rd was generated by a reptile, and the first mammifer
had birds for its parents. The transformations appear rather astounding,
as we pass from one class to another; but the difference between the
species, even, is often so great, that the transition appears hardly
less difficult. In what quadruped, for instance, do we find the first
ancestor of the huge and sagacious elephant? What humble lizard gave
birth to those monsters of the fossil world, the plesiosaurus and
megalosaurus, thirty or forty feet in length? Man, of course, upon this
theory, is only a more perfectly developed monkey, or chimpanzee. With a
nod of approbation to Lord Monboddo's theory, our author observes, that
man has even the rudiments of "a caudal extremity" in the _os coccygis_.

That the instinct of animals and the mind of man are the results of
nothing but material organization is an obvious corollary from this
doctrine. "The difference," says this writer, "between mind in the lower
animals and in man is a difference in degree only; it is not a specific
difference." Mental phenomena, apparently so various and unstable in
the individual, are reduced at once to regularity, and become subject to
calculation, if considered in the mass. This shows, that, like the
phenomena of the weather, they are under the presidency of natural laws.
The phrenologists are the only persons who have followed the order of
nature in the study of mind; they have even determined the functions of
the different parts of the brain. An experiment is mentioned with a
newly killed animal, whose brain was taken out and its place filled with
substances producing electric action, when the process of digestion,
that had been interrupted, was instantly resumed, thus "showing the
absolute identity of the brain with a galvanic battery." The experiment
of inducing muscular action in a corpse, by applying galvanism, is
sufficiently well known. To borrow an illustration from Sidney Smith, it
would seem, that, if we only knew to what organs of the brain to direct
an electric current, an automaton, or a dead man, might be made to hold
an argument, "at least as well as most country parsons."

A person who should hear for the first time this naked exposition of the
writer's theory would be tempted at once to reject the whole, as too
extravagant and absurd to deserve further notice. But he would be much
mistaken in this conclusion. The theory is a very plausible one; it is
one of the best cosmo