years had elapsed
since that day--emphatically the _last_ to the Pre-Adamite race--had
come and gone. Of all the accountable creatures that had been summoned
to its bar, bone had been gathered to its bone, so that not a vestige of
the framework of their bodies occurred in the rocks or soils in which
they had been originally inhumed; and, in consequence, only the remains
of their irresponsible contemporaries, the inferior animals, and of the
vegetable productions of their fields and forests, were now to be found.
The dream filled for a time my whole imagination; but though poetry
might find ample footing on a hypothesis so suggestive and bold, I need
scarce say that it has itself no foundation in science. Man had _no_
responsible predecessor on earth. At the determined time, when his
appointed habitation was completely fitted for him, he came and took
possession of it; but the old geologic ages had been ages of
immaturity--_days_ whose work as a work of promise was "good," but not
yet "very good," nor yet ripened for the appearance of a moral agent,
whose nature it is to be a fellow-worker with the Creator in relation to
even the physical and the material. The planet which we inhabit seems to
have been prepared for man, and for man only.

Partly through my friend, but in part also from the circumstance that I
retained a measure of intimacy with such of my schoolfellows as had
subsequently prosecuted their education at college, I was acquainted,
during the later years in which I wrought as a mason, with a good many
university-taught lads; and I sometimes could not avoid comparing them
in my mind with working men of, as nearly as I could guess, the same
original calibre. I did not always find that general superiority on the
side of the scholar which the scholar himself usually took for granted.
What he had specially studied he knew, save in rare and exceptional
cases, better than the working man; but while the student had been
mastering his Greek and Latin, and expatiating in Natural Philosophy and
the Mathematics, the working man, if of an inquiring mind, had been
doing something else; and it is at least a fact, that all the great
readers of my acquaintance at this time--the men most extensively
acquainted with English literature--were not the men who had received
the classical education. On the other hand, in framing an argument, the
advantage lay with the scholars. In that common sense, however, which
reasons but does n