the lesser lights; let them shine or let them be obscured,—our spiritual sun beams on for ever.
To return, now, from this digression—we would repeat the conviction, that the view which has been presented, namely, that there was no existence of noxious, fierce, and malignant animals before the creation and fall of man, remains uncontradicted by any certain facts of geology. The remains of such animals, as before shown, are found only in the latest strata, or in caverns under a deposite of stalagmite earth, and there, not unfrequently, mixed with human remains. Indeed it seems to be a fact generally admitted by geologists, that the present races of animals are, for the most part, no older than man. "It may be proper to observe," says Dr. Pye Smith, "that it is only in the newest and latest kinds of formation, that any remains of man and his cotemporary animals are to be found."[1] "Geology decides," says Dr. Hitchcock[2], "that the species now living, since they are not found in the rocks any lower down than man is (with a few exceptions), could not have been cotemporaneous with those in the rocks, but must have been created when man was." The view, indeed, that fierce and noxious animals had no existence before the fall of man, is not a new: one. "It is a common supposition," says Pye Smith,—in examining the question whether there was any death before sin—'that in the interval between their creation and the fall of man, animals were gentle and fed solely upon vegetable productions. Some have proposed the hypothesis that the carnivorous tribes were not created
