an, the highest of the vertebrates, is thus the
archetype, representing and including all the lower and earlier
members of the vertebrate type. The above are but trite and familiar
examples of a doctrine which may furbish and has furnished the
material of volumes. There can be no question that the Hebrew Bible is
the oldest book in which this principle is stated. In the first
chapter of Genesis we have specific type in the creation of plants and
animals after their kinds or species, and in the formation of man in
the image and likeness of the Creator; and, as we shall find in the
sequel, there are some curious ideas of higher and more general types
in the grouping of the creatures referred to. The same idea is
indicated in the closing chapters of Job, where the three higher
classes of the vertebrates are represented by a number of examples,
and the typical likeness of one of these--the hippopotamus--to man,
seems to be recognized. Dr. McCosh has quoted, as an illustration of
the doctrine of types, a very remarkable passage from Psalm cxxxix.:

"I will praise Thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Marvellous are thy works,
And that my soul knoweth right well.
My substance was not hid from Thee,
When I was made in secret,
And curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth:
Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being imperfect;
And in thy book all my members were written,
Which in continuance were fashioned when as yet there
was none of them."

It would too much tax the faith of many to ask them to believe that
the writer of the above passage, or the Spirit that inspired him,
actually meant to teach--what we now know so well from geology--that
the prototypes of all the parts of the archetypal human structure may
be found in those fossil remains of extinct animals which may, in
nearly every country, be dug up from the rocks of the earth. No
objection need, however, be taken to our reading in it the doctrine of
embryonic development according to a systematic type.

Science, it is true, or rather I should perhaps say philosophical
speculation, has sometimes pushed this idea of plan into that of a
spontaneous genetic evolution of things in time, without any creative
superintendence or definite purpose. This way of viewing the matter
is, however, as we shall have occasion to see, both bald and
irrational, and wants the symmetry and completeness of that style of
thought which grasps at once