Strange to say, however, it is to the higher exponents of natural science, and in especial to the geologists, that it has been left to deal most directly with the sophistries of Bolingbroke and Pope. Oken, a man quite as far wrong in some points as either the poet or his master, was the first to remark, and this in the oracular, enigmatical style peculiar to the German, that "man is the sum total of all the animals." Gifted, as all allow, with a peculiarly nice eye for detecting those analogies which unite the animal world into a harmonious whole, he remarked, that in one existence or being all these analogies converge. Even the humbler students of the heavens have learned to find for themselves the star of the pole, by following the direction indicated by what are termed the two pointer stars in the Great Bear. And to the eye of Oken all the groups of the animal kingdom formed a sphere of constellations, each of which has its pointer stars, if I may so speak, turned towards man. Man occupies, as it were, the central point in the great circle of being; so that those lines which pass singly through each of the inferior animals stationed at its circumference, meet in him; and thus, as the focus in which the scattered rays unite, he imparts by his presence a unity and completeness to creation which it would not possess were he away. You will be startled, however, by the language in which the German embodies his view; though it may be not uninstructive to refer to it in evidence of the fact that a man may be _intellectually_ on the very verge of truth, and yet for every moral purpose infinitely removed from it. "Man," he says, "is God manifest in the flesh." And yet it may be admitted that there is a certain loose sense in which man _is_ "God manifest in the flesh." As may be afterwards shown, he is God's _image_ manifested in the flesh; and an image or likeness _is_ a manifestation or making evident of that which it represents, whether it be an image or likeness of body or of mind.