augmented riches of the earth. And the end is not yet. "The present
race, rude and impulsive as it is, is perhaps the best adapted to the
present state of things in the world; but the external world goes
through slow and gradual changes, which may leave it in time a much
serener field of existence. There may then be occasion for a nobler type
of humanity, which shall complete the zooelogical circle on this planet,
and realize some of the dreams of the purest spirits of the present
race."

The question now occurs, How are we to account for the origin of
_life_, both in the vegetable and animal kingdoms? The answer can
readily be given, if we follow out resolutely to their remotest
consequences the principles that have already been established. The
evolution of natural laws, the necessary action of the qualities with
which atoms were at first endowed, has sufficed to produce this complex
system of mutually dependent worlds, and all the successive
transformations of the earth's rind, which have fitted it for the
support of successive races of organic beings. May not the same causes
have produced the beings themselves? The one process would seem to be
not much more elaborate and intricate than the other. If the inherent
qualities of matter have built up a solar system, they may have created,
also, the first animalcule, the first fish, the first quadruped, and the
first man. There has been a marked progress, in either case, from the
chaotic, the rude, the imperfectly developed, up to the orderly, the
complex, the matured forms. The first essays, the rude efforts, of
nature have gradually been perfected. The chaotic world that was first
shelled off from the sun differed not less widely from the admirably
furnished planet we now inhabit, than does the zooephyte, whose remains
are not split out of the rock, from man, the present head of the animal
tribe. At any rate, geology informs us, that the causes, whatever they
may be, which produce life, have been long and frequently in operation.
They were not exhausted in the first effort; they are probably still at
work throughout the universe. Not merely successive generations, but
successive races, both of plants and animals, widely distinguished from
each other, have, at different periods, tenanted the earth's surface.
Those of which we possess the fossil remains belong, almost without
exception, to extinct species. They were crowded out of existence, as it
were, by the new forms,