aspin,1 and birch, which they are careful to plant in the mud. These form their subsistence. Their magazines sometimes contain a cart-load of these articles; and the beavers are so industrious, that they are always adding to their store.

There is a species of beaver found in the great rivers in Europe-the Danube, the Rhine, the Rhone, and the Weser,which has been regarded as synonymous with the beaver of Canada, but which, though it forms burrows or holes in the banks of those rivers which it frequents, does not, like them, erect any lodges, as above described. Does this instinct sleep in them, and require a certain degree of cold to awaken it, or are they a distinct species? Linné mentions one in Lapland, where the cold is sufficiently intense. Cuvier seems uncertain whether they ought to be considered as distinct. Beavers seem formerly to have existed in England; the town of Beverley, (Beaver-field,) in Yorkshire, seems to have taken its name from them, and its arms are three beavers.

Such are the principal operations that these wonderful animals, probably by the mixture of intellect with instinct, are instructed and adapted by their Creator to execute, that man, by studying them and their ways, may acknowledge the Power, Wisdorn, and Goodness, that formed and guides them.

The functions of the numerous tribes of this Order are various. The great majority may be said to be granivorous, or nucivorous, or even graminivorous; but many live upon dried vegetable substances, and wood. The aye aye, which approaches the Quadrumanes, appears to be insectivorous. Though many of them are great plagues to man, yet, by exciting his vigilance, they are useful to him, and they form the food of many of the lesser predaceous animals.

Order 6.-The connection between the animals of which this Order consists, and the Rodents, seems not easily made out. The lowest tribe, the Amphibians, which Cuvier has placed immediately before the Marsupians, appears to have no connection with that Order, or any of the Rodents; and the morse, which forms his last genus of the tribe in question, appears evidently to look more towards the herbivorous cetaceans, the manatee, &c., than to any other animals; the seals, indeed, may be regarded as tending towards the feline tribe. Amongst the other Predaceans, the hedgehog and tenrec present, I apprehend, something more than an analogy to the

1 Populus tremula.

2 Betula alba.

3 Cheiromys.

porcupines and some of the rats. The bear seems to look towards the sloth: and the feline race, in their whiskers and feet, look to the hares and rats.

The general functions of this Order are to check the tendency to increase not only in their own Class, the Mammalians, but in most of the other Classes of animals, more particularly those which man has taken into alliance with him, as cattle, and poultry, and game of every description. But where his action is greatest, theirs is usually least; and the most powerful devastators of the animal kingdom, the lions and the tigers, are found in the warmest climates, where nature is most prolific, and where man has not fully established his dominion, in the trackless and burning deserts of Libya, and in the impenetrable forests and jungles of India.

In more northern regions, the bears, the foxes, and other Mammalians, are employed in this department, though the former also eat roots and other vegetable substances,1 and thus in the wild countries of the north supply the place of man, and keep the animal population under, and at a certain level, so that one may not encroach upon another. If the matter is closely investigated, we shall find that God has distributed and divided these predaceous animals to every country, in measure and momentum, as every one had need.

The necrophagous Mammalians also, or those that devour dead carcasses, such as the hyænas, dogs, and similar animals, are equally useful in removing infectious substances, which in hot climates soon generate disease, and are always disgusting objects, and exercise a very important and beneficial function, devolved upon them by their Creator; for if all the animals exercising this function were removed from the earth, it would soon be depopulated, and a universal pestilence would destroy man, and all his subject animals.

Order 7.-The animals of this Order, though evidently leading towards the Quadrumanes, seems less nearly connected with the insectivorous Predaceans of Cuvier, the hedgehog, mole, &c., and to approach nearer to some Marsupians, as the flying squirrel and the flying opossum. I therefore consider them as forming an Osculant Order, distinguished by their powers and organs of flight, before sufficiently noticed. They are nocturnal animals, and live entirely upon insects. In the winter, they become torpid, and suspend themselves by the

1 Fn. Boreal. Americ. i. 15, 23, 28,

3 See above, p. 272.

2 Carnivora. Cuv.

claw of the thumb of the fore-foot, which is left free for this and

other purposes.

Order 8.-Linné evidently degraded man when he placed him in the same Order with the monkey, and even considered his genus Homo as consisting of two species, advancing the Oran Outan' to the honour of being his congener, and a second species of man. Cuvier has, with great propriety, separated man, the heir of immortality, and those spirit goeth upward. from the beast that perisheth, and whose spirit goeth downward, and placed them in different Orders. Man has employed some animals in almost every Order, or taken them under his care; but there is only a single instance of a Quadrumane being so used. There is a kind of monkey, a native of Madagascar, which, being of a gentle disposition, the natives of the southern part of that island take when they are young, and educate, as we do hounds, for the chase.*

The principal function of these animals is to live and move in the trees, amongst the branches in tropical countries, and they subsist upon fruits, roots, the eggs of birds, and insects. One object of their creation seems to be to hold the mirror to man, that he may see how ugly and disgusting an object he becomes when he gives himself up to vice and the slave of his passions. In fact, in every department of the animal kingdom, the moral instruction of his reasonable creature seems to have been one of the objects of creative wisdom, and the sloth and the glutton may be added to the mandril and baboon as equally calculated to cause him to view vice with disgust and abhorrence; as the bee, the ant, and the beaver, to excite him to industry, and prudence, and foresight; or the dove to peace and mutual love.

1 Written also Ourang Outang, and Orang Otang.

2 Excles, i. 21.

4 N. D. D'H. N. xvi. 171.

3 Indris brevicaudatus,

CHAPTER XXV.

Functions and Instincts. Man.

AFTER traversing the whole Animal Kingdom from its very lowest grades, and having arrived at Man, who confessedly stands at the head, and is the only visible king and lord of all the rest, it will be expected that I should devote a few pages to the world's master.

Baron Cuvier, with great propriety, places him by himself in a separate Order, distinguished from that which succeeds it, in his system, by the significant appellation of Bimane, indicating that his two hands are the instruments by which he subdues and governs the planet that he inhabits;1 by which also he is enabled to embody his conceptions, and, as it were, to convert his thoughts into material subsistences.

I shall consider him both physically and metaphysically; physically as to his actual position, and as to his action upon his subjects and property, whether vegetable or animal; and metaphysically as to his connection with that world, to which his mind or spirit belongs. When I say that man stands at the head of the creation, I do not mean to affirm that he combines in himself every physical attribute in perfection that is found in all the animals below him; for it is manifest to every one, that many of them far exceed him in the perfection of many of their organs, and in their qualities of various kinds. For sight, he cannot compete with the eagle; for scent, with the hound, or the shark; for swiftness, with the roe-buck; for strength and bulk, with the elephant: but it is in his mind that his superiority lies. There is in him a SPIRIT, an immaterial substance which constitutes him the sole representative here on earth, of the SPIRIT OF SPIRITS. He is the only member of the Animal Kingdom that partakes both of a heavenly and of an earthly nature,-that belongs both to a material and an immaterial world: and on this account it was that God, when he had created man, constituted him king over the whole

1 See above, p. 302.

sphere of animals with which he had peopled this globe that we inhabit. When his unhappy fall took place, the Divine Image was impaired, and consequently the dominion over those creatures, which formed a part of it, was proportionably weakened, and reduced to its present standard. But still, though weakened, it is not abrogated; his subjects have not universally broken the yoke and burst the bonds of his dominion-a large portion of them still acknowledge him as their king and master; and those that he has not subdued so as to make them do his bidding, still fear him and flee him: and even of these, there is none so fierce and intractable, that he has not found means to tame and subdue. And this is the position in which he now stands with respect to the animal kingdom; he has that within Lam that enables him to master them, and apply such of them as are of a convertible nature, if I may so speak, to work his w.l. and answer his purpose.

The functions of man, with regard to the world in which he is now placed, are all included in his action upon the sphere of animals and vegetables, and in their re-action upon him. If we survey all nature, wherever we turn our eyes, or wherever we direct our thoughts, we see the action of antagonist powers, a flux and reflux, by which the Great Builder of the universe supports the vast machine, and maintains all the motions that he has generated in it. The same principle is at work in every description of beings in our own planet; every action of man. upon any object of the world, without him, produces a reaction from that object, attended often by important results.

The action of man upon the world without him, is threefold. H.s first action upon them is, that of the mind to contemplate them, so as to gain a knowledge of their forms and structureof their habits and instincts-of their meaning and uses. His second action upon them, having studied their natures, and discovered how they may be made profitable to him, is to colket and multiply such species as he finds will, in any way, answer his purpose. His third action upon them is to diminish and keep within due limits those species that experience teaches him are noxious and prejudicial either to himself, or these animals that he has taken into alliance with him, which are principal sources of wealth to him, and minister to his daily Ls, comfort, and enjoyment.

It we consider the predaceous animals, we shall find in them a greater tendency to multiply than in those that content themselves with grazing the herbage; they generally produce more young at a birth; and their period of gestation is often shorter, so as to admit of more than one litter in the year: so that, un