is this record, proceeding step by step from one Almighty operation to another! each the natural consequence, as it were, of that which preceded it. When the earth was formed, and planted, and was receiving the influences of the sun and other luminaries, and thus was prepared to welcome and maintain her locomotive inhabitants, the perfect sphere of animals, if I may so speak, adapted to the wants of the primeval state of the globe of dry land and sea, both external and internal, and to the instruction and uses of man, each individual form gifted and fitted to play the part assigned to it in the general plan of Providence, was brought into existence. The supposed extinct animals all exhibit a relationship to those that we now find existing, and many of them evidently fill up vacant places in the general system, and therefore there is no cause to suppose that they were originally separated from and anterior to their fellows. It is observed that those herbivorous Saurians now inhabiting the surface of our globe, as the Monitor and Iguana, though these can scarcely be called herbivorous since they live principally on insects, are pigmies compared with their affinities, the Megalosaurus and Iguanodon; and a similar disproportion obtains between the existing Proteus and the fossil one. If any of these races are subterranean, perhaps these smaller ones may be regarded, as inhabiting the outskirts of the proper station, or metropolis of their tribe.

It appears, I hope, from what has been observed, in the present chapter, on the subject of animals brought into being subsequent to the fall, and upon those that have since that sad event become extinct from whatever cause, that Divine Providence, after the first creation of man and the animal kingdom, did not leave all things to the action of the original laws which had received his awful sanction before the fall, but altered those by which this system, especially our own globe, was guided and governed before that fatal event, to suit them to what had taken place, and to the altered and deteriorated moral state of man. We learn from the Apostle Saint Peter, that the primeval globe and its heavens or atmosphere, perished at the deluge,' by which expression less cannot be intended, than that the atmosphere and the earth were then, as it were, new mixed, so as to render the former less friendly to life and health, whence would gradually follow the shortening of human, and probably animal life; and subject to raging storms and hurricanes; to the fury and fearful effects of thunder and lightning; to the overflowing violence of torrents of rain: while the latter, from the breaking up, inversion, mixing, depression, or elevation of its original strata, and the addition of new ones from animal and vegetable deposites,o was rendered in many places utterly barren, and

1 Gr. aπwλεTO. 2 Pet. iii. 6.

See Appendix, note 11.

in others much diminished in fertility, so that the general productiveness of the globe must have been considerably diminished, and the permission to eat flesh must have been extremely useful in increasing the amount of food, and diminishing that of labour. Such a change having taken place, both in the heavens and the earth, and vast countries being essentially altered both in the temperature of the atmosphere, from whatever cause, and the productions of the soil, the extinction of many of the original animal forms, that were extra-tropical, or at least were inhabitants of high latitudes, and were incapable of bearing the changes, whether it was ante-diluvial or post-diluvial, would necessarily follow; and again as man was become by his nature prone to sin, he as necessarily was made subject to evil. Hence he became exposed, from the new constitution of the earth and atmosphere, to various diseases and sundry kinds of death, the term of his existence was shortened, and it was chequered with days of darkness as well as of light: and he was infested by various animals, either newly created, or then first let loose against him and his property.

All these things indicate a change in the mechanical as well as other original powers set and kept in action by the Creator, and a certain dependence of two distinct classes of events upon each other. If a great alteration generally takes

place in the moral condition of man, a corresponding change affects his physical one; and this alternation and conflict between good and evil, in this double series, after a long and arduous struggle, will finally be determined by the destruction of this diluvial earth and heavens, which we are assured will, in the end, be replaced by "New Heavens and a new Earth wherein dwelleth righteousness."

CHAPTER II.

Geographical and Local Distribution of Animals.

HAVING Considered the first creation of the animal kingdom, and the larger features of its history to the time of the Deluge, bringing us to that era when our globe had assumed its present general characters, and its population was in those circumstances that led to their present habits and stations: the next subject to be discussed is their geographical and local distribution.

What had taken place in this respect before the Deluge we have no means of ascertaining. That the original temperature of the earth was once more equal than it is now, seems to be the general opinion of men of science, however they

may differ as to its cause. If this was the case, as it probably was, any individual species might have been located in any country, north or south, and suffer no inconvenience from unaccustomed heat or cold, so as to interfere with its complete naturalization: the only other requisite would be a kind of food suited to its nature; and it is singular and worthy of particular attention, that a large proportion of the plants, as well as animals, that are found in a fossil state in our northern latitudes are of a tropical type or character.

After their creation, and perhaps the expulsion of the first pair from Paradise, we may suppose that the various animals of the antediluvian world were guided to those regions in which it was the will of Providence to place them, by a divine impulse upon them, which caused them to move in the right direction. Probably before the Deluge took place, the world was every where peopled with animals: and perhaps, as Professor Buckland has suggested, the sudden change of temperature that destroyed the northern animals might be one of the predisposing causes of that

event.

Under the present head, the geographical distribution of our postdiluvian races of animals, the first thing to be considered is the means by which,

1 See above, p. 17, &c.