With how much of wonder, as scene succeeded scene, and creation followed creation,--as life sprang out of death, and death out of life,--must not that acute Intelligence have watched the course of the Divine Worker,--scornful of spirit and full of enmity, and yet aware, in the inner depths of his intellect, that what he dared insultingly to depreciate, he yet failed, in its ultimate end and purpose, adequately to comprehend! Standing in the presence of unsolved mystery, under the chill and withering shadow of that secret of the Lord which was not with him, how thoroughly must he not have seen, and with what bitter malignity felt, that the grasp of the Almighty was still upon him, and that in the ever varying problem of creation, which, with all his powers, he failed to unlock, and which, as age succeeded age, remained an unsolved problem still, the Divine Master against whom he had rebelled, but from whose presence it was in vain to flee, emphatically spake to him, as in an after age to the patriarch Job, and, with the quiet dignity of the Infinite, challenged him either to do or to know! "Shall he that coutendeth with the Almighty instruct him? He that reproveth God, let him answer. Knowest thou the ordinances of Heaven? or canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?" With what wild thoughts must that restless and unhappy spirit have wandered amid the tangled mazes of the old carboniferous forests! With what bitter mockeries must he have watched the fierce wars which raged in their sluggish waters, among ravenous creatures horrid with trenchant teeth, barbed sting, and sharp spine, and enveloped in glittering armor of plate and scale! And how, as generation after generation passed away, and ever and anon the ocean rolled where the land had been, or the land rose to possess the ancient seats of the ocean,--how, when looking back upon myriads of ages, and when calling up in memory what once had been, the features of earth seemed scarce more fixed to his view than the features of the sky in a day of dappled, breeze-borne clouds,--how must he have felt, as he became conscious that the earth was fast ripening, and that, as its foundations became stable on the abyss, it was made by the Creator a home of higher and yet higher forms of existence,--how must he have felt, if, like some old augur looking into the inner mysteries of animal life, with their strange prophecies, the truth had at length burst upon him, that reasoning, accountable man was fast coming to the birth,--man, the moral agent,--man, the ultimate work and end of creation,--man, a creature in whom, as in the inferior animals, vitality was to be united to matter, but in whom also, as in no inferior animal, responsibility was to be united to vitality! How must expectancy have quickened,--how must solicitude have grown,--when, after the dynasty of the fish had been succeeded by the dynasty of the reptile, and that of the reptile by the dynasty of the sagacious mammal, a time