construct, have spent their busy lives. All knowledge asserts its true dignity when once brought into relation with the grand end of knowledge,—a wider and deeper view of the significance of conscious and unconscious created being, and the character of its Creator.
We shall close this article with some remarks upon the great doctrines that dominate all the manifold subordinate thoughts which fill these crowded pages. The plan of creation, Mr. Agassiz maintains, "has not grown out of the necessary action of physical laws, but was the free conception of the Almighty Intellect, matured in his thought before it was manifested in tangible, external forms." Before Mr. Agassiz, before Linnæus, before Aristotle, before Plato, Timæus the Locrian spake; the original, together with the version we cite, is given with the Plato of Ficinus:—"Duas esse rerum omnium causas: mentem quidem, earum quae ratione quadam nascuntur, et necessitatem, earum quae existunt vi quadam, secundum corporum potentias et faculitates. Harrum rerum, id est, Natunae bonorum, optimum esse quoddam rerum optimarum principium, et Deum vocari. . . . .Esse præterea in hac Naturæ universitate quiddam quod maneat et intelligible sit, rerum genitarum, quæ quidem in perpetuo quodam mutationum fluxu versantur, exemplar, Ideam dici et mente comprehendi. . . . .Permanet igitur mundus constanter talis qualis est creatus a Deo . . . . proponente sibi non exemplaria quædam manuum opificio edita, sed illam Ideam intelligibilemque essentiam."—So taught the half-inspired pagan philosopher whom Plato took as his guide in his contemplations of Nature.
We trace the thought again in Dante, amidst the various fragments of ancient wisdom which he has embodied in the "Divina Commedia":
Ciò che non muore e ciò che può morire
Non è se non splendor cli quella idea
Che partorisco, amando, il nosfro Sire.
Paradiso, XIII. 52-54.
Two thousand years after the old Greek had written, the Christian philosopher, Sir Thomas Browne, repeats the same doctrine in a new phraseology:—"Before Abraham was, I am, is the saying of Christ; yet it is true in some sense, if I say it of myself; for I was not only before myself, but Adam, that is, in the idea of God, and the decree of that Synod held from all eternity. And in this sense, I say, the World was before the Creation, and at an end before it had a beginning; and thus was I dead before I was alive; though my grave be England, my dying place was Paradise; and Eve miscarried of me before she conceived of Cain."
The slender reed through which Philosophy breathed her first musical whisperings is laid by, and the sacred lyre of Theology is silent or little heeded. But the mighty organ of Modern Science with its hundred stops, each answering to some voice of Nature, takes up the pausing strain, and as we listen we recognize through all its mingling harmonies the simple, sublime, eternal melody that came from the lips of Timaeus the Locrian! The same doctrine reappears in various forms: in the popular works of Derham and Paloy and the Bridgewater Treatises; in the learned and thoughtful pages of Burdach, and in the mystical rhapsodies of Oken. But never, we believe, was it before enforced and illustrated by so imperial a survey of the whole domain of Natural Science as in the volumes before us.
We are not disposed to discuss at any length the opinion maintained by Mr. Agassiz, that life has not grown out of the necessary action of the physical laws. If we accept the customary definitions of the physical laws, we accede most cordially to his proposition. As opposed to the fancies of Epicurus and his poet, Lucretius, or to modern atheistic doctrines of similar character, we have no qualification or condition to suggest which might change its force or significance. When we remember that the genius of such a man as Laplace shared the farthest flight of star-eyed science only to "waft us back the tidings of despair," we
