ense feeling of
appropriation, that "calls the delightful scenery all its own,"
associated

"With worthy thoughts of that unvaried love
That planned, and built, and still upholds, a world
So clothed with beauty, for rebellious man."

Strange to say, however, it is to the higher exponents of natural
science, and in especial to the geologists, that it has been left to
deal most directly with the sophistries of Bolingbroke and Pope.

Oken, a man quite as far wrong in some points as either the poet or his
master, was the first to remark, and this in the oracular, enigmatical
style peculiar to the German, that "man is the sum total of all the
animals." Gifted, as all allow, with a peculiarly nice eye for detecting
those analogies which unite the animal world into a harmonious whole, he
remarked, that in one existence or being all these analogies converge.
Even the humbler students of the heavens have learned to find for
themselves the star of the pole, by following the direction indicated by
what are termed the two pointer stars in the Great Bear. And to the eye
of Oken all the groups of the animal kingdom formed a sphere of
constellations, each of which has its pointer stars, if I may so speak,
turned towards man. Man occupies, as it were, the central point in the
great circle of being; so that those lines which pass singly through
each of the inferior animals stationed at its circumference, meet in
him; and thus, as the focus in which the scattered rays unite, he
imparts by his presence a unity and completeness to creation which it
would not possess were he away. You will be startled, however, by the
language in which the German embodies his view; though it may be not
uninstructive to refer to it in evidence of the fact that a man may be
_intellectually_ on the very verge of truth, and yet for every moral
purpose infinitely removed from it. "Man," he says, "is God manifest in
the flesh." And yet it may be admitted that there is a certain loose
sense in which man _is_ "God manifest in the flesh." As may be
afterwards shown, he is God's _image_ manifested in the flesh; and an
image or likeness _is_ a manifestation or making evident of that which
it represents, whether it be an image or likeness of body or of mind.

Not less extraordinary, but greatly more sound in their application,
are the views of Professor Owen,--supreme in his own special walk as a
comparative anatomist. We find him recognizing man as exemplifying