any imitations; and one of the most popular
of these answers line for line, save that it is more stiff and
rectilinear, to the pattern in a recently discovered Old Red Sandstone
coral, the _Smithia Pengellyi_. The beautifully arranged lines which so
smit the dames of England, that each had to provide herself with a gown
of the fabric which they adorned, had been stamped amid the rocks _eons_
of ages before. And it must not be forgotten, that all these forms and
shades of beauty which once filled all nature, but of which only a few
fragments, or a few faded tints, survive, were created, not to gratify
man's love of the aesthetic, seeing that man had no existence until long
after they had disappeared, but in meet harmony with the tastes and
faculties of the Divine Worker, who had in his wisdom produced them all.

[Illustration: Fig. 105.

MURCHISONIA BIGRANULOSA.

(_Old Red Sandstone._)]

[Illustration: Fig. 106.

CONULARIA ORNATA.

(_Old Red Sandstone._)]

[Illustration: Fig. 107.

CALICO PATTERN.

(_Manchester._)]

[Illustration: Fig. 108.

SMITHIA PENGELLYI.

(_Old Red Sandstone._)]

You will, I trust, bear with me should I seek, in depths where the light
shed by science becomes obscure, to guide my steps by light derived from
another and wholly different source. In an assembly such as that which I
have now the honor of addressing, there must be many shades of religious
opinion. I shall, however, assail no man's faith, but simply lay before
you a few deductions which, founded on my own, have supplied me with
what I deem a consistent theory of the curious class of phenomena with
which this evening we have been mainly dealing. First, then, I must hold
that we receive the true explanation of the _man_-like character of the
Creator's workings ere man was, in the remarkable text in which we are
told that "God made man in his own image and likeness." There is no
restriction here to moral quality: the moral image man had, and in large
measure lost; but the intellectual image he still retains. As a
geometrician, as an arithmetician, as a chemist, as an astronomer,--in
short, in all the departments of what are known as the strict
sciences,--man differs from his Maker, not in kind, but in degree,--not
as matter differs from mind, or darkness from light, but simply as a
mere portion of space or time differs from _all_ space or _all_ time. I
have already referred to mechanical contrivances as identically the same