extreme form, the philosophers seem to be on the very eve of confirming. The foreknown "archetypal idea" of Owen,--"the immaterial link of connection" of all the past with all the present, which Agassiz resolves into the foreordained design of the Creator,--will be yet found, I cannot doubt, to translate themselves into one great general truth, namely, that the Palæozoic, Secondary, and Tertiary dispensations of creation were charged, like the patriarchal and Mosaic dispensations of grace, with the "shadows of better things to come." The advent of man simply as such was the great event prefigured during the old geologic ages. The advent of that Divine Man "who hath abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light," was the great event prefigured during the historic ages. It is these two grand events, equally portions of one sublime scheme, originated when God took counsel with himself in the depths of eternity, that bind together past, present, and future,--the geologic with the Patriarchal, the Mosaic, and the Christian ages, and all together with that new heavens and new earth, the last of many creations, in which there shall be "no more death nor curse, but the throne of God and the Lamb shall be in it, and his servants shall serve him." "There is absurdity," said Pope, "in man's conceiting himself the final cause of creation." Unless, however, man had the entire scheme of creation before him, with the further partially known scheme of which but a part constitutes the grand theme of revelation, how could he pronounce on the absurdity? The knowledge of the geologist ascends no higher than man. He sees all nature in the pre-Adamic past, pointing with prophetic finger towards him; and on even the argument of Hume,--just and solid within its proper limits,--he refuses to acquiesce in the unfounded inference of Pope. In order to prove the absurdity of "man's conceiting himself the final cause of creation," proof of an ulterior cause,--of a higher end and aim,--must he adduced; and of aught higher than man, the geologist, as such, knows nothing. The long vista opened up by his science closes with the deputed lord of creation,--with man as he at present exists; and when, casting himself full upon revelation, the vail is drawn aside, and an infinitely grander vista stretches out before him into the future, he sees man--no longer, however, the natural, but the Divine man--occupying what is at once its terminal point and its highest apex. Such are some of the bearings of geologic science on the science of natural theology. Geology has disposed effectually and forever of the oft-urged assumption of an infinite series; it deals as no other science could have dealt with the assertion of the skeptic, that creation is a "singular effect;" it casts a flood of unexpected light on the somewhat obsolete plausibilities of Bolingbroke and Jenyns, that exhibits their utterly unsolid character;