ens, while the sun moves
round it, must yield ultimately to scientific truth. And it is a truth
as certain as the existence of a southern hemisphere, or the motion of
the earth round both its own axis and the great solar centre, that,
untold ages ere man had sinned or suffered, the animal creation
exhibited exactly its present state of war,--that the strong, armed with
formidable weapons, exquisitely constructed to kill, preyed upon the
weak; and that the weak, sheathed, many of them, in defensive armor
equally admirable in its mechanism, and ever increasing and multiplying
upon the earth far beyond the requirements of the mere maintenance of
their races, were enabled to escape, as species, the assaults of the
tyrant tribes, and to exist unthinned for unreckoned ages. It has been
weakly and impiously urged,--as if it were merely with the geologist
that men had to settle this matter,--that such an economy of warfare and
suffering,--of warring and of being warred upon,--would be, in the words
of the infant Goethe, unworthy of an all-powerful and all-benevolent
Providence, and in effect a libel on his government and character. But
that grave charge we leave the objectors to settle with the great
Creator himself. Be it theirs, not ours, according to the poet, to

"Snatch from his hand the balance and the rod,
Rejudge his justice, be the god of God."

Be it enough for the geologist rightly to interpret the record of
creation,--to declare the truth as he finds it,--to demonstrate, from
evidence no clear intellect ever yet resisted, that he, the Creator,
from whom even the young lions seek their food, and who giveth to all
the beasts, great and small, their meat in due season, ever wrought as
he now works in his animal kingdom,--that he gave to the primeval fishes
their spines and their stings,--to the primeval reptiles their trenchant
teeth and their strong armor of bone,--to the primeval mammals their
great tusks and their sharp claws,--that he of old divided all his
creatures, as now, into animals of prey and the animals preyed
upon,--that from the beginning of things he inseparably established
among his non-responsible existences the twin laws of generation and of
death,--nay, further, passing from the established truths of _Geologic_
to one of the best established truths of _Theologic_ science,--God's
eternal justice and truth,--let us assert, that in the Divine government
the matter of fact always determines the quest