, where the three higher classes of the vertebrates are represented by a number of examples, and the typical likeness of one of these--the hippopotamus--to man, seems to be recognized. Dr. McCosh has quoted, as an illustration of