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 were stricken with
universal death, and buried by nature, deep in her teeming bosom, to
flourish presently in the veins of plants--the plants to die again,
and be dug, long ages after, from our deep coal-fields. These thoughts
towards nature, towards the marvellous records of an antiquity, the
remoteness of which we cannot realise, will rise to the minds of all
visitors who can see in the vast collection of animal life through
which we have guided them, revelations of the endless forms and the
endless beauties that pass often unnoticed, because not understood,
under every step that man takes in the many journeys that lie between