ures seem very formidable, just as those personal weapons
of the middle ages seem so that were borne at a time when every soldier
took the field cased in armor of proof. The slim scimitar or slender
rapier would have availed but little against massive iron helmets or
mail coats of tempered steel. And so the warriors of the period armed
themselves with ponderous maces, battle-axes as massive as hammers, and
double-handed swords of great weight and strength.

Before passing onwards to other and higher classes and orders, as they
occurred in creation, permit me to make the formidable armor of the
earlier fishes, offensive and defensive, the subject of a single remark.
We are told by Goethe, in his autobiography, that he had attained his
sixth year when the terrible earthquake at Lisbon took place,--"an
event," he says, "which greatly disturbed" his "peace of mind for the
first time." He could not reconcile a catastrophe so suddenly
destructive to thousands, with the ideas which he had already formed for
himself of a Providence all-powerful and all-benevolent. But he
afterwards learned, he tells us, to recognize in such events the "_God
of the Old Testament._" I know not in what spirit the remark was made;
but this I know, that it is the God of the Old Testament whom we see
exhibited in all nature and all providence; and that it is at once
wisdom and duty in his rational creatures, however darkly they may
perceive or imperfectly they may comprehend, to hold in implicit faith
that the Adorable Monarch of all the past and of all the future is a
King who "can do no wrong." This early exhibition of tooth, and spine,
and sting,--of weapons constructed alike to cut and to pierce,--to unite
two of the most indispensable requirements of the modern armorer,--a
keen edge to a strong back,--nay, stranger still, the examples furnished
in this primeval time, of weapons formed not only to kill, but also to
torture,--must be altogether at variance with the preconceived opinions
of those who hold that until man appeared in creation, and darkened its
sympathetic face with the stain of moral guilt, the reign of violence
and outrage did not begin, and that there was no death among the
inferior creatures, and no suffering. But preconceived opinion, whether
it hold fast, with Lactantius and the old Schoolmen, to the belief that
there can be no antipodes, or assert, with Caccini and Bellarmine, that
our globe hangs lazily in the midst of the heav