restoration,--set aside so long before,--as virtually the true one;--a recognition in which Agassiz, when made acquainted with the nature of the evidence, at once acquiesced. Now, here was there a question which had been raised regarding the true mechanism of one of the oldest ganoidal fishes, and settled erroneously on wrong data, again opened up, to be settled anew on one of the most obvious mechanical principles exemplified in the simple art of the slater or tiler. The argument of Sir Philip amounted simply to this:--If the accepted restoration be a true one, then the Creator of the Pterichthys must have committed a mistake in mechanics which an ordinary slater would have avoided; but as the Creator commits no such blunders, the mistake probably occurs in but the restoration. I may mention, that the dorsal surface of this ancient fish had also its central plate,--a lozenge truncated at its two longer ends; and that, moulded to meet the necessities of its position, it was not flat, like the under one, but strongly arched; and that on four of its six sides it overrode by a squamose suture the lower plates with which it came in contact. These are but humble illustrations of the designing principle, as exhibited of old; and yet they impress none the less strongly on that account. Among the many contrivances of the Chinese Museum, to which I have already referred, none seemed more to excite the curiosity of visitors than a set of tall-backed, elaborately carved chairs, exceedingly like those which were used in our own country two centuries ago, and which Cowper so exquisitely describes. For thousands of miles in the wide tract that spreads out between European Christendom and the great wall, the inhabitants squat upon mats or carpets, or loll on divans; and the contrivance of the chair is unknown: it reappears in China, however, and reappears, not as a mere seat or stool, but as, in every bar and limb, the identical chair of Europe arrested a century or two back in its development. And every corresponding tenon and mortise exhibited by the Chinese and European examples of this simple piece of furniture served more forcibly to show an identity of character in the minds which had originated them in countries so far apart, than the more elaborate contrivances which, though illustrative of the same principles of invention, were less easily understood. It is so with the more simple and familiar instances of adaptation furnished by the works of the Creator. We infer from them, more directly than from the complex mechanisms, that he who wrought of old after the manner of a man must have, in his intellectual character, if I may so express myself, certain man-like qualities and traits. In all those works on Natural Theology that treat, like the work of Paley, on the argument of design, the assumption of a certain unity of the intellectual nature of the Creator and creature is made, tacitly at least, the basis of all the reasonings;