e kindling morn of creation?" There is fancy here; but it is
that sagacious fancy, vouchsafed to only the true poet, which has so
often proved the pioneer of scientific discovery, and which is in
reality more sober and truthful, in the midst of its apparent
extravagance, than the gravest cogitations of ordinary men. It is surely
no incredible thing, that He who, in the dispensations of the human
period, spake by type and symbol, and who, when He walked the earth in
the flesh, taught in parable and allegory, should have also spoken in
the geologic ages by prophetic figures embodied in the form and
structure of animals. Nay, what the poet imagined, though in a somewhat
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 Palaeozoic, 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 prop