as in aught typical of the
human race, it would yet not be easy to instance a family of animals
that has ministered more extensively to his necessities. I refer to the
sheep,--that soft and harmless creature, that clothes civilized man
everywhere in the colder latitudes with its fleece,--that feeds him with
its flesh,--that gives its bowels to be spun into the catgut with which
he refits his musical instruments,--whose horns he has learned to
fashion into a thousand useful trinkets,--and whose skin, converted into
parchment, served to convey to later times the thinking of the first
full blow of the human intellect across the dreary gulf of the middle
ages.

At length the human period begins. A creature appears upon the scene
unlike all that had preceded him, and whose nature it equally is to look
back upon the events of the past,--among other matters, on that
succession of beings upon the planet which he inhabits, with which we
are this evening attempting to deal,--and to anticipate at least one
succession more, in that still future state in which he himself is again
to appear, in happier circumstances than now, and in a worthier
character. We possess another history of the primeval age and subsequent
chronology of the human family than that which we find inscribed in the
rocks. And it is well that we do so. From various causes, the geologic
evidence regarding the period of man's first appearance on earth is
singularly obscure. That custom of "burying his dead out of his sight,"
which obtained, we know, in the patriarchal times, and was probably in
use ever since man came first under the law of death, has had the effect
of mingling his remains with those of creatures that were extinct for
ages ere he began to be. The cavern, once a haunt of carnivorous
animals, that in the first simple ages of his history had furnished him
with a shelter when living, became his burying-place when dead; and thus
his bones, and his first rude attempts in pottery and weapon-making,
have been found associated with the remains of the cave-hyaena and
cave-tiger, with the teeth of the ancient hippopotamus, and the tusks of
the primeval elephant. The evidence on the point, too,--from the great
paucity of human remains of a comparatively remote period, and from the
circumstance that they are rarely seen by geologists in the stratum in
which they occur,--is usually very imperfect in its details. Further, it
is an evidence obnoxious to suspicion,