“Hands, From out the darkness, shaping man;”
but above them a living loving countenance, human and yet Divine; and can hear a voice which said at first, “Let us make man in our image;” and hath said since then, and says for ever and for ever, “Lo, I am with you alway, even to the end of the world.”
But now, friend, who listenest, perhaps instructed, and at least amused—if, as Professor Harvey well says, the simpler animals represent, as in a glass, the scattered organs of the higher races, which of your organs is represented by that “sca’d man’s head,” which the Devon children more gracefully, yet with less adherence to plain likeness, call “mermaid’s head,” { 126a} which we picked up just now on Paignton Sands? Or which, again, by its more beautiful little congener, { 126b} five or six of which are adhering tightly to the slab before us, a ball covered with delicate spines of lilac and green, and stuck over (cunning fellows!) with stripes of dead sea-weed to serve as improvised parasols? One cannot say that in him we have the first type of the human skull: for the resemblance, quaint as it is, is only sensuous and accidental, (in the logical use of that term,) and not homological, _i.e._ a lower manifestation of the same idea. Yet how is one tempted to say, that this was Nature’s first and lowest attempt at that use of hollow globes of mineral for protecting soft fleshy parts, which she afterwards developed to such perfection in the skulls of vertebrate animals! But even that conceit, pretty as it sounds, will not hold good; for though Radiates similar to these were among the earliest tenants of the abyss, yet as early as their time, perhaps even before them, had been conceived and actualized, in the sharks, and in Mr. Hugh Miller’s pets the old red sandstone fishes, that very true vertebrate skull and brain, of which this is a mere mockery. { 127} Here the whole animal, with his extraordinary feeding mill, (for neither teeth nor jaws is a fit word for it,) is enclosed within an ever-growing limestone castle, to the architecture of which the Eddystone and the Crystal Palace are bungling heaps; without arms or legs, eyes or ears, and yet capable, in spite of his perpetual imprisonment, of walking, feeding, and breeding, doubt it not, merrily enough. But this result has been attained at the expense of a complication of structure, which has baffled all human analysis and research into final causes. As much concerning this most miraculous of families as is needful to be known, and ten times more than you are likely to understand, may be read in Harvey’s “Sea-Side Book,” pp. 142–148,—pages from which you will probably arise with a sense of the infinity and complexity of Nature, even in what we are pleased to call her “lower” forms, and the simplest and, as it were, easiest forms of life. Conceive a Crystal Palace, (for mere difference in size, as both the naturalist and the metaphysician know, has nothing to do with the wonder,) whereof each separate joist, girder, and pane grows continually without altering the shape of the whole; and you have conceived only one of the miracles embodied in that little sea-egg, which the Creator has, as it were, to justify to man His own immutability, furnished with a shell capable of enduring fossil for countless ages, that we may confess Him to have been as great when first His Spirit brooded on the deep, as He is now and will be through all worlds to come.