assing away of a dying species. For species have their appointed
periods as well as individuals: viewed in the infinite mind of GOD, the
Creator, from the standpoint of eternity, each form, each race, had its
proper duration assigned to it--a duration which, doubtless, varied in
the different species as greatly as that assigned to the life of one
individual animal differs from that assigned to the life of another. As
the elephant or the eagle may survive for centuries, while the horse and
the dog scarcely reach to twenty years, and multitudes of insects are
born and die within a few weeks, so one species may have assigned to
its life, for aught I know, a hundred thousand years as its normal
period, and another not more than a thousand. If creation was, with
respect to the species, what I have elsewhere proved it was with respect
to the individual,[1]--a violent irruption into the cycle of life--then
we may well conceive this to have taken place at very varying relative
periods in the life-history of the different species;--that is to say,
that at a given date, (viz., that of creation) one species might be just
completing, _ideally_, its allotted course, another just commencing, and
a third attaining its meridian.

Certain it is, that not a few species of animals have died during the
present constitution of things. Races, which we know on indubitable
evidence to have existed during the dominion of man, have died out, have
become extinct, so that not a single individual survives. The entire
totality of individuals which constituted the species, have, in these
cases, ceased to be. Some of these seem to have died at a very early era
of human history; but others at a comparatively recent period, and some
even within our own times. Even within the last twenty years several
animals have been taken, of which it is highly probable that not a
single representative remains on the earth; while there are others yet
again, which we know to be reduced to a paucity so extreme, that their
extinction can scarcely be delayed more than a few years at most. Thus
we may consider ourselves as standing by the dying-beds of these
creatures, with the consciousness that we shall soon see them no more;
that the sentence is gone forth against them; that their sands are
running to the last grains, and that no effort of ours can materially
prolong their existence. The facts from which these conclusions are
drawn are highly curious, and I shall endeavo