enslavement, as it has provided for and fostered that of permanent domestication. And finally, that these functional relations are in accordance with a great law of natural progression, by which the development of newer and higher races shall ever be coincident with the extinction of the earlier and inferior.

Such are the relations-zoological, geographical, ethnological, and functional-which constitute man's WHERE, or the place he now occupies in the scheme of creation, and from which the following inferences may fairly be deduced:-1. That adaptive modification of pre-existing structures, rather than independent creation of new ones, seems to be the method of nature in the production of newer and higher life-forms, and that in this respect man comes under the same category as the rest of his fellow-creatures. 2. That man, like other animals, is influenced by external conditions; and that while, in accordance with a great creational plan, adaptive modification is producing newer and higher forms, geographical surroundings are co-ordinately instrumental in favouring the same results. 3. That in obedience to a great progressional law, and under the influence of geographical conditions, man passes into newer and higher varieties—the lower varieties being thus necessarily the earlier and the higher, and ascensive the

more recent; and 4. That, gifted with improvable and progressive functions, man subjugates and adapts the forces of nature, rising higher and higher in the aggregate or as a species-the inferior varieties disappearing before the spread of the higher and more. civilised. Admitting these inferences, and the facts from which they are drawn, we will be better prepared to understand man's history and origin-that is his WHENCE-as well as to follow more clearly his WHITHER, or the progressive destiny that lies before him. The whole forms one great successional category of events, in which the past merges into the present, and the present into the future, and which we can only understand in proportion to our knowledge of the existing relations and operations of the universe.

WHENCE?

HISTORICAL RELATIONS.

Tradition Uncertain and Unreliable- All History Recent and Partial—Discrepancies in Chronological Systems-Inferences as to Man's Antiquity from the Known Rate of Progress in Civilisation and Refinement-Our Fifth Proposition.

ADMITTING man's existing relations, or the position he now occupies in nature, let us next try to discover what light can be thrown on the antiquity of his species relatively to the antiquity of other species. For this purpose we must appeal to History in the first place, and where History fails us we must turn to the record preserved in the earth's rock-formations, and which Geology is striving to interpret. Having obtained some notion of his antiquity, or, in other words, having traced him nearer and nearer to his origin, we may discover some indication of the nature of that origin, and the process by which it was effected. In the prosecution of this inquiry, science has to contend not only with numerous difficulties but with inveterate prejudices-difficulties inasmuch as both historical and geological records are obscure and im