he
sum total of all the animals;" hence, too, a recognition of type in the
_history_ of the successive vertebral periods of the geologist,
symbolical of the history of every individual man. It is not difficult
to conceive how, on a subject of such complexity, especially if
approached in an irreverent spirit, grave mistakes and misconceptions
should take place. Virgil knew just enough of Hebrew prophecy to
misapply, in his _Pollio_, to his great patron Octavius, those ancient
predictions which foretold that in that age the Messiah was to appear.
And I am inclined to hold, that in the more ingenious speculations of
the Lamarckians we have just a similar misapplication of what,
emboldened by the views of Owen and Agassiz, I shall venture to term the
_Geologic Prophecies_.

The term is new, but the idea which it embodies, though it at first
existed rather as a nice poetic instinct than as a scientifically based
thought, is at least as old as the times of Herder and Coleridge. In a
passage quoted from the former writer by Dr. M'Cosh, in his very
masterly work on typical forms, I find the profound German remarking of
the strange resemblances which pervade all nature, and impart a general
unity to its forms, that it would seem "as if on all our earth the
form-abounding mother had proposed to herself but one type,--one
proto-plasma,--according to which, and for which, she formed them all.
Know, then," he continues, "what this form is. It is the identical one
which man also wears." And the remark of Coleridge, in his "Aids to
Reflection," is still more definite. "Let us carry us back in spirit,"
he says, "to the mysterious week, the teeming work days of the Creator
(as _they rose in_ VISION _before the eye of the inspired historian_) of
the operations of the heavens and of the earth, in the day that the
Lord God made the earth and the heavens. And who that watched their ways
with an understanding heart could, as the vision evolved still advanced
towards him, contemplate the filial and loyal bee, the home-building,
wedded, and divorceless swallow, and, above all, the manifoldly
intelligent ant tribes, with their commonwealths and confederacies,
their warriors and miners, the husband folk that fold in their tiny
flocks on the honey leaf, and the virgin sister with the holy instincts
of maternal love detached and in selfless purity, and not say in
himself, Behold the shadow of approaching humanity, the sun rising from
behind in th