al life was but a span
removed from vegetable vitality; we have an era of gigantic vegetable
growth; an era of gigantic but rude animal growth, and so on step by
step down to the advent of man. The previous combinations of animal
life and vegetable life passed away with the era in which they
flourished; one class succeeding another, each emerging from, and
stepping over the annihilation of its predecessor, till we come down
to the present--is there no future progress for this earth as a
planet? Is there to be no other era, where man himself, like the
sauruses, like the mastodon, shall have passed away, to be succeeded
by some nobler animal structure, some loftier intelligence, some more
cunning invention of the infinite mind?

"Man, great in intellect, powerful in mind, gifted with reason, and
having within him a spirit that is immortal, proud, glorious, aspiring
as he is, falls very far short of perfection in every attribute of his
nature. To say, therefore, that the prescience, the creative power of
the Almighty, reached the limit of its achievements in the creation of
man, is to impeach the omnipotence of God himself. Will any man insist
that the ingenuity of the Almighty is exhausted? May it not be, then
that the time will come when some sentient beings, as far superior to
man, as man is to the animals of the era of the lizards and the
amphibia, shall, like the geologists of the present day, be delving
among the rocks and rubbish of vanished ages, for evidences of the
existences of our own proud species at, to them, some remote period of
the world's progress?

"If these questions cannot be answered by the learned and the wise, if
science makes no response, and philosophy furnishes no solution of
them, who dare say that the world is not, even now, entering upon a
new era of progress, taking another step in the forward movement? May
it not be, that the time is coming when the barrier between the
living, and the disembodied spirit is to be broken down? When that
viewless essence, that mystery of mysteries, the spirit of life, the
immortal soul, shall be permitted to come back from the unknown
country, to impart to the people of this world, the wisdom, the
mysteries, and the glory of the next? May not this be the new era that
is about opening in the progress of all things? It may be asked, is it
not possible that a new principle is about being evolved, that will
admit of communication between the living and the physic