r, 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 Palaeontology, 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 favorite one with
thoughtful men in every age of the world. According to the Psalmist,
these great "works of the Lord are sought out of all them that have
pleasure therein." The Book of Job, probably the oldest writing in
existence, is full of vivid descriptions of the wild denizens of the
flood and desert; and it is expressly recorded of the wise old king,
that he "spake of trees, from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon, even
unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall; and also of beasts, and
of fowl, and of cree