As, however, the discussion of these interesting subjects would lead me into matters that are hardly suited to the Lecture-room of this Institution, I must pass over the consideration of them with a few brief remarks.
In so doing, I may appear to postulate some opinions upon points that are still the subject of animated controversy in the scientific world. But it would require a far broader field of investigation than is here afforded me, in order to treat these inquiries successfully, and to adduce all the evidence that would be necessary to support the hypotheses put forward; and I am anxious to devote no greater space to these preliminary remarks than is necessary to point out some of the main features of interest that are involved in the particular study which forms the subject of my lecture.
We are apt to speak of the creation of the universe as a thing of the past, and to suppose that the world, with all the varied life upon it, previous to man’s appearance, having been created for his especial happiness and supremacy, was afterwards left to his control and government. But this view of the subject belongs to an age in which the laws of nature in their all-sufficiency and completeness were but little studied and appreciated. Modern science finds no evidence of any such abandonment of the universe to man’s jurisdiction. The more comprehensively the subject is viewed, the more restricted appear to be those limits over which the free will of mankind is permitted to range, and the more evident it becomes, that in his social advancement, his laws, arts, and wars, he moves on under the influence and development of those same laws which have been in force from the very first dawn of creation. The lower the archaeologist searches in the crust of the earth for the relics of human art, the more faint become the traces of that broad gulf, which in our times appears to separate man from the brute creation. In all the numerous and varied offsprings of the human intellect, in the arts, and even in speech, the more we investigate and trace them back, the more clearly they appear to point to a condition of the human race in which they had no existence whatever. The great law of nature, ‘natura non facit saltum,’ was not broken by the introduction of man upon the earth. He appears to have been produced in the fullness of time, as the work of creation required a more perfect tool, and to have ameliorated his condition, only as the work to be performed became more complicated and varied, just as in the hands of man, the rougher tool is employed for felling, and the finer tool for finishing and polishing.