which the vital force of the animal appears to preside, diverging in radii, as in the sea-eggs, starfishes, coral, sponges); the polypus advances to the Articulata, or jointed animals, including all kinds of worms, leeches, or ringed animals, of which insects are the most highly organised developments; next to the Mollusca, or soft-bodied animals; and then from these, which include the shell-fish, the scheme gradually progresses to the fish with backbones; and here the lowest order of Vertebrata is developed:  the fish merges into the reptile, the reptile into the bird; the bird, as in the ornithorhyncus, into the Mammalia.

Thus the gradations of life may be clearly apprehended by the visitor.  The highest development of animal life he has seen in the mammalia saloon, all the animals of which produce their young alive and suckle them; the order of life immediately below the mammalia, he has examined in the marvellous varieties of birds arranged in the northern gallery; then he turned to the west, and examined the third order of animal life in the reptiles; then the fourth order represented by fish; and so on till he watched the simpler forms of life in the star-fish and the sponge.

The history of this marvellous progress of animal life, so far as scientific men have gazed into its deep mysteries, is surely worth attention.  Few have the courage and the enthusiasm to follow each footstep of the tiny ant at his complex labours,—­few are the Hubers that dwell among us; but to us all is given the love of that knowledge which opens our eyes to a few of the mysteries that lie thickly on our path, in the formation of the gravel upon which we tread, the clouds that grandly glide above us, and the leaves that gather upon the trees.  After all the labours of our learned men, we are only now pressing, with trembling footsteps, the avenue to the endless schemes, and systems, and wonders, that lie buried in and about our world.  Still let all who enter our museum, go there with the resolve to accomplish something by their visit.  Even in the common concerns of life; in the petty matters that wear away the brain at last; in the market-places of the world, this insight is not without its effect.  The heart is humbled as the eyes open to the grandeur of the scheme, and to the consequent littleness of individual manhood; but again, the breast swells with the purest of all pride, when the thinker says to himself:  I am the King—­because the hero or highest type of the Articulata, Radiata, Mammalia, or any order of vegetable or animal life.  All these great and complicated developments are the beautiful works of the Great Unseen, but I am His masterpiece.  One may well dream in this zoological museum, amid the staring glass-eyed skins of an inferior brotherhood—­of the long, long time ago when the fossils, which are now scattered here and there, to assure us of their former vitality, moved about the world, before they