t are scarcely less poetic than the pleasing imagination of the
poet regarding it. They tell that man's world, with all its griefs and
troubles, is more emphatically a world of flowers than any of the
creations that preceded it, and that as one great family--the
grasses--were called into existence, in order, apparently, that he
might enter in favoring circumstances upon his two earliest avocations,
and be in good hope a keeper of herds and a tiller of the ground; and as
another family of plants--the Rosaceae--was created in order that the
gardens which it would be also one of his vocations to keep and to dress
should have their trees "good for food and pleasant to the taste;" so
flowers in general were profusely produced just ere he appeared, to
minister to that sense of beauty which distinguishes him from all the
lower creatures, and to which he owes not a few of his most exquisite
enjoyments. The poet accepted the bee as a sign of high significance:
the geologist also accepts her as a sign. Her entombed remains testify
to the gradual fitting up of our earth as a place of habitation for a
creature destined to seek delight for the mind and the eye as certainly
as for the grosser senses, and in especial marks the introduction of the
stately forest trees, and the arrival of the delicious flowers. And,

"Thus in their stations lifting toward the sky
The foliaged head in cloud-like majesty,
The shadow-casting race of trees survive:
Thus in the train of spring arrive
Sweet flowers: what living eye hath viewed
Their myriads? endlessly renewed
Wherever strikes the sun's glad ray,
Where'er the subtile waters stray,
Wherever sportive zephyrs bend
Their course, or genial showers descend."

LECTURE SECOND.

THE PALAEONTOLOGICAL HISTORY OF ANIMALS.

Amid the unceasing change and endless variety of nature there occur
certain great radical ideas, that, while they form, if I may so express
myself, the groundwork of the change,--the basis of the variety,--admit
in themselves of no change or variety whatever. They constitute the
aye-enduring tissue on which the ever-changing patterns of creation are
inscribed: the patterns are ever varying; the tissue which exhibits them
for ever remains the same. In the animal kingdom, for instance, the
prominent ideas have always been uniform. However much the faunas of the
various geologic periods may have differed from each other, or from the
fauna which now exists, in their