ta membra_ of extinct being are ranged around the
walls of this classic hall, or whether we may not find something akin
near our own snug and comfortable homes. I think I know some hardened
hearts which have ossified around the soft emotions which in earlier
years played therein. And, bless you, Madam, I meet every day, in my
down-town walks, some strange animated fossils, more repellent than any
I ever beheld in the Natural History cabinet. These bear the unfamiliar
look which belongs to a fabulous age, and rest, silent and unobtrusive,
in their half-opened cerements. The others wear a very familiar form,
which belongs to our day, yet they are the exponents of a dead life
which animated the buried bones of barbarism. The innocent Megatheria
and Ichthyosauri crawled and paddled and died in their day; but these
living fossils have the vital forms of the life above ground, while they
bear within the psychical peculiarities of extinct beings. They creep
about on the shores of time with the outward shapes of their fellows,
and, when buried in its rising waves, will leave undistinguishable
remains in their common tomb; and future explorers will never trace
therein the evanescent peculiarities in which the two were so unlike.

Bones! Why, the whole earth is a big bundle of them. They are not only
in graveyards, where "mossy marbles rest"; they are strewn, "unknelled,
uncoffined, and unknown," over the whole surface of the globe, and lie
embosomed in the gulfs of the great, restless ocean. Who knows what
untamed savage rests beneath us here? Don't start, my dear Madam. I have
no doubt that, when Tommy plays bo-peep round the big tree on the
Common, he is tripping over the crania of some Indian sachems.
Goldsmith's seat, "for whispering lovers made," very likely rested on
some venerable, departed Roman; and many a Maypole has gone plump
through the thorax of some defunct Gaul. If the old story be true, that,
when we shudder, somebody is walking over our grave, what a shaking race
of beings our remote ancestors must have been!

My dear Madam, down in the green fields, the flowery meadows, the deep
woods, the damp swamps of the balmy South, are there not spread, to-day,
in grievous numbers, the bones of the noble, true-hearted heroes who
went forth in their strength and manhood to meet a patriot's fate? Will
not the future tread of those they ransomed be light and buoyant in the
long days of freedom yet to come? What will they kn