INTRODUCTION.

T has been said by one of our poets a that the most "proper study for mankind is man." Man, under whatever form he is presented to us, historically, morally, physically, or religiously, must claim our attention beyond every other study.

To know our future destiny as we should do, it requires to know something of the past; the two conditions seem to be intimately connected in that book which alone gives us the history of our origin, and unfolds to us our future hopes.

I confess I have no sympathy with those who would trace our origin to the gorilla or the ape, and still less with those who give us the far less intelligent or intelligible origin of the oyster.

The Bible tells us that "of one blood hath God made all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation "." It also tells us that "all flesh is not the same flesh, but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds d"

We have therefore the highest guarantee-if the Bible is to be accepted, and if not accepted, what

a Pope's Essay on Man, Ep. ii. line 2.

b "Simia quam similis turpissima bestia nobis."-Ennius.

are we?—that we all proceed from one common stock, and that stock far, far beyond the lower order of animals, however intelligent some of them may appear to be, and that the lines of demarcation are so strong as cannot by any possibility be overpassed. God is the God of order and not of confusion.

Neither can I give in to the notion that each country has had its autóx@oves, or its own separate creation; a view, one would have thought, altogether exploded, did not the most absurd theories crop out over and over again, however repeatedly refuted. Revelation, however, distinctly pronounces against such imaginations.

There is nothing new in the theory of the. progress of species, or anything too ridiculous, but it will rise up again from time to time to startle us; perhaps purposely, to set us thinking, that our minds should resettle themselves upon the grand truths of revelation, and "that men would therefore praise God for His goodness, and the wonders that He doeth among the children of men;" "Made little lower than the angels, that He might crown them with glory and worship." I say nothing is too absurd but it will crop out again, for it was a part of the Bardo-Druidic creed, that "animals originated in the lowest point of existence, the meanest water-worm. Land animals they presumed were of a superior order, and rose in their various gradations up to man. As all modes of existence below humanity are necessarily evil, so no animal can pass to a lower state when it dies, but the divine benevolence has so ordained that it should rise higher;