whome thowe shuldest shewe this great mercye? O moste lovynge Lord, forgyve us our unthankfulnes, and all our synnes, for Jesus Christ's sake, O heavenly Father, increase thy Holy Spirit in us, to teache our heartes to cry Abba, deare Father! to assure us of our eternal election in Christ; to revele thy wyll more and more towards us; to confirme us so in thy trewthe, that we may lyve and dye therein; and that by the power of the same Spirit we may boldlely gyve an accompts of our faith to all men with humblenes and mekenes, that whereas they backbyte and slaunder us as evyll doers, they may be ashamed and once stopp their mowthes, seinge our good conversation in Christ Iesu, for whose sake we beseche thee, O Lord God, to guide, governe, and prosper this our enterprise in assemblinge our bretherne, to prayse thy holie name. And not only to be here present with us thy children according to thy promesse, but also mercifullie to assist thy like persecuted people, our Bretherne, gathered in all other places, that they and we, consentinge together in one spirite and truethe, may (all worldly respectes set a part) seke thy onely honor and glorie in all our and their Assemblies.

SO BE IT.

THE

TESTIMONY OF THE ROCKS.

LECTURE FIRST.

THE PALEONTOLOGICAL HISTORY OF PLANTS.

PALEONTOLOGY, or the science of ancient organisms, deals, as its subject, with all the plants and animals of all the geologic periods. It bears nearly the same sort of relation to the physical history of the past, that biography does to the civil and political history of the past. For just as a complete biographic system would include every name known to the historian, a complete palæontologic system would include every fossil known to the geologist. It enumerates and describes all the organic existences of all the extinct creations,-all the existences, too, of the present creation that occur in the fossil or semi-fossil form; and, thus coextensive in space with the earth's surface,nay, greatly more than coextensive with the earth's surface,for in the vast hieroglyphic record which our globe composes, page lies beneath page, and inscription covers over inscription, — coextensive, too, in time, with every period in the terrestrial history since being first began upon our planet,-it presents to the student a theme so vast and multifarious, that it might seem but the result, on his part, of a proper modesty, conscious of the limited

range of his powers, and of the brief and fleeting term of his life, were he to despair of being ever able effectually to grapple with it. "But," to borrow from one of the most ingenious of our Scottish metaphysicians, "in this, as in other instances in which nature has given us difficulties with which to cope, she has not left us to be wholly overcome." "If," says Dr. Thomas Brown, in his remarks on the classifying principle, "if she has placed us in a labyrinth, she has at the same time furnished us with a clue which may guide us, not, indeed, through all its dark and intricate windings, but through those broad paths which conduct us into day. The single power by which we discover resemblance or relation in general, is a sufficient aid to us in the perplexity or confusion of our first attempts at arrangement. It begins by converting thousands, and more than thousands, into one; and, reducing in the same manner the numbers thus formed, it arrives at last at the few distinctive characters of those great comprehensive tribes on which it ceases to operate, because there is nothing left to oppress the memory or the understanding."

But, is this all? Can the Paleontologist but say that that classifying principle, which in every other department of science yields such assistance to the memory, is also of use in his, or but urge that it enables him to sort and arrange his facts; and that, by converting one idea into the type and exemplar of many resembling ones, it imparts to him an ability of carrying not inadequate conceptions of the mighty whole in his mind? If this were all, you might well ask, Why obtrude upon us, in connection with your special science, a common semi-metaphysical idea, equally applicable to all the sciences, -in especial, for example, to that botany which is the science of existing plants, and to that zoology which is the science of existing animals? Nay, I reply, but it is not all. I refer to this classifying principle

because, while it exists in relation to all other sciences as a principle-to use the words of the metaphysician just quoted-"given to us by nature," as a principle of the mind within,-it exists in Paleontological science as a principle of nature itself, as a principle palpably external to the mind. It is a marvellous fact, whose full meaning we can as yet but imperfectly comprehend, that myriads of ages ere there existed a human mind, well nigh the same principles of classification now developed by man's intellect in our better treatises of zoology and botany, were developed on this earth by the successive geologic periods; and that the by-past productions of our planet, animal and vegetable, were chronologically arranged in its history, according to the same laws of thought which impart regularity and order to the works of the later naturalist and phytologists.

I need scarce say how slow and interrupted in both provinces the course of arrangement has been, or how often succeeding writers have had to undo what their predecessors had done, only to have their own classifications set aside by their successors in turn. At length, however, when the work appears to be well nigh completed, a new science has arisen, which presents us with a very wonderful means of testing it. Cowley, in his too eulogistic ode to Hobbes,-smit by the singular ingenuity of the philosophic infidel, and unable to look through his sophisms to the consequences which they involved,-could say, in addressing him, that

We now know, however, that no mere resemblance to truth will for any considerable length of time serve its turn. It is because the resemblances have, like those of Hobbes, been mere resemblances, that so much time and labor have had to be wasted by the pioneers of science in their removal; and, now that a wonderful opportunity has occurred of comparing, in this matter of classification, the human with the Divine idea,-the idea embodied by the zoologists and botanists in their respective systems, with the idea embodied by the Creator of all in geologic history, — we cannot perhaps do better, in entering upon our subject, than to glance briefly at the great features in which God's order of classification, as developed in Palæontology, agrees with the order in which man has at length learned to range the living productions, plant and animal, by which he is surrounded, and of which he himself forms the most remarkable portion. In an age in which a class of writers not without their influence in the world of letters would fain repudiate every argument derived from design, and denounce all who hold with Paley and Chalmers as anthropomorphists, that labor to create for themselves a god of their own type and form, it may be not altogether unprofitable to contemplate the wonderful parallelism which exists between the Divine and human systems of classification, and -remembering that the geologists who have discovered the one had no hand in assisting the naturalists and phytologists who framed the other-soberly to inquire whether we have not a new argument in the fact for an identity in constitution and quality of the Divine and human minds,· not a mere fanciful identity, the result of a disposition on the part of man to imagine to himself a God bearing his own likeness, but an identity real and actual, and the result of that creative act by which God formed man in his own image.

The study of plants and animals seems to have been a