s records of an antiquity, the
remoteness of which we cannot realise, will rise to the minds of all
visitors who can see in the vast collection of animal life through
which we have guided them, revelations of the endless forms and the
endless beauties that pass often unnoticed, because not understood,
under every step that man takes in the many journeys that lie between
his hopeful cradle and his inevitable grave.

END OF THE FIRST VISIT.

VISIT THE SECOND.

On entering the British Museum for the second time, the visitor should
ascend the great staircase, pass through the south, central, and
mammalia saloons; traverse the eastern zoological gallery, and
continue north, direct into the first room of the most northern
gallery of the northern wing;--where the studies of his second visit
should begin. His first visit was occupied in the examination of the
varieties of animal life distributed throughout the surface of the
globe. The greater part of his time on this occasion will be devoted
to the study of the wonders that lie under the surface of the earth;
of the revelations of extinct animal life made by impressible rocks;
and of the metallic wealth which human ingenuity has adapted to the
wants and luxuries of mankind. In the fossil remains he will be able
to recognise traces of an animal life, of which we have no living
specimens; of trees, the like of which never rise from the bosom of
the soil at the present time. The lessons that lie in these
indistinct, disjointed revelations of the remote past, are pregnant
with matter for earnest thought to all men. They are part of our
history--links that hold us to the sources of things, and recall us
again and again to the condition of our universe, as it trembled into
space, and as now we inhabit it--a great and marvellous globe, every
grain of which has an unfathomable story in it. Philosophers have
laboured long at the story of the earth; and their revelations have
tended to settle it, in a form not unlike the following:--

Originally, within the space bounded by the orbit of Uranus, a gaseous
matter was diffused at a high temperature. By laws, the origin of
which we have not yet traced, the condition of the diffused heat was
changed, and the particles of the gaseous matter, condensed and
agglomerated by attraction, into a series of planets, of which our
earth is the third in point of size. That the earth has undergone vast
changes, is evident to the most super