though planted with various vegetables, seem unapt to exhibit in beauty the frail blossoms of the plant, which though they can bear the fluctuations of their own atmosphere, must often be destroyed by the greater weight and more irresistible agitations of a denser element. To ornament the bosom of the deep, therefore, more solid forms, sending forth blossoms capable of sustaining the action of such an element, were requisite and therefore God, who gifted his creature man with an inquiring spirit, and with an appetite for knowledge of the works of creation, to furnish him with objects for inquiry, and to gratify that appetite to the utmost, not only placed before his eyes upon the earth an innumerable host of creatures, of which he could gain a notion by only opening his eyes and by observing their beauties, and experiencing their utility, might praise his Maker for them; but also filled the deep with inhabitants, and ornamented it with animals that appeared to vegetate and blossom like plants, that his curiosity being excited, he might also study the inhabitants of the water, and glorify his Maker for the creation of them also.

But we may derive another use from the consideration of these plant-like animals, if the sceptic endeavours to persuade us, from the gradual progress, observable in natural objects from low to high, and from the narrow interval

that often separates those in the same series from each other, that by the action of certain physical causes, consequent upon certain established laws and a fixed order of things, and by the stimulus of certain appetencies in themselves, animals gradually changed their forms and organization, and thus, by slow degrees, kept improving in all respects, till at last the monkey became the man, if the sceptic thus attempts to pervert us, we may turn round upon him, and ask him, how it was that the zoophyte, buried in the depths of the ocean, should imitate the plant? can a studied imitation every where denoting purpose and design, a mighty structure including innumerable forms and parts connected with each other and formed evidently according to a preconceived plan, be the result of the operation of blind, unguided physical agents, acting by the appetencies of these organized beings? How indeed could they have any appetency to put on the appearance of a set of objects they never saw? The thing is morally impossible. In fact, when we survey the whole series of natural objects, and find throughout a system of representation, as well as a chain of affinities, it is as clear as the light of day, that an infinite Intelligence must first have planned, an Almighty hand then executed, and that infinite Love still sustains the whole.

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CHAPTER VI.

Functions and Instincts. Radiaries.

IT happens not seldom to the student of the works of creation, when he is endeavouring to thread the labyrinth of forms in any of the three kingdoms of nature, and has arrived at any given point, to feel doubtful which course to pursue. The road divides, perhaps, into two branches, which both promise to lead him right. At the very outset of the animal kingdom, as we have seen, there was some uncertainty, whether we should begin by the Infusories or Polypes, and now the Tunicaries, or Ascidians as some call them, at the first blush seem more closely connected with the Polypes, than the Radiaries, which Lamarck has placed next to them; but when we consider that the organization is much more advanced in the former than in the latter, not only in the organs of digestion, but in those of sensation, respiration, and circulation, we feel satisfied that the latter, where the object is to ascend, should first be considered. I shall, therefore, now give some account of the Radiaries.

The animals forming this class receive this appellation, because they exhibit a disposition to form rays, both in their internal and external

parts, a disposition which begins to show itself, as we have seen, both in the polypes and the infusories1 with respect to their oral appendages, and is found also in the tunicaries and cephalopods, or cuttle-fish. And this tendency in the works of the Creator to produce or imitate radiation, does not begin in the animal kingdom; the Geologist detects it in the mineral, and the Botanist in the vegetable, for Actinolites, Pyrites, and other substances exhibit it in the former, and a great variety of the blossoms of plants in the latter. We may ascend higher, and say that irradiation is the beginning of all life, from the seed in the earth and the punctum saliens in the egg, to the fœtus in the womb; and still higher in the physical world, sound radiates, light radiates, heat radiates. If we further survey the whole universe, what do we behold but radiating bodies dispersed in every direction. Suns of innumerable systems, shedding their rays upon their attendant planets; and the Great Spiritual Sun of the universe, even God himself, is described in Holy Scripture as that awful Being, "Whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting."

Cuvier, and after him several other modern Zoologists, have considered Lamarck's Class of Radiaries as forming a group or class of the

VOL. I.

1 See above, p. 154, 166, &c.

zoophytes; but when we recollect that they cannot, like the infusories and polypes, be propagated by cuttings and offsetts, this seems to indicate an animal substance in which the nervous molecules are less dispersed, and that some tendency to nervous centres has been established, In the upper classes of invertebrated animals, indeed, many will reproduce an organ when mutilated, and some even a head, but none but the polypes and infusories multiply themselves in the way above stated. It seems, therefore, most advisable to adhere to Lamarck's system, by considering the animals in question, as forming a group by themselves, and to adopt his name of Radiaries.

These are distinguished from the class immediately preceding, the polypes, by being limited as to their growth to a certain standard, as to their form by the general appearance of radiation they usually present, being either divided into rays, as in the star-fish; or having rays exhibited by their crust as in the sea-urchins; or embedded in their substance, forming appendages to their viscera, as in the sea-nettle or jelly-fish. They have not, like the polypes, a terminal mouth or orifice surrounded by food-collecting tentacles; but one placed, most commonly, underneath their body. Their digestive organs are distinct and more complex. They are never fixed, and are to be met with only in the sea and its estu