think the five or six tons of
flesh these bones must have carried round might reasonably permit the
bearer to rank, on _a priori_ reasons, among the most confirmed of
sluggards, even if Owen and Agassiz and Wyman had not so decided on
strictly scientific, anatomical grounds.

My dear Madam, does it ever occur to you, when you wonderingly gaze on
the strange relics around this hall,--these stony skeletons, these
silent remnants of extinct races, that you are face to face with
rock-buried creatures, who lived and sported and mated, who basked in
the sunlight and breathed in the air of this world, hundreds of
thousands of years before you were thought of? who rested in the shade
of the trees which made the coal that warms you to-day? who trod the
soft mud which now builds in solid strength the dwellings which shelter
you? who darted through the deep waters that foamed over a bed now
raised into snow-capped mountains? who frolicked on a shore now piled
with miles of massive rock? whose bones were petrifactions untold ages
before the race was born which built the Pyramids? Do you really
understand how far back into antiquity these grim fossils bear you? Can
you really conceive of Nature, our dear, kind, gentle mother, in those
early throes of her maternity which brought forth Megatheria and
Ichthyosauri,--when the "firm and rock-built earth" was tilted into
mountain ranges, wrinkled by earthquakes, and ploughed by mighty hills
of moving ice? And yet in those distant days, which have left their
ripple-marks and rain-drops in the weighty stone, there was life, warm,
breathing, sentient life, which, dying, traced its own epitaph on its
massive tomb. Shakespeare, Caesar, Brahma, Noah, Adam, lived but
yesterday compared with these creatures, whose stone-bound bones were
buried in the sands that drifted on the shores of this world centuries
before the first man drew into his nostrils the breath of life. Does the
thought ever occur to you, that, ages hence, some enthusiastic student
of nature may puzzle his brains over the bones of some such humble
individuals as you and I, and wonder to what manner of creature they
belonged? Or that, perched upon the shelves of some museum in the year
500000, they may be treasures of an unknown past to the Owens and Wymans
of that day?

You wish I would not talk so?--Well, Madam, let us leave this mausoleum
of the past, and come forth into the life of 1866; and let us see
whether all the _disjec