Surveyed from the special point of view furnished by this peculiar nature of man, unique in creation, all the past of our planet divides into two periods;--the period, inclusive of every age known to the geologist, during which only the Creator wrought; and the period during which man has wrought, and to which all human history belongs. In such a view we are presented with two sets of works,--those of the Creator-worker, and those of the creature-worker; and the vast fund of materials on which the natural theologian frames his arguments demonstrative of design or contrivance, assumes a new significancy and interest when employed as evidence that there exists a certain correspondence of nature and intellect between the two workers, human and Divine. The ability of accomplishing the same ends by the same means,--in other words, of thinking and acting in the same practical tract,--indicates a similarity, if not identity, of intellectual nature. In the Chinese centre of civilization, for instance, printing, gunpowder, the mariner's compass, with the various chemical and mechanical arts of elegant life, were originated without concert with the European centre of civilization, simply because in China, as in Europe, the same human faculties, prompted by the same tastes and necessities, had expatiated in the same tracts of invention, and had, as a consequence, educed the same results. I was much struck, when spending half an hour in a museum illustrative of the arts in China, by the identity of these with our own, especially in the purely mechanical departments; and again, when similarly employed in that apartment devoted, in the British Museum, to the domestic utensils of the ancient Egyptians. The identity of the more common contrivances which I witnessed, with familiar contrivances in our own country, I regarded as altogether as conclusive of an identity of mind in the individuals who had originated them, as if I had actually seen human creatures at work on them all. One class of productions showed me that the potter's wheel and the turning lathe had been known and employed as certainly in China and ancient Egypt as in Britain. Another, that their weaving processes must have been nearly the same. The Chinese know, for instance, as well as ourselves, that patterns can be delicately brought out,--as in the damasks,--without the assistance of color, simply by exposing silken or flaxen fibre at different angles to the light; and they have fallen, as their work shows, on the right methods of producing it. And the Egyptians anticipated us in even our most homely household contrivances. They even fermented their bread and trussed their fowls after the same fashion; and thus gave evidence, in these familiar matters, that they thought and contrived "after the manner of men." Now, in acquainting myself with the organisms of the geologic periods, I have been similarly but more deeply impressed by what I must be permitted to term the