to a conviction, that the contrivance is
admirably adapted to produce the effects we behold;--that the means are
competent to the end. The same reasoning applies to the phenomena of
intellect, and may be illustrated by the comparative difference which
appears in animals and man.

The mental endowments and capacities which animals possess, have
rendered them stationary; whatever the more docile and intelligent may
have been compelled to learn, they do not appear to comprehend, and want
the means to communicate: so that their contemporaries and descendants
are unbenefited by the acquirement, and the attainment perishes with the
individual. When brought into existence, the world is to them a recent
creation, and bears no evidence of a former race, from archives or
monuments which they can understand. The record of their ancestors has
been discovered by man, in fossile preservation; but its characters are
unintelligible to them. As they have not been endowed with the capacity
to numerate, they can experience no solicitude for the past, nor
apprehension for the future. Their recollection is not an act of the
will, but an excitation by the object that originally produced it. In
the grammar of animals, the present is the only tense, and to punish
them for the faults they had formerly committed, would be equally absurd
and tyrannical. They are not the creatures of compact, and being unable
to comprehend the nature of institutions, and the obligation of laws,
they cannot be responsible agents. It has also been remarked, that they
are destitute of sympathy for the sufferings of their fellows; but
sympathy would be superfluous, where they cannot understand the nature
of the affliction, and do not possess the power of administering relief.

The features of the human mind are very differently shaped, and
strongly indicate an ulterior destination. Man possesses language, the
instrument of thought, the vehicle of intelligible communication;--and
he is gifted with the hand, to record the subjects of his experience, to
fabricate his contrivances, and to rear the durable monuments of his
piety and splendour. Thus, he is rapidly progressive, his mind becomes
opulent from the intellectual treasures of his ancestors, and, in his
turn, he bequeaths to posterity the legacy of wisdom. His comprehension
of numbers, on which the nature of time is founded, enable him to revert
to the transactions of distant ages, and to invest faded events with