formed as these substances were, miles below the surface of the earth, they would have remained for ever inaccessible to man, had not the imprisoned gases, finding vent in earthquake and volcano, forced them to or near the surface, and thus exhibited them to man's eye, and placed them ready to his hand. And though he cannot avail himself of them now but by the "sweat of his brow," by labour, which is the announced consequence of sin, does not that very fact prove that the "Fall" was expected and predicted long prior to his advent? From whence do the physician, the chemist, and the apothecary furnish their laboratories with remedies for human diseases, but from Nature's great store-houses, where the remedies were provided, ages before the maladies were known? But disease is the result and consequence of sin; they stand to each other in the relation of cause and effect.

Thus also in Revelation, the Messiah is—in anticipation of man's fall-spoken of as the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world; the remedy for human sin, and redemption from its thraldom, provided before the outbreak of the moral malady. Heaven is said to be the kingdom prepared for redeemed man before the foundation of the world. God's remedial scheme for human sin and human sorrow, antedating each, showing that the fall was no unforeseen catastrophe breaking in upon divine arrangements. The remedy was provided before the disease had germinated. And if the sad story of human history begins with "Paradise Lost," it closes with "Paradise Regained," in a world over whose brightness sin flings no shadow, and amidst whose melodies sorrow never wakes a sigh!

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CHAPTER XVIII.

Excelsior!

HE title of this chapter seems to be the motto of Nature; for everything in Nature is constantly pointing to something higher than itself. There was a time in our world's history, long anterior to the Adamic era, when it was exclusively mineral, when the first tiny fronds had not climbed the primitive rocks as they emerged from the deep. From the monad up to man there has been from creation's birthday a constant ascension, a constantly ascending series of steps. From the earliest dawn of the geologic era, the morning twilight of creation's birthday, we see this ever upward march. "Nature," says Henry Sullar, "before she developes the human being, prophesies of this as her great ultimate performance," and shows in these very prophecies the ultimate thought and purpose of her Creator's mind. And while a scientific scepticism seizes upon these prefigurations as a lever by which it may remove the Deity from His own universe, the Christian thinker and scientist sees in them the clearest evidences of design, of the Creator's ultimate thought and man's ultimate development and glory. Long before his advent, Nature

gives pictures and shows of her unborn man child, hinting at him, longing and trying to realize him, and, like a fond and expectant mother, preparing for him long before the time comes for his actual appearance.

In this respect there is a striking analogy, an exact correspondence between the typical systems of Nature and Revelation. But as in Nature there are foreshadowings revealed by embryology and geology of the ultimate human being, and all the previous and inferior organisms point upward and onward to man, so do all the types of Revelation point to the glory of the "man Christ Jesus," and to the future glory of redeemed man in association with Him. "As the veil slowly rises," says the late Hugh Miller, "a new significance seems to attach to all creation. The Creator in the first stages of His workings appears to have been associated with what He wrought simply as the Producer or Author of all things; but even in these ages, as scene rose after scene and one dynasty of the inferior animals succeeded another, there were strange typical indications, which a pre-Adamic student of prophecy among the spiritual existences of the universe, might possibly have aspired to read; symbolical indications to the effect that the Creator was in the future to be more intimately connected with His material works than in these ages, through a glorious creature made in His own image and likeness. And to this semblance and portraiture of the Deity-the first Adam-all the merely natural symbols seem to refer. But in the eternal decrees it had been for ever determined that the union of the Creator with the creation was not to be a mere union by proxy or semblance; and no

sooner had the first Adam appeared and fallen than a new school of prophecy began, in which type and symbol were mingled with what now had its existence on earth, and all pointed to the second Adam, the Lord from heaven. In Him the creation and the Creator met in reality-the created humanity and the uncreated divinity, -and not in semblance; on the very apex of the finished pyramid of being, sits the adorable Monarch of all, as the son of Mary and the Son of God, as God and the Son of God, the eternal Creator of the universe. And these, the two Adams, form the main themes of all prophecy, natural and revealed. And that type and symbol should refer, not only to the second, but, as held by such men as Agassiz and Owen, to the first Adam also, exemplifies, we are disposed to hold, the unity of the style of Deity, and serves to show that it was He who created the world that dictated the Scriptures."

These typical forms, ever pointing to the near advent of something superior to themselves, begin in Nature at the very basis of the mineral kingdom, in those beautiful objects known as crystals. These in the exquisite symmetry of their forms, their translucent brightness, and their clustered modes of growth, predict and picture forth the advent of the tree, the plant, the flower. Nearly all of them assume regular and flower-like forms. They have been expressively called the "geometry of Nature," and in them we observe, under simpler but more unbending aspects, the commencement of those wondrous forms which, under more flexible modifications, play so important a part in the economy of living beings. It was a happy misfortune which befell Abbé Hauy, when

a fine group of calcareous spar which he was examining fell from his hands, and was shivered into fragments. As he gazed in sadness upon the wreck, the broken crystals were of a prismatic shape, and as he gathered up the broken pieces of one of the prisms in sadness, he observed that, while not less regular in shape than the original crystal, they were all of the same shape (rhomboidal), and the thought instantly flashed upon his mind. that all the varied crystalline forms in Nature might be derived from a few primitive forms. And the thought was true, and since his day Professor Weiss, of Berlin, has shown that those primitive forms are six in number. The transition from the more rigid crystals to the freer forms of organic Nature may be seen in the beautifully ramified figures made by the frostwork on our window panes. And everyone who has a sense of the beautiful, will be grateful that the more rigid mathematical figures which are found in the mineral, have given place to freer forms in the vegetable kingdom; that the trees are not triangular, or that the larger animals are not circular in their outline; that though the varied forms of the vegetable kingdom are clearly prefigured in the mineral and the crystal, they have not taken such painfully exact shapes. Still the forms of organic objects, such as the sweep of the veins of leaves, and the outline of trees, though more flowing and waving, are evidently regular curves, and clearly predicted and prefigured in the crystal.

The frostwork on the window pane, of which we have spoken, prefigures in its turn the form of certain mosses, and particularly the soft, feathery moss of forest pathways.