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Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/365

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THE IGUANODON.
351

touching its edges; and who by every finer telescope is shown an increased multitude of such suns, many of them far larger.

Hereafter as heretofore, higher faculty and deeper insight will raise rather than lower this sentiment. At present the most powerful and most instructed intellect has neither the knowledge nor the capacity required for symbolizing in thought the totality of things. Occupied with one or other division of Nature, the man of science usually does not know enough of the other divisions even to rudely conceive the extent and complexity of their phenomena; and, supposing him to have adequate knowledge of each, yet he is unable to think of them as a whole. Wider and more complex intellect may hereafter help him to form a vague consciousness of them in their totality. We may say that just as an undeveloped musical faculty, able only to appreciate a simple melody, can not grasp the variously-entangled passages and harmonies of a symphony, which in the minds of composer and conductor are unified into involved musical effects awakening far greater feeling than is possible to the musically uncultured, so, by future more evolved intelligences, the course of things now apprehensible only in parts may be apprehensible all together, with an accompanying feeling as much beyond that of the present cultured man as his feeling is beyond that of the savage.

And this feeling is not likely to be decreased but increased by that analysis of knowledge which, while forcing him to agnosticism, yet continually prompts him to imagine some solution of the Great Enigma which he knows can not be solved. Especially must this be so when he remembers that the very notions, beginning and end, cause and purpose, are relative notions belonging to human thought, which are probably inapplicable to the ultimate reality transcending human thought, and when, though suspecting that explanation is a word without meaning when applied to this ultimate reality, he yet feels compelled to think there must be an explanation.

But, amid the mysteries which become the more mysterious the more they are thought about, there will remain the one absolute certainty, that he is ever in presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed.

THE IGUANODON.

THE iguanodon was discovered by Dr. Mantell, in the Wealden of England, in 1822, and has since figured in geological books as one of the largest and most remarkable of the animals whose former existence is revealed in the fossil beds of past ages. It is described in the second edition of Dana's "Geology" as "an herbivorous dinosaur of the Wealden. It was thirty feet long, and of great bulk, and